Say goodbye to Twinkies

SWJJ said
I just think the whole thing is malarkey. I don't believe you. I'll assume a 20% margin, which I figure is way low since a good portion of that income sound like its service work you perform yourself, that means your store makes 7500 after inventory cost (again way low based on what you've said this far)

Say lease is probably around 1700.00, plus another 300 for utilities, since you run the store front 8 hours a day you probably only need a part time employee to assist, service work and books being done after hours, I'm sure the owner and a part time associate could run the store, so another $500 or that.

That leaves a net profit for your business ~ 5k a month. Working 80 hours a week (I highly doubt you REALLY work more than that) that means you make ~ $15 dollars an hour. Far better than your "less than minimum wage" claim

Now when it's all said and done you may not feel 5k a month justified the headache of running a business and working 80 hours a week, and that's understandable and everything, but please throttle back on the exaggerations and insisting no one else knows anything about running a business.

Great post.

If he's not BS'n or inaccurately stating his recollection, his model was all wrong and/or his location was terribly flawed.

I've had stores that have done $45k per month that I didn't walk in for months at a time where we had fantastic and expensive managers and excessive employee hours because that's how I liked it and we sure as heck weren't scraping by on minimum wage or even $15/hr for any 80 hours.

In order to do what he's saying, he was either paying too much for his inventory or charging too little. And, if he really was doing 8 hours of service calls per day 5 days per week and not making at least $800 per week to put in his pocket, then he was wasting his time.

My punch-list and warranty guy makes $850 per week and drives a panel van that costs another $1k per month including fuel. He does little odds and end jobs for various clients and real estate companies we work with and he easily pays his own way to do all my warranty and BS work by billing $75 per service call and $65 per hour. Even when he's only actually billing for 20 or so hours per week he's paying his own way and on the occasions when he's actually busy and bills 35-50 hours per week, I almost feel guilty.