$130 Per Week

That's how much a local catering service business would charge me each week to park my catering truck in their corporate yard. You know... that truck I'm going to buy from "a guy."
.

The $130 weekly per truck price includes water and electrical outlets, Darling International waste grease dumps, trash dumps, and two "barrows" (large contractor wheelbarrows) of crushed ice each day. The account carries weekly charges for additional ice, cleaning and food service supplies, a very large assortment of prepackaged foodstuffs, and some institutional sized ingredients for cooking onboard the big kitchens-on-wheels.
.

$130 per week = $563 per month = $6, 760 per year per truck (today's dollars.) Below is a chart (larger chart) that lays out how many trucks TLC Catering had cleared for sanitary operations by County Health for each year from 1988 through 2008. Truck #3 is still in use in 2009 = 22 years.



In this calculation, the present value of the rent "savings" is assumed for all years.


If all these 22 years of business rent were transacted today, TLC Catering pockets $466,000 not available to any other catering businesses who operate legally. This is the core reason why TLC Catering was able to stay financially afloat all these years. This is the core reason Allen & Brassey fight like rabid dogs to preserve the false grandfathering claim of property use legality. For over two decades, this and other money was obtained illegally, while the City of Manteca stood by, blind and stupid.
Those hard dollars didn't appear out of thin air, either. They were purchased with non-monetary social costs paid by their neighbors: primarily, a quality of life degradation caused by noise pollution equivalent to harassment and assault and, secondarily, a continuing business blight putting severe pressure on residential property values.
There are a couple other very significant financial aspects to this case - the "savings" of middleman profit margins, and repeated refinancing while riding the real estate bubble. These will be discussed later as more information becomes available.