One Dingy Sandwich Shop Worth 100 Million Dollars?

Jun 7, 2021

A dingy sandwich shop called “Hometown,” located in the tiny town of Paulsboro, near Philadelphia, has a value on the Wall Street stock market of over 100 million dollars. This ordinary sandwich shop recorded just $13,976 in sales last year, as the Financial Times reported, and is losing about $70,000 every month. Yet, Duke and Vanderbilt universities, two of the most prestigious seats of higher learning in the U.S., bought a total of 2 million dollars of stock in this single sandwich shop.

On paper, Hometown is a so-called “special purpose acquisition company” or SPAC, which can raise capital on the stock market as an empty corporate shell and use its stock market valuations to go shopping for deals to purchase other companies. “We will not restrict our potential candidate target companies to any specific business, industry or geographical location,” Hometown’s owners told investors last March. That is, this dingy sandwich shop can raise capital through the sale of its stocks to purchase any business such as vaccine developers, electric car companies, computer chip manufacturers, etc. You name it.

So, this sandwich shop is like a front to launder illegal money gained, for example, from narcotics marketing, but with only one critical difference: it is legal under the U.S. law. In other words, Hometown is another Wall Street scam to suck up money.

This outright scam is capitalism’s craziness at its best. Like the subprime mortgage scam that ignited the Great Recession in 2008, these scams can easily cause financial catastrophes, and unemployment and misery among the working class.

While we need real education for personal development, good paying jobs, housing, and health care, Wall Street turns anything and everything in its path into a casino that can benefit only a few filthy rich. This rotting capitalist system is not working for the dominant majority of humankind.