Yep. This is why the smart banks pre-loaded all their phat friends up.

Let's say you're YUM brands. You operate 7,000 taco bells through 350 franchisees. You also provide financing for franchise purchasers. In 2016, there were 4,500 franchise restaurants. Those 7,000 restaurants employ 210,000 people - that's 30 per restaurant, well under the cut-off. They're a 24-7 operation. Your 30 employees per restaurant are going to be working in about four shifts (if you average the workweek amongst 40 hours) meaning you're going to be paying seven people at a time an average of $11 an hour, or $80/hr burn rate for all employees. Your payroll runs around $58k a month, and you're going to apply for 2.5x that so you're looking for a PPP loan of $144,000.

Take your 4,500 franchise restaurants, their $144k PPP loans and offer them to JP Morgan Chase. You've got everything in a database; you can preload all the forms. JP Morgan can just shotgun that shit out and earn - wait for it - $32.4 million providing $648m worth of liquidity for Taco Bell franchisees. Meanwhile the rest of us get to flail around and trade text messages saying "I heard Paypal is processing loans without any money to back them" and "try Fundera at least it's quick."

Theoretically, I have a PPP loan. Practically, I haven't seen the money (although I have an application number and signed documents). It came through one of seven banks I applied through - each of which came up with their own number as to what they'd give me. Interestingly enough the one that came through in the end offered me zero communication until yesterday, at which point I got an email saying, cryptically, "I am sending you this request for your electronic signature, please review and electronically sign by following the link below" from who-the-fuck knows.

"Please sign below" is a lot like how TARP went for us - the bank kept hammering on us to refinance which I was extremely leery of until it was explained to me that Chase would much rather give TARP money to people they knew would pay it back than to people they were supposed to give it to so my mortgage went from a 30 year to a 15 year at the same payment with a two-page legal disclosure. I didn't pick anything about it.

As my brother-in-law said, "it sucks that I haven't been able to get a PPP loan but I can sleep at night knowing Chick-Fil-A is going to be okay."