---
title: "Physical presence"
description: "Locations, real estate, physical density of outlets: the spot your building stands on is a spot a competitor can no longer take. Nearly irrelevant to an app directory, but one of the oldest moats in the general catalogue."
canonical: https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/31/
locale: en
---

# Physical presence

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- Sheet 31 / 35

## Passport

- **Rock**: Assets
- **Depth**: 4 · Mine
- **Time to dig**: 10+ years
- **Capital**: ◉ · extreme
- **Solo**: ✗ no
- **AI**: ↑ AI-resistant
- **Rent**: ~ partly

## Essence

Locations, real estate, physical density of outlets: the spot your building stands on is a spot a competitor can no longer take. Nearly irrelevant to an app directory, but one of the oldest moats in the general catalogue.

## How it is built

### McDonald's — a real-estate company that sells burgers

The phrasing belongs to its own financial architect: the business is in the corners, the intersections and the plots bought up over decades and leased to franchisees. The best locations are finite; whoever takes them first collects rent forever, and the brand is the shop window the whole town drives past.

### Starbucks — pre-emption by clusters

A strategy of deliberate cannibalisation: open outlets densely enough to eat your own sales, as long as the site does not go to a competitor. The density also shortens the queues and the walk to coffee, so presence becomes the product.

### American Tower — the site plus the permits

A mast is less hardware than an approved location with permits that will not be issued twice in the same place, and one mast is leased to every operator at once — an overlap with efficient scale. ATM and vending networks run the same logic at small scale: thousands of micro-locations assembled over years of contracts.

## How it is bypassed

### Delivery removes the point of the place

When food, goods and services travel to the customer, the corner stops deciding: e-commerce against shopping centres, dark kitchens as restaurants with no dining room and no window, working delivery-only out of cheap premises. A location moat holds while the customer comes to you.

### Mobile ordering redraws the map

The queue moves into the phone: in China, Luckin Coffee built tiny pickup points designed around app orders — cheap, fast to open, in side streets instead of corners — and passed Starbucks on outlet count by playing a different game on the same street. The digital layer devalues the premium for the prime frontage.

### Rent somebody else's presence

Shop-in-shop, partner shelves, marketplaces, franchising in reverse: instead of buying corners, sign contracts with those who already have them. A slow-building physical moat is rented faster than it is repeated.

## Verdict

A moat of the finiteness of good places: built by pre-emption and by decades of contracts. Bypassed by delivery, by digital ordering and by renting other people's locations — and in digital products it barely appears at all.

## Related

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