The New Yorker has an article: “Retirement the Margaritaville Way“. At the active-living community for Jimmy Buffett enthusiasts, it’s five o’clock everywhere.
The first person I met at the Bar & Chill was a bald guy in a black T-shirt, black drawstring shorts, and flip-flops, with a Harley-Davidson tattoo on his right arm and a claddagh ring on his left hand. He was drinking and laughing with a few friends. He gestured to the empty stool next to him and said, “We don’t bite.”
I offered an expression of if-you-insist, and he said, “Bring it.” His tone was cheerful, as you might expect at the Bar & Chill, the principal drinking-and-dining establishment that looks out on the town center of Latitude Margaritaville, an active-living community for Jimmy Buffett enthusiasts, aged “55 and better,” in Daytona Beach, Florida.
The bald man, drinking a vodka soda, said his name was Phil. Phil Murphy, from Arlington, Massachusetts, aged sixty-four. Formerly a research director at Forrester, retired since 2015. “I was in the air for twenty years,” he said. He looked and sounded less like my idea of a Parrothead, as Jimmy Buffett’s diehard fans are called, than like Mike Ehrmantraut, the melancholic fixer in “Breaking Bad.” Standing off his left shoulder, his wife, Betty, red hair cut short, added a dash of urbanity, a spritz of Allison Janney. Phil and Betty had organized an emergency fund for the restaurant’s staff during its Covid shutdown. One of their friends declared them “the king and queen of the Bar & Chill.”
The chief executive of Margaritaville Holdings, the parent company of Latitude Margaritaville, is a New Yorker named John Cohlan. In 1994, Cohlan was an associate at Triarc, the investment firm co-founded by Nelson Peltz, which owned RC Cola and Arby’s. That year, Peltz moved the firm temporarily to Palm Beach. Cohlan, thirty-six and single at the time, didn’t know anyone there; a friend introduced him to Jane Slagsvol, Jimmy’s wife, and, eventually, Cohlan met Buffett himself. At Jazz Fest, in New Orleans, he saw the enthusiasm of Buffett’s fans during his set and had an epiphany that Buffett might be a more substantial and self-sustaining brand than any that Triarc owned. “He was a real businessman!” Buffett told me recently. Buffett had already, as he put it, “opened that vein of the mine” with a Margaritaville bar and a T-shirt shop in Key West.
Disney had shown interest in a partnership but hadn’t agreed to Buffett’s terms. The investor Warren Buffett, whom Jimmy had got to know after a Buffett-clan pilgrimage to a South Pacific island populated by Buffetts (a DNA test revealed no blood relation between the two), had advised him, Ask for what you want, and if they say no someone else will come along. Uncle Warren, as Buffett calls him, was right. That someone was Universal Studios. Buffett enlisted Cohlan to help him establish a twenty-thousand-square-foot Margaritaville restaurant at the entrance to Universal’s Islands of Adventure theme park in Orlando. Cohlan also outflanked Seagram, which owned both the park and Buffett’s record label, on the question of what alcohol to stock—with Seagram, Margaritaville created its own. Buffett brought in Cohlan as his partner, saying, “I can’t pay you what you’re making on Wall Street, but you get to come to work in shorts and flip-flops.”
More than twenty million people a year pass through the doors of a Margaritaville-branded establishment. The company, with annual system-wide sales of $1.7 billion, licenses the name to restaurants, hotels, casinos, and resorts, and sells a wide array of branded merchandise: umbrellas, towels, beach furniture, bicycles, blenders, frozen shrimp, and Key-lime-pie mix. It recently announced plans to launch a cruise line. (Before that, Buffett himself had never been on a cruise ship.) Given the age of Buffett’s fan base, and the life style he’s hawking—as well as baby-boomer demographics—the move into active living was a natural one.
“Who knew people wanted to live in Margaritaville?” Buffett told me. “I thought for a while it was a myth.”
Even Buffett himself has a house: a Bimini model. He’d visited Latitude Margaritaville at Daytona four times, Sarantis said. “One day, he came to my house,” she added. “He’d bought a house and wanted to meet the residents. He literally knocked on my door. ‘Hi, neighbor.’ Are you kidding me? I have yellow Labs. He was showing me pictures of his dogs.”
Read the full article at The New Yorker – “Retirement the Margaritaville Way“