Beer, Wine, and Liquor Retailers

The median filer grossed $29,123, or $2,426 a month before expenses. That is an operating business at part-time scale: enough revenue to be worth running properly, not enough to be the only thing in the household.

At 11,457 filers this is a real but thin national population. There is no established price for Beer, Wine, and Liquor Retailers at this scale, which cuts both ways: nothing anchors you low and nothing anchors you high.

3,941 filers, 34.4% of the total, took $100,000 or more in receipts. Read the size of that group as evidence about turnover in Beer, Wine, and Liquor Retailers rather than about income: the costs scale with it.

Independent food and beverage retail suits people who can manage waste, margin and hours simultaneously in a category where the large chains set the price expectation.

There is no training requirement to file under this code — which is precisely why so many people appear in the bottom bands. Entry being free is not the same as the work being viable.

37.5x between the quarters — $5,980 against $224,545, or $18,213 a month. This is the shape of a field where a minority does very well and the summary statistics quietly borrow their success.

The bottom quarter of Beer, Wine, and Liquor Retailers earns under $5,980 — $44,040 below the $50,020 a typical American job pays. Entering at the bottom and waiting is a live risk here, not a theoretical one, and some people never leave that quarter.

Do not start this without a waste discipline; the margin in this category is thinner than the shrinkage.

33.8% — 3,872 of the 11,457 filers in 2022 — grossed under $10,000 for the year. That is not the tail of the distribution, it is a third of it, and it is measured before any expense came out.

Read that as a floor, not an estimate. Census publishes gross receipts, not net income, so everyone inside that share earned less than $10,000 suggests once costs came out — and filers who grossed well above $10,000 may still have netted nothing.

From $5,980 to $224,545 is 37.5x — the shape of a field where a minority captures most of the money. The midpoint of $29,123 is arithmetic, not a forecast, and treating it as one is the standard mistake here.

Put in money rather than ratios: $5,980 at the 25th percentile, $29,123 at the midpoint, $224,545 at the 75th. $218,565 separates the quarter of Beer, Wine, and Liquor Retailers at the bottom from the quarter at the top.

Getting to $224,545, the 75th percentile, is worth $195,422 a year more than the $29,123 midpoint and $218,565 more than the $5,980 a quarter of Beer, Wine, and Liquor Retailers settle for.

$23,143 below the midpoint, $195,422 above it. That asymmetry is extreme even for this data, and it means every summary of Beer, Wine, and Liquor Retailers that is not a median — including any average you see quoted elsewhere — is describing the top of the range rather than the middle.

Spread across a 2,080-hour year those receipts come to $14.00 an hour at the midpoint, $2.87 at the 25th percentile and $107.95 at the 75th. That is turnover per hour, not pay per hour, and it is not comparable with the $24.04 an hour a typical American job pays.

Counted straight off the return: 2,606 filers grossed under $5,000, 1,266 took $5,000 to $9,999, 1,665 took $10,000 to $24,999, 3,927 cleared $100,000 and 2,635 cleared $250,000.