Grocery and Related Product Merchant Wholesalers

At $62,015 a year — $5,167 a month — the midpoint filer under this code is turning over more than most nonemployer businesses ever do. Read it as turnover: the bigger the revenue, the bigger the costs hiding inside it.

28,316 filings sit behind this code — a workforce the size of a mid-sized occupation that no payroll survey counts, because none of it runs through a payroll.

38.6% of filers grossed $100,000 or more. At that share the upper band is not an exception, it is a large minority of the field — though gross receipts at this level usually carry proportionate costs.

Independent nondurable-goods wholesaling suits people who can move perishable or fast-turning stock on tight terms, where a slow week is written off rather than carried.

Nothing stops anyone filing under this code, and 28,316 people did. Free entry is why the lower bands are as full as they are: the distribution below counts everyone who tried, not everyone who was ready.

Bottom quarter under $14,568, top quarter over $219,527: 15.1x, or $17,079 a month. At this stretch the label has stopped describing one occupation, and every summary statistic about it — including the midpoint — should be treated with suspicion.

The bottom quarter of Grocery and Related Product Merchant Wholesalers earns under $14,568 — $35,452 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 cold chain and turn discipline; in this category slow stock is not stock, it is loss.

Of the 28,316 people who filed as Grocery and Related Product Merchant Wholesalers in 2022, 20.6% — about 5,824 of them — grossed under $10,000 for the entire year, before a single expense was deducted. That is the gentlest end of this dataset and it is still roughly one filer in four.

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.

A ratio of 15.1x between the quarters is the signature of a winner-take-most distribution. $62,015 is a real number about a real population, but nobody entering Grocery and Related Product Merchant Wholesalers should plan around it.

The middle half of this field earns between $14,568 and $219,527. That is $204,959 of range, with $62,015 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.

Between $14,568 and $219,527 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $62,015. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $157,512; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $204,959.

$47,447 below the midpoint, $157,512 above it. That asymmetry is extreme even for this data, and it means every summary of Grocery and Related Product Merchant Wholesalers 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 $29.81 an hour at the midpoint, $7.00 at the 25th percentile and $105.54 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.

Straight from the Census bands for Grocery and Related Product Merchant Wholesalers: 3,464 filers under $5,000, 2,361 between $5,000 and $9,999, 4,032 between $10,000 and $24,999, 10,897 above $100,000 and 6,073 above $250,000.