If you’re entrepreneurial, a hot dog pushcart is a pretty inexpensive way to start your own business. For $20 you can buy plans on the internet to build your own cart from about $500 worth of parts. For less than $2,000 you can get a pretty nice professionally built cart, and for $10,000 you can get a fancy trailer in which two people can stand and work. There are even large trucks with commercial kitchens available in the $100,000 range.
The wholesale cost of a quality hot dog is about 20¢, a bun costs about 10¢, and the condiments cost about 10¢ per sandwich. That makes your cost about 40¢ each. If you can move volume, you can buy for less. Typical resale price in Chicago is about $1.95, so your gross is about $1.45 per sale.
If you sell 200 hot dogs per day, 360 days per year (hey, take some holidays off), you would sell 72,000 dogs per year and could gross over $100,000 (not including soft drinks, chips, etc.). That’s cash money. No credit cards or checks. To stay open this much you’ll need a high traffic spot, indoors, and employees.
Subtract your overhead: Payroll, napkins, propane, rent, license fees, freebies for the cops, and other supplies, and there’s still a decent profit for a pretty small upfront investment and a lotta work. Oh yes, don’t forget to subtract from the profit the dogs you eat yourself.
Here are some suppliers who sell pushcarts and vending trucks:
High quality websites are expensive to run. If you help us, we’ll pay you back bigtime with an ad-free experience and a lot of freebies!
Millions come to AmazingRibs.com every month for high quality tested recipes, tips on technique, science, mythbusting, product reviews, and inspiration. But it is expensive to run a website with more than 2,000 pages and we don’t have a big corporate partner to subsidize us.
Our most important source of sustenance is people who join our Pitmaster Club. But please don’t think of it as a donation. Members get MANY great benefits. We block all third-party ads, we give members free ebooks, magazines, interviews, webinars, more recipes, a monthly sweepstakes with prizes worth up to $2,000, discounts on products, and best of all a community of like-minded cooks free of flame wars. Click below to see all the benefits, take a free 30 day trial, and help keep this site alive.
Post comments and questions below
1) Please try the search box at the top of every page before you ask for help.
2) Try to post your question to the appropriate page.
3) Tell us everything we need to know to help such as the type of cooker and thermometer. Dial thermometers are often off by as much as 50°F so if you are not using a good digital thermometer we probably can’t help you with time and temp questions. Please read this article about thermometers.
4) If you are a member of the Pitmaster Club, your comments login is probably different.
5) Posts with links in them may not appear immediately.
Moderators