Napkin math:

One million Euro a year gross would imply more or less 3000 Euro a day. Open for 12 hours a day, that's 250 Euro an hour. At 15 Euro a crepe, that's a customer every 4 minutes the whole day. That would be a truly phenomenal success.

And that's gross. If you assume 50% margin on cost (insanely high) and that cost includes the apparently very high employee salaries. Then they need a customer every two minutes for the day. Let's say taxes take half of their net before taxes. they now need a customer every minute for 12 hours every day of the year to hit a million Euro net. All under a series of assumptions that are extremely generous to the firm.

It's hard to imagine that this story, if true, didn't involve an embellishment of scale.

Here are some actual numbers from Austria for some comparable venues:

- sausage kiosk average(!) turnover 180.000 € (sausages cost 2-3€, better kiosks make several times that easily)

- small Subway €900k approx.

- average McDonald's €3.2 mil

I'd imagine a decent crepes place the size of a McDonald's in a good location could easily make €2 mil/year turnover and half that much profit in a good year.

A 50% margin on food service is unheard of. That McDonalds is making 5-9% a year most likely, which is in line with food trucks generally.

Agreeing with you:

When I worked in food service long ago, the managers claimed the goal (of a Subway chain) was 30% gross margin. But that's gross margin, and doesn't account for overhead, and thus is not profit margin.

This shop does not sell only crepes, it sells also other related things, like donuts and waffles, organic juices, and the like.

It works 24/7 with shifts and has delivery that covers the whole city.

To reach that amount, this guy worked his butt off for 3 years non-stop.

Sounds possible. He can also find other ways to make money - bake other stuff overnight and sell it to other cafe's wholesale, etc etc. I've known people who've done exactly this kind of thing. It's doable.

Crepes do not cost 15 euros... at the max 5 euros. But you misread the post; he didn't claim the guy made a million euros in a year, he just claimed 1 million, so it could have been spread over 10 years.

"At my highest peak" is meaningless to apply to a running total. It must be some period of time. A year would be implied, given the context of the conversation.

Hmm - here's how I did the back of napkin math:

1,000,000 gross in a peak year.

say business is open 290 days of the year.

avg per day = 3448 euro

if average customer order spend is ~15 euro, that's ~230 orders per day that must be made to sustain the 1mm euro gross.

So - if the biz is open 6 hours (optimized around eating times) - that would be ~38 orders/hour.

Key Questions: for the average case : is 38 orders/hour OR 230 orders/day reasonable or not?

for the non-average case: can they make 2x the orders really busy days - i.e. what is the absolute peak orders than can make in a day?

While I am skeptical as well, there are a few other scenarios that aren't being considered in your napkin math:

- Selling items other than crepes: coffee, tea, alcohol, soft drinks, snacks, etc all have great margins.

- If the place is a cafe, customers may stay and work/read and run a tab, increasing the average revenue per customer.

- Multiple customers may arrive as a group and run up a higher tab.

- Multiple locations: compounding revenue, higher reach, etc

There are probably many more things I'm not even considering.

Multiple locations was my first assumption. In fact, multiple locations, some of which had closed since the peak.

The numbers might line up a little more if there was a single brick and mortar and several carts throughout the city and assume the 1 million was gross not profit.

Do you honestly believe crepes are the only thing sold at a crepe shop?

I believe it would be reasonable to assume that the combination of crepes and whatever else is sold would work out to be, generously, 15 Euro a customer. By all means feel free to disaggregate customer orders into crepes, tiramisu, and fancy coffee if you think it makes the math better.

This is certainly a feel good story, but there is a certain balance to be had regarding the 'moral of the story'. For example:

* The owner of the crepe shop may be 1 in 100,000 with the business acumen, drive & luck to reach the success he had.

* In the long-run, it continues to be beneficial to have a degree [1] since it is nigh impossible to determine whether the business will remain successful for decades.

* The 'degree' kid didn't have to be disrespectful to raise a point and in most cases, people are better off asking more questions before creating a picture of the situation.

* It is difficult to determine whether the 'owner' was actually the owner and whether the salary of the employees were what he said it was. When folks are driven into a corner, they either respond by fight-or-flight.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2018/data-on-display/educa...

Degree success is not proven to be causative as opposed to a correlation. You get even stronger correlation to income from the colleges you apply to rather than graduate.

I strongly suggest that this is due to being colleges that you can afford if you get in which directly correlates to your parents' incomes, connections, and support which greatly increases your odds to becoming a richer adult.

Yes, parental income has a greater correlation than anything else.

Parental socioeconomic status has a greater correlation than income, and IQ has a greater correlation than that. If your parents are Syrian refugee doctors in Germany you’re going to do better than the average German even if your family arrived with no money and not speaking German. If you’re an American with two parents with JDs working as public defenders you’re not going to grow up rich bit the chances of ever being poor are quite slim.

Good business sense is something that some folks just have it seems.

People of a particular experience level see careers, money, life as a set of prescribed paths for everyone where in life things are far more random and unpredictable.

Wise and truthful words my friend.

You spoke the truth.

Perhaps we are missing a more complete picture of this individual. The sort of person who graduates school and resolves to take whatever job lands on his doorstep often has zero ambition, drive, or work ethic. However as we know he is successful with his crepe shop, he must in fact have some of those traits.

I think you have that the wrong way around. The person who graduates school and has zero ambition, drive, or work ethic is usually the one who won't take whatever job lands on his doorstep.

This exchange just makes me think of a letter Hunter S. Thompson once wrote to Hume Logan:

https://fs.blog/2014/05/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/

Seems like a bit of reading that fits, right now.

Speaking as someone who had very little ambition, drive, or work ethic, going to university seemed like a perfect opportunity to put off doing something with my life

Your story sounds made up.

To me it just sounds like the OP is paraphrasing and getting the point of the story across without being word for word accurate.

The story is not that outrageous--Out of the thousands of people on hacker news, it seems likely enough to me that something close to that actually happened to one of them.

I'm sort of that story - however my high-school class mates are generally nice people and are more curious than condescending. I'm glad I chose to start my own small business as they share their woes of collage debt, office-politics, and dead end jobs that seemingly suck the joy out of life.

I would say that for some, a family centered life and a humble trade could be better than chasing after what I perceive* to be vanity.

* I'm probably mistaken in motivation, but life does present us with choices that are seemingly easy yet are full of hidden costs.

I wish so I could add extra spices to it lol.

What I know for sure is that my old friend has accomplished more things than our entire classroom as a whole.

I don't care whether people believe the story or not, or whether he actually paid his staff the money he said he had.

All I did was to share with you people his story as I have witnessed it myself.

I don't think it does. Just sounds like a retelling where some readers focus on specifics rather than the essence.

That old ambiguous word “make”, could be revenue, could be profit. Most likely revenue on a good day.

But your point stands money is made by businesses. For every smart person getting 500k a year salary there’s a business behind that salary with investors making even more.

He may have grossed that amount, but is that really take-home pay? Otherwise, we're comparing applies & oranges (& crepes).

What a silly story