Why was Gus in the meth business. I mean he had to be making pretty good money. I guess it just wasn't enough for his greedy ass.
Also, Walt ended up making something like 80 million. Is the meth business really that lucrative. Are there that many meth heads in this country? I know it's a fictional TV show, but is it a pretty accurate portrayal of the meth business?
He needed some way to laundry all the money he made in meth. What better way to do this than with a really successful fast food chain?
shareMadrigal Electromotive GmbH, the parent company of Los Pollos Hermanos
I think, like Walt, Gus was in the Empire Business.
We also don't know that the chicken business was doing really well. He might have been making bank with the meth, but scraping around with the chicken thing. He opened those things to cover his meth tracks, not necessarily because the restaurant was successful.
If this is answered in one of the spin-offs, I don't know about it.
Gus was a perfectionist though. You know he served good chicken and served it quickly. He also kept his restaurants spotlessly clean, which always gets people to go back.
shareI'm not saying that they weren't successful. Just that they weren't his main concern.
If I had to guess, I'd say he was running a great, successful restaurant and a successful (for him) meth business, and he was just (as you say) a perfectionist who wasn't in it for cash, but for precision and the building of his empire.
I do get the impression with Gus it's more about the power than simply the money. The weirdest thing about Gus is that with the $10s (or $100s) of millions he must've made, I can't remember a single example of him actually enjoying any of that wealth. He spent his days playing the dutiful manager of Los Pollos Hermanos right down to putting on the ugly yellow shirt each day. We get no glimpse of his home life or him engaging in any kind of luxury or beautiful women (or men since we don't even know for certain he's heterosexual) that would come with such wealth. Of course we only see him when interacting with Walt, Mike or Jesse so our access to him is pretty limited but still he remains largely a mystery.
shareI don't know. I think that the weirdest thing about Gus was that despite being at the head of this huge Empire he invariably had to deal directly with the likes of Jessie and yes, even Walt and that the success of his Empire was so dependant on them...
shareGus wanted to deal with Gale, not Walt and Jesse. I think he got intrigued by Walt, and Jesse was just "there" (at first, anyway). But, it was Gale that Gus cultivated and recruited.
The success of his empire depended on a brilliant meth cook. By circumstance and a series of unpredictable events, that was Walt and Jesse instead of Gale.
Yeah, I remember thinking that, too.
The closest we see is when he is cooking for somebody, but even then, it seems to be more about the precision of the art and "doing it right" than it does a passion he loses himself in. Contrast the way Gus prepares a meal to the way Gale prepares a meal for himself.