Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by slowrabbit on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:28PM (#21327031)

Same money running a fast food joint? You're underpaid bro or you know some crazy overpaid fast food managers. People from science based fields are coming to computer science because those other fields lack job opportunities at competitive pay.

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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by godot on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:49PM (#21327236)

I believe OP means running a fast food joint as the owner, not a manager employee.

Granted I don't know anything about that business, a quick google search comes up with an article from 2015 saying running a McDonald's provides an average annual profit of $150k so it sounds about in the right ballpark range: https://www.mymoneyblog.com/mcdonalds-franchise-cost-vs-prof...

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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by fingerlocks on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:54PM (#21327272)

McDonald’s franchise owners make $500k to $1 million a year, in average. That’s profit, not revenue.

My source is from the McDonald’s franchise disclosure documents. The money blog mentioned in sibling comments claim it’s less.

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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by defen on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @04:15PM (#21328080)

According to this random quora link: https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-McDonalds-make-in-a-day the average McDonald's unit in the USA has $2,670,320 in annual sales. 25% - 40% profit margin sounds really high for a restaurant, but I don't know enough about the industry to dispute it. Are you sure those numbers were presented as averages and not the high end of what you could make? Or does the typical owner have multiple locations?

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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by fingerlocks on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @05:12PM (#21328544)

My source was this pdf: https://www.bluemaumau.org/sites/default/files/MCD%202013%20...

Very possible I skimmed and may have read it incorrectly, accounting is not my thing. As I have now reached the maximum amount of effort I'm willing to put into a forum comment, I'm not going to dig any further. But if you can tease out better information, I'd be curious to know.

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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by owyn on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @05:45PM (#21328793)

From the document... Across ~12,000 locations they put the majority of restaurants in a range but they do have the numbers pretty well crunched.

Average profit margin 26-28% Average gross sales 2.2 - 2.6M Average operating income before rent/tax: 570k - 716k

"The rent paid to McDonald’s will vary based upon sales and McDonald’s investment in land, site improvements, and building costs."

It looks like that rent paid to McD's home planet is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% of that investment (yearly? I guess?) but it seems to average about 100k-150k.

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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by fingerlocks on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @06:48PM (#21329240)

Good, this was my takeaway as well. My range was loosely rounded since 716k was something like the 85th percentile.

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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by eyegor on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:48PM (#21327225)

I assuming running = owning, not managing. Subtle maybe in practice but not in revenue.

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