My parents decided to open a boba shop in a small but growing town in Dallas, Texas. I decided to help them since I was unemployed and struggling to find a job. We’ve been open for a year and we’ve seen some growth but our daily average doesn’t exceed $300. Our only competitor is a coffee shop across the street and they’re always busy.

The problem is they don’t work at the boba shop. I’m the one managing it and doing all the front end and back end work. My mom doesn’t speak English, only Chinese and isn’t capable of making drinks and my dad works a day job. So that left me with running everything but they also decided to add appetizers to our menu so I had no choice but to hire someone to help me.

On the bright side, the cost of labor is only 18% of our Net Income but we have so many expenses that I cannot cut. Our fixed monthly expenses is $6200. All of our money gets wasted on inventory. It seems like whatever we make from sales, we’re constantly buying more inventory PLUS using our own money on top of that. Our monthly net income is about $2500 but we end up buying $4k-$6k in inventory a month. Half of that being stuff for the food they added on the menu. Our food isn’t popular and half of it gets eaten by us because we don’t have time to cook dinner nor do we have money to buy groceries regularly.

I have an appointment with an accountant coming up to discuss that but the problem is our location. We’re in a small town. Everyone leaves this town during the day when they go to work. We were hopeful that summer would be busy but it wasn’t. Now kids are going back to school in 2 weeks.

We signed a 5 year lease with the plaza owner and based on my math, my dad would end up burning through $240k of his retirement fund if this keeps up.

I’ve urged them to shut the place down but they wanna ride it til the wheels fall off. Now I have several options I want to explore but I’m not sure how big the risk is. Their solution to this problem is to add more food or raise the price of our products. After taxes, a drink is $7 on average, which is almost the same price as a drink from Starbucks or other fast food chains. So I refuse to raise the price. Plus the cost of making a drink is less than 30% of the sales price.

We can:

Remove food from the menu completely Become a catering service and focus solely on events (less inventory). Our local high school has plenty of events and so do neighboring towns so I’m hopeful we can get in if we just pay a vendor fee Shut down and save our asses from accruing more debt

All of this is very discouraging and it’s making me depressed because I’m 27 years old and I’m making no money. I missed out on my best friend’s wedding because I couldn’t take the time off to go, nor did I have the money to buy a tuxedo and fly there. I had to rehome two of my dogs because I’m never home and I couldn’t afford their vet bills anymore. It’s taking a toll on my relationship as well. Everyday seems like a blur now. I stopped going to the gym because I couldn’t afford a membership. Shit sucks. Sometimes I just want to end it all but I’m really trying my best to stick through it.