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The template only earns its keep if you actually put two cases next to each other.

This is the reason every teardown answers the same questions in the same order. Put a luxury house beside a console platform and the differences stop being vibes — one is refusing sales to protect a price, the other is selling below cost to collect a toll, and both are defending a moat.

Case ACase B

Food · NYSE: MCD

McDonald's

Franchises roughly 43,000 restaurants that sell about $130 billion of food a year, of which McDonald's Corporation books under $26 billion — mostly as rent and royalties.

Technology · NASDAQ: AMZN

Amazon

Runs a near-breakeven retail operation at enormous scale, and earns essentially all of its profit from renting out the two things that operation forced it to build — computing capacity and shelf placement.

The thesis in one line

The burger is the tenant screening process. The business is the land underneath it.

The store is not the business. The store is the customer acquisition cost for the businesses.

Verdict

Own it

Moat

Wide

Scale economics · Brand · Process power · Distribution

Wide

Scale economics · Network effects · Process power · Switching costs

Porter's five forces

Competitive rivalry

Threat of new entrants

Threat of substitutes

Buyer power

Supplier power

Competitive rivalry

Threat of new entrants

Threat of substitutes

Buyer power

Supplier power

Headline figures

Systemwide sales: ~$130B
Operating margin: ~45%
Franchised restaurants: ~95%
Paid to the McDonald brothers, 1961: $2.7M

Net sales: $638B
AWS share of operating income: ~58%
Retail operating margin: ~5.4%
Third-party share of units: ~60%

Unit economics

One franchised US restaurant, per year

McDonald's earns more from the restaurant than the person who runs it does, without cooking anything, and its share arrives first — rent is senior to the operator's profit. That is a landlord's position, not a restaurateur's.

One $50 third-party item sold through Amazon

Amazon captures roughly 38% of the sale price and carries none of the inventory risk. The seller took the risk, paid for the warehouse, and then paid again to be found in a search of Amazon's own catalogue.

What would change her mind

Sustained evidence that franchisee cash-on-cash returns are falling — franchisee associations publicly resisting rent or remodel requirements, restaurant closures outpacing openings in the US, or McDonald's being forced to fund value promotions out of corporate rather than restaurant P&L for more than a few quarters. Any of those would mean the rent is being extracted from a tenant base that can no longer carry it, and the annuity is not what it appears to be.

If AWS revenue growth falls below 15% for two consecutive quarters while segment operating margin also declines, the cloud business is being commoditised rather than merely contested, and the capex is being spent defending share rather than buying growth. That combination — decelerating growth and compressing margin at the same time — breaks the thesis outright. A single weak quarter on either measure alone does not.

No mechanisms in common

These two share no tagged mechanism, which usually means the comparison is about contrast rather than pattern — a useful thing to know before you start writing.