If you have a great company with a sterling reputation and loyal customers, here’s a nifty way to ruin it: License an operator to run a little version of your business in an airport.

I’m trying to think of a single pleasant retail experience in an airport. Any restaurant, any shop, any airport. Well, I wolfed down a surprisingly good Chicago Dog at Midway International Airport last summer and I scarfed a passable beignet in the New Orleans airport. Other than that, everything at every airport is overpriced and often bad, and every clerk projects utter and excruciating boredom.

Most brands don’t seem to care. But as you can see in the article on page 1 of this issue, Kitson is making a public claim that the operator of the two Kitson shops at Los Angeles International Airport just isn’t up to that store’s standards, and that brand appears set to fly out the airport for good.

I admit I have no idea if Kitson’s claims are true; I’ve not even been to the Kitson shops there. The operator at LAX may be doing a fine job for all I know.

But I can say that there’s a reason that many shops at many airports hurt the brands that are sold there.

In many cities, Los Angeles included, shop owners and restaurateurs essentially are asked if they want some easy money. All they need to do is supply their goods or food – along with their good name – and the airport operator will take it from there. There’s no shop to operate, no employees to manage and no heavy lifting, except to pick up that big check at the end of the month.

The airport operators also see a pretty easy path to nice money. They don’t need to fight to establish a reputation because they’ve got the big name over the door of their shop or restaurant, and they don’t need to lure customers because thousands walk by every day. All they have to do is overprice their goods, hire some minimum-wage workers (or living-wage workers in Los Angeles) and collect the check.

Oh, and since many airports are owned by cities or some government agency, the political folks wring whatever they get out of these cozy deals. No surprise that many airport concession operators are politically connected types.

As a result, this is a system loaded with incentives to separate money from travelers but have little to no incentive to provide an outstanding customer experience. Or even a decent customer experience.

And that’s why many shops at many airports actively hurt the brands that are sold there.

1. 1. .

A fair amount has been written about the high price that the Royal Bank of Canada agreed to pay for L.A.’s City National Corp. And with good reason. RBC will pay more than 2.6 times City National’s tangible book value, which makes it the priciest bank transaction since the Great Recession, according to SNL Financial.

In recent years, most bank transactions were in the 1.6 to 1.7 range, although a few went for less than book value.

Why so much? Most of the explanation has centered on the complementary wealth-management assets that the two banks can give each other. That’s a good explanation, but there’s another reason: Canada’s banks are almost desperate to buy in America.

Growth prospects in Canada are almost nil. The country is small, and there’s been a de facto ban on big-bank mergers for 20 years. It’s a country fairly dependent on natural resources, and now the oil-price collapse will tamp down on the economy even more.

Canada’s banks have been active buyers in the United States. We’ll see more.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].