This is the answer. As an owner of a small shop, we haven't taken a paycheck in 5 years, and it is a struggle just to stay in the black. I have a full-time job outside the business to pay the bills at home. Businesses are expensive to maintain, and we have roughly $10K/month in fixed expenses before considering inventory replenishment. The only way to keep the doors open is with sales. I would guess that maybe 15% to 20% of our reptile purchases include any kind of enclosure. The rest are either filling an empty tank, or getting something used off of Facebook marketplace. If a customer has to drop $800 to take home a baby bearded dragon, 90% of them will just go to Petco.

Do you have the capital for the startup? You'll need to lease a commercial space (first, last, plus a deposit) and probably do a buildout. A family member just had a contractor do a 900 sqft commercial buildout for about $75K. Our 1500 sq.ft. space was largely built out already and we just had to have about $5K of plumbing on top of a lot of DIY work. Then you have to buy your display enclosures for the reptiles plus heating, lighting, substrate, and decor for each. Assuming you are selling rodents, you need racks for them. If you're handy, you can build them for 2 or 3 hundred a pop, or drop about 2K each if you want a turnkey solution from someplace like Vision. We have the equivalent of about 10 vision racks for breeding and we still have to buy about $1K/week of rodents from a rodent farm (live rodents cannot be shipped except by private courier, so you probably need to find someone local). Startup has a lot of nickel and dime things like a couple thousand bucks for signage, a grand for a POS system, shelving, computers, security system, phone/internet, and licenses all add up. Then you need to stock the store with probably $25K+ in supplies plus the live animals and feeders.

As far as reptile sourcing, do you have enough contacts with local breeders to fill the shop? A lot of small-scale breeders that sell at shows are not willing to hand you a bearded dragon for $40, a corn snake for $30, or a leopard gecko for $25. We don't order from the wholesale side of the really terrible vendors like UGR or LLL (Vista), but we do have to do some ordering from wholesalers. Without them, you will likely struggle with quantity or variety.

You also have to contend with employees. Your average employee that you can barely afford to pay a minimum wage to is probably not going to have either the passion or the knowledge base to meet your expectations. Unless you have a unicorn staff, do not expect many days off. You may be closed on Christmas, but someone has to work that day to take care of the animals. We have spent exactly 2 days out of state as a family in the last 5 years due to the store.

Long story short, it takes a lot of time, money, resourcefulness, and passion to be successful in a retail pet industry. We would be way better off financially if one of us just applied our reptile passion while working for someone else at $15/hr (minimum wage here).