Fruit and Vegetable Retailers

Median gross receipts of $13,337 put the typical filer somewhere between a serious side income and a failing attempt at a full-time one, and the receipts figure alone cannot tell you which.

At 12,885 filers this is a real but thin national population. There is no established price for Fruit and Vegetable Retailers at this scale, which cuts both ways: nothing anchors you low and nothing anchors you high.

11.9% of filers grossed $100,000 or more. That is a substantial upper tier by the standards of this dataset — the difference between a full operation and an occasional one is visible in the distribution rather than only in the anecdotes.

Independent food retail suits people who can be in the shop, since in this category the owner’s presence is most of what separates a good week from a bad one.

There is no qualification, licence or minimum to appear in this data — you file and you are counted. Read the receipts distribution as the price of that: no barrier at the door means no filter before the numbers.

The top quarter of Fruit and Vegetable Retailers earns 9.4x the bottom quarter — under $4,259 against over $39,977, a spread of $35,718. Distributions this stretched are usually two different jobs sharing one label, and any average across them means little.

The bottom quarter of Fruit and Vegetable Retailers earns under $4,259 — $45,761 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 on borrowed money against forecast footfall, which is the assumption that fails most often here.

Of the 12,885 people who filed as Fruit and Vegetable Retailers in 2022, 44.9% grossed under $10,000 for the year — 5,785 people who did not clear a part-time wage in revenue, let alone in profit.

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 $4,259 to $39,977 is 9.4x — the shape of a field where a minority captures most of the money. The midpoint of $13,337 is arithmetic, not a forecast, and treating it as one is the standard mistake here.

The middle half of this field earns between $4,259 and $39,977. That is $35,718 of range, with $13,337 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.

Getting to $39,977, the 75th percentile, is worth $26,640 a year more than the $13,337 midpoint and $35,718 more than the $4,259 a quarter of Fruit and Vegetable Retailers settle for.

$9,078 below the midpoint, $26,640 above it. That asymmetry is extreme even for this data, and it means every summary of Fruit and Vegetable Retailers that is not a median — including any average you see quoted elsewhere — is describing the top of the range rather than the middle.

Converted to a 2,080-hour year, the receipts run $2.04 an hour at the 25th percentile, $6.41 at the midpoint and $19.21 at the 75th. Read them as revenue per hour worked; the equivalent wage is lower by whatever this work costs to do.

Counted straight off the return: 3,782 filers grossed under $5,000, 2,004 took $5,000 to $9,999, 2,951 took $10,000 to $24,999, 1,533 cleared $100,000 and 608 cleared $250,000.