So I was thinking this as well as I live in Des Moines and we had our two stores close within the last year. We no longer have any home brew stores in our market, but we have 2 thriving clubs of brewers that are pretty well attended. I thought about doing this out of my basement and having strictly online order and self pickup type service for the local brewers.
As a CPA I figured I’d run some numbers on it trying to figure out volume of sales. What I thought would be my strategic advantage, not having rent, really boiled down to a volume issue. Let’s say I did $10k volume of sales/year with a 25% markup. I’d only be taking home $2,500 before other misc expenses. That’s probably not worth my time, even if it was $5,000. The hours putting together recipes and the cost of fridges and misc items would eat into that profit pretty quick. There’s a reason the large retailers are successful. They have LOTS of money to spend on advertising and can deal out of warehouses in HIGH volume. Volume is the key to any retail store. Even if you do $100k sales/year at 25% you still only take home $25k of profit which simply isn’t enough in my opinion to justify a store!
