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After Adrian Mocerian's real estate business went bust and his friend Mark Jordan got laid off, they travelled all the way from Tennessee to Chicago to an empty parking lot, outside of this Vienna Beef factory, to learn how to sell hot dogs.
"I slide my thumb so I'm not crushing the bun top.
Enrollment has doubled. Tuition for ‘Wiener Work 101" will run you 400 dollars. But a year-round vendor has the potential to be pretty lucrative. Business is up 25%.
Whenever the economy has turned sour, the recession or whatever, there's always been an increase in mobile vending hot dog carts.
Jack Beller works at one of the largest vendor cart companies in the country. Business is heating up, especially now. Between Memorial day and Labor day, just a three-month span, Americans eat about 7 billion hot dogs.
Food like hot dogs, I would consider the comfort food. And I would expect that's one of the pop reasons they are popular. Also in the terms of down economy, people tend to eat more comfort foods.
He calls this the most basic form of capitalism, and it has its advantages. You can be your own boss, set your own hours, and it's an all-cash business with very little overhead.
Usually the permitting from whatever municipality you are in is a couple hundred dollars a year at most.
So how much will this cart run?
This cart will run about $3,400.
The average hot dog costs 25 cents. Most vendors sell a hot dog for $1.50. If you sold 100 hot dogs a day , working five days a week, you'd clear $32,500 a year; 250 hot dogs a day, more than 80,000 dollars a year. Sounds like a cake some could really relish.
Linsey Davis, ABC news.