Many of these fees are not for a typical situation. For example, digging into the Minneapolis fees, one finds that $8,275.05 of the $13,972.68 total is for the Sewer Availability Charge described as:
> ... a one-time fee that communities pay to Metropolitan Council Environmental Services (MCES) when a residence or business connects to the metropolitan disposal system for the first time. [0]
If one started a restaurant in a previously used restaurant space, my sense is that many of these large fees would be essentially zero. Still there is a lot of licensing and inspecting.
This is pretty much the case in every country though. Tbf my dad has made a business of acquiring distressed restaurants and improving their profitability. In most cases, the suckers are first-time restaurant owners who viewed it as a side hustle rather than a full time job.
In most cases, it costs about 4x as much to open a restaurant than to acquire a distressed one. Anecdotally, a restaurant that was built with a cost of about a million bucks (local currency) in a 500 sq ft place (expensive city), was acquired by him for about 50k, and is now back to clocking about 1.5 million in revenue.
> ... a one-time fee that communities pay to Metropolitan Council Environmental Services (MCES) when a residence or business connects to the metropolitan disposal system for the first time. [0]
If one started a restaurant in a previously used restaurant space, my sense is that many of these large fees would be essentially zero. Still there is a lot of licensing and inspecting.
[0] https://www2.minneapolismn.gov/business-services/licenses-pe....