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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

$20m / year is a mom & pop business?

In retail, yes. Retail margins are usually less than 3%; so $20m/yr in revenue would give you less than $600k/yr in profit. Not bad money by any means; but certainly not enough to need a bunch of shareholders.

Contrast this with the fact that an average Walmart does over $100 million a year in revenue (though Walmart's margins are closer to 1%), and it's actually not that huge.

I am not sure what kind of retail you are referring to (offline grocery perhaps?) but most ecommerce retail operations are running margins significantly higher than 3%. 10-30% is more typical in my experience, and 40-60% for operations selling unique products they make themselves.

Gross or net margins?

At first, I thought "you meant $100 billion" not "million", until, on a 2nd or 3rd rereading, I realized you were referring to an average single Walmart store does over $100m in revenue.

So I thought I'd throw this comment in here in case others were misreading it as I did.

Totally did the same thing. Thanks for the explanation, really cleared it up.

Wal-Mart's margins are 3.3% (Trailing 12 months)

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=WMT+Key+Statistics

Ah; you're right. I was recalling a statistic that Walmart's margin on specific items can be as low as 1% and must have gotten them confused. :)

Sure. I worked summer jobs in IT consultancies with approximately that in revenue. They were owned and managed day-to-day by one guy acting as CEO/COO with his wife doing the books and payroll.

They had employees, but were still entirely owned and managed by a literal "mom and pop" whose children I went to school with.

Yes, if that's revenue rather than profits.

A million dollars ain't what it used to be.

They are family owned and operated, yes! In almost all the cases I know of. I may be using the term wrong though.

27.5 million is mom & pop in the governments eyes for programming work.

Momma's got needs!

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