This was bound to happen eventually. Jimmy Buffett’s hospitality and food empire already includes Margaritaville (which encompasses restaurants, hotels, resorts, and casinos), a beer brand (LandShark, which is a better beach beer than it has any right to be), and all the beach-related merchandise that any ocean-adjacent person could possibly need in one lifetime. So naturally, as the tropically-obsessed singer/songwriter leans into his 70th year on this sandy, tequila-filled Earth, it’s only right that Buffett has decided to partner with development company Minto Communities to open a Margaritaville-themed retirement home community.
Before you even waste a second thinking about the obvious: yes. The first location of Buffett’s retirement home will be based in Daytona, Florida.
The first location will include approximately 7,000 available homes and be dubbed “Latitude Margaritaville” with prices in the reasonable range of $200-350,000 for residents 55 or over. According to Senior Vice President of Minto, Bill Bullock, the company aims to have things completely up and running by 2018. There are already 10,000 registrants on the list for a spot so if your parents want a prime location in the Daytona community they better sign up fast and hope people ahead of them on the list…drop off somehow. To put it nicely.
Now, this idea might be easy to make fun of, but for anybody who has actually experienced and embraced the world of Jimmy Buffet and his “Parrothead” fans, it makes sense why this type of retirement opportunity is appealing. Although I hate to admit it, I’m one of those people and it’s largely (read: entirely) because my dad is a legitimate Parrothead (complete with a parrot tattoo that he got in Key West decades ago). So it only makes sense to me, having been to 10 concerts and counting with this community’s target audience, why this could be appealing enough to buy into. Each 2 or 3-bedroom home comes with personal beach access, spa and fitness facility access, and live entertainment for residents.
For a not-small section of a generation, Buffett concerts are a yearly escape where 12 hours or more of tailgating and making friends in the parking lot has turned into a kind of beach-based religion where frozen drinks at 11am and turning your car into a pirate ship is the norm, not strange. So it’s no surprise that 10,000 people and counting have decided that some approximation of this environment is where they would like to live out their days. A daily concert of Buffett’s pre-1996 discography sounds like the perfect way to break up the normal retirement home monotony. Any album after ’96 is, of course, strictly ignored for everyone’s mental well being.
Jimmy is heading into his 42nd straight summer of touring this year so who knows? He may make a surprise appearance every now and then once his retirement kicks in fully. Until then, Parrotheads finally have a place to enjoy retirement where they can try to reason with hurricane season every day, until they go up to that big cheeseburger paradise in the sky.
(via ABC News)
