Depends where you are, how you count labor and how busy you are. Location and competitive markets determine both wages and prices. Are you counting the owner/manager as part of the cost? Also are you counting work comp and unemployment and employers share of fica?
Where I live there is no way I could run 25% unless I don’t count my manager. I do not work in the store, but if I ran the store replacing the manager and did not count my compensation as part of the labor percentage, our cost would be around 24-25%. With our GM, the labor cost is 33-34% not counting work comp but including employers share of fica and unemployment.
Our local wage picture is higher than some other places:
Cook: $10-12 per hour depending on experience
Phones: $9-11 per hour depending on experience
Asst Mngr: $14 per hour plus ski pass and paid vacation
We run several points lower during our busy season and higher in the off-season. If we could be as busy as we are in the high season more or less all year, we would drop our labor cost by 4 points.
Long winded way of saying, it is not possible to say what your labor cost should be without knowing what kind of pricing you can achieve, what your total volume is, what wages your local market requires to attract and keep the quality of people you seek to hire and whether the cost includes a general manager/owner who is putting full time hours into the operation of the business. (and, if the manager/owner is included how much they are paid… i.e. market wage or some other amount)
