What do you think would be more difficult to run...An artisan Bakery or A woodfired Neapolitan place. Think Something like Tartine(minus some of the crazy pastries, but keep some and the deli) vs. UPN. Who do you think has it rougher, Anthony or Chad.
Neither is easy to operate, however, having owned both a bakery and a pizzeria, I can tell you that I prefer running a pizzeria.
Bread has seemingly a great mark up as flour is your only real expense (minus pastries, where butter, etc. would weigh heavily in food costs), but if it costs you 50 cents to make a great 2 lb loaf of levain and you sell it for $4 that's $3.50 profit. Great! But how many loaves per day do you need to sell to break even with fixed costs? Also, you may not sell everything (often don't) and you may have 20 loaves that you don't sell, which means a negative profit of $10 in food waste/shrinkage. Most bakeries rely on wholesaling bread to restaurants to make the bread program profitable, but it involves invoicing, delivery, etc. Pastries and coffee sales are the main profits of a retail bakery.
Pizza is much more profitable. You can sell one pizza and make as much profit as you would selling 3 loaves of bread. But when you add potential salad and alcohol sales to that pizza, then you really start seeing profit.
Both are very labor intensive. Lots of hours on the feet and often no time to take breaks. I can't say one was easier than the other in the physical dept. What will really kill you in the end is stressing out over sales and profit. Nobody puts their life savings into a dream, works 90-100 hours a week and comes out on top 100% of the time. Most fail and the stress created takes a huge toll. Those that do succeed, still have to go through several years of stress before you start seeing the fruits of your labor. We almost filed at the 4 year mark, which is when we finally paid off almost all of our debt. Now, I don't worry about that problem anymore and I actually take home a check. Yippeee!
Both businesses require employees, insurance, taxes, bookkeeping, blah, blah, blah. All the not so fun things that most don't think about, or want to deal with, when running a business.
Every business has it's own parameters of size and production that come into play when determining fixed costs and labor needs. The bigger you get, the more vulnerable you are to loss. The smaller you are, the more you hinder your overall gross sales potential, but slow days hurt less.
Really a lot at play here. Ask me specifics.
