Retail Franchises

The retail category on PlainFranchise covers 31 franchise brands with publicly available Franchise Disclosure Documents, making it a solidly populated sector with enough concept variety that prospective franchisees can triangulate investment levels, royalty norms, and revenue benchmarks across peer brands. The average initial investment across these brands runs from $326K to $772K, a 137% low-to-high spread that mirrors the underlying cost variance across site size, market tier, and buildout scope within the sector. The typical initial franchise fee lands near $34K, which is the upfront payment for trademark rights, training, and territory — it is a sunk cost, not a capital expenditure.

Ongoing royalties average 5.4% of gross sales across the retail cohort, the single biggest ongoing cost line in most franchise P&Ls. On a franchise doing $950K in annual revenue, that rate translates to roughly $51K per year flowing to the franchisor before the advertising fund, rent, and labor — which is why negotiating even a small royalty discount (where allowed) materially changes unit economics. Item 19 financial performance data is available for a subset of these brands and shows an average reported gross revenue of $950K per location — a useful benchmark when evaluating a specific brand's revenue claim against its sector peers. Aggregate franchised-and-company unit count across the sector runs near 129,715 locations, giving a rough sense of saturation and available white-space markets.

Use this sector page as a comparative screen rather than a ranking. Two brands with similar investment ranges and royalty rates can produce radically different franchisee outcomes depending on supply-chain leverage, real-estate strategy, territory protection, and the quality of franchisor support — details that never show up in sector averages. The cards below sort alphabetically by default; click into any brand to see its full FDD-derived investment profile, Item 19 financial performance (where disclosed), unit-count trajectory, and termination/non-renewal rate. For sector-level macro context, cross-reference with industry benchmarks on PlainBizBench and SBA-approved-lender activity on PlainLender before signing an FDD receipt.