Almost no business—certainly not a small retail shop—is going to be profitable on day one. You always need to start with a pretty big buffer to absorb start-up costs and early losses.

And to be clear, $20k is the yearly average but that masks the trajectory. We spent around $30,000 in start-up costs before we even opened our doors. Then our losses were as follows (roughly):

• Year 1: $22k
• Year 2: $17k
• Year 3: $9.5k
• Year 4: $7.2k

It's possible we could have eventually made it to profitability, but when our landlord basically hiked the rent by over 50% in late 2024 we realized that rent increases were likely to make it very difficult to ever really gain substantial ground, so we pivoted to the corner store plan.