That list is ranked by sale volume / valuation.
There are plenty of franchises with more than the 2225 of panera bread in the rest of the list (including elements 21 to 27 of said list).
There are plenty of franchises with more than the 2225 of panera bread in the rest of the list (including elements 21 to 27 of said list).
The point was that there are a number of recognizable brands that have fewer stores than pandas in existance.
If you do want by to go by 'sales volume', it looks like the cost to rent a panda is about $1M/yr, for a total of 2.5B/yr. So you drop down to about position 43 if you want to sort by that metric. Still bigger than Midas, Jiffy-Lube, Baskin-Robbins.
We're pretty deeply in the apples vs oranges comparison at this point though...