Say goodbye to Twinkies

dtc said
Then it's even less believable for me to hear you say you were making less than minimum wage working 120 hours per week and doing $45K per month in sales at an average of 300% muf.

Anyway, I guess it's Obama's fault the internet came along and ruined all your fun.

In fairness to DK I will say that with his main product (livestock) there are a lot of associated costs that he had that would go well beyound those associated with many products found in retail stores. A lot as in a mind numbing amount that those outside the industry wouldn't be aware of.

I would say that the number one reason that this type of store fails is because of the way they are started. Usually by someone in the hobby that thinks it would be so cool to have a business selling what they love and they approach it as an extension of what they are already doing at home but on a grander scale. They soon realize that nothing could be further from the truth and depending on income and resources they soon go out of business, try all kinds of things to keep the business afloat which prolongs the inevitable, or they understand what the real purpose behind having a retail store is and adapt/evolve to make it profitable.

I'm certainly no expert on the subject nor am I inferring that any of the above applied to DK. I did ,however, open such a business 17 years ago and made many of those mistakes but I fortunately had the resources that allowed me the time to learn and adapt before it was too late.

This much I believe. If two people were going to start identical businesses and one knew everything there was to know about the things he wanted to sell and the other didn't but was really sharp and had really good business acumen my money would be on the second guy as to who had the greater chance of success.

I just sold my business a couple of months ago and in retrospect I think I would have done better selling Twinkies as opposed to aquarium livestock. I might not have enjoyed it as much but there would have been less overhead and I'm pretty sure Twinkies have a longer shelf life.