So, you don't believe in small business. I tend to resect a person who has started his/her own business and works hard to make it successful. It's not an easy thing to do.
It's a bizarre psychologically when a person wants to see someone fail. It says a lot about a person's personality.
Big Frank has left the island and gone back home to Philadelphia to be with his family. He's 76yrs old. He lived on the north coast, and had businesses on the north coast, since 2001. He had his success and good run. He a successful Irish pub/restaurant for 17yrs on the beach. I think, by anyone's definition, it was a good 17yrs run of owning and operating a bar/restaurant on the beach.
Unfortunately, he didn't make the bar/restaurant work in Sosua...but who does? A few make it, but even the ones that do, usually only manage to survive on a thin shoe string that often dips in the red during the low season, before swinging back up in the high season. It's an ebb and flow. Always has been. Even more so today now that things have mostly moved down south to Punta Cana.
When I first started at O'Shay's in 2007, you couldn't get a seat at the bar during football games. There was virtually no competition. No business wanted to shell out $100 a month per receiver (you needed at least 4 to 5 of them) to have the DirectTV NFL package. O'Shay's was the only place you could go to watch your favorite college or NFL team play. We could get 95% of all games. We also had the Pay Per View fights and other big sporting events.
And then the internet came along, and suddenly--almost overnight--anyone could "tap" into whatever sporting even was taking place around the world and show it for free.
In Cabarete, a few places sprung up and started showing sports for free (They grabbed it from the internet) and were giving away beer and drinks away almost for free. These places attracted crowds of expats who bounced from happy hour to happy hour, trying to score the cheapest beer and drink on beach. Nothing wrong with that. That's economics 101.
It never bothered Big Frank that people wanted to save money and get cheaper drinks. What bothered Big Frank was the amount of people walking across the road, or down the beach, buying their beers or drinks and then coming back into O'Shay's to watch Pay-Per-View or NFL ticket games simply because the other places couldn't get their internet to stream smoothly.
Uber & Lyft have a similar business concept where they move into a market, and aggressively undercut the competition.
A lot of businesses on the beach have failed over the years as a result of trying to undercut and sell beer and drinks for next to nothing. It's hard to pay wages, insurance, electricity, generator maintenance, vacation pay, maternity pay, taxes, etc. while selling a beer for $15 pesos above cost. A lot of people found out the hard way and are now closed.
Big Frank sold his business at the right time. The market was being saturated with business almost giving beer & drinks away for free at Happy Hour.
I can say this about Big Frank and Rocky: both men always wished the best for all businesses around them. They understood that in order to attract more tourists and more customers, you need everyone around you thriving. Having a street where everyone is doing good attracts more people to your area. The last thing you want is businesses closing all around you. People want to be in an area where they can easily hop from place to place and experience different diversity and different niches.
Whenever you hear someone wishing or hoping for someone else's failure, you need to look at the psychology behind that wish. That's not a good person.