The citizens of Latitude Margaritaville testify so consistently to a life of gratification that one suspects, but finds no evidence for, a regimen of happy pills or talking points. Disgruntlement and curmudgeonliness must exist, but not in view of a visitor susceptible to such traits.
“My husband doesn’t own pants.”
“We’ve got four bars in our villa.”
“The freshman fifteen is real here.”
Stuart Schultz, a former summer-camp director who, as Latitude Margaritaville’s head of residential community relations, serves as a kind of cheerleading pooh-bah, told me, “It’s like being in college, but with money and without having to study. You have a great dorm room, you never have to go to class, and there’s always a party.”
... 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.”
The development in Daytona was a joint project of Margaritaville Holdings and Minto Communities USA, the American branch of a builder based in Ottawa. In 2017, Minto had bought roughly two thousand acres of brush and swamp, about seven miles from the coast, across the street from the Ladies Professional Golf Association’s headquarters and its pair of signature courses. Minto had a plan to develop a retirement community there called Oasis. Cohlan caught wind of it, and Oasis became Latitude Margaritaville, taking its name from Buffett’s breakthrough 1977 album, “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes”—the one with the “Margaritaville” single. The latitude would be east-central Florida, or any place where it doesn’t ice over in winter; the attitude would be strummin’ the six-string on a front-porch swing. The partners developed a nearly identical one in Hilton Head, South Carolina, and last year launched the biggest one yet, in Panama City, Florida...
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The New Yorker
March 28 2022
Read or listen
At the active-living community for Jimmy Buffett enthusiasts, it’s five o’clock everywhere.
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