Does anyone know of a person who has purchased a dog waste scooping business franchise?

I know there is a place in St. Louis Missouri that’s big enough that they have several highway billboards.

I think the size of your town and the number of others offering the service would be key. You need high population density and low competition.

I think it’s a thankless business – first, it’s hard to convince people to pay for something that they can pretty easily to for themselves.

Another challenge would be overhead costs: how far do you need to travel to get from one customer to another, and is the pricing enough to pay gas and vehicle costs? Somehow I don’t see that as being particularly lucrative.

Put it this way – this seems like a really poor investment. But you could buy into it and see if business starts to pick up.

Upon reflection, the fact that this might be a real business does not particularly surprise me too much. After all, businesses have been created on less. (I’m thinking here of Pet Rocks and smartphone apps that do nothing as examples, and which have made a mint in their day.)

So, sure; if you control the costs well enough, work out the process and controls so that you can deliver a consistently high-quality service and maintain repeat business, hire and train willing and able employees as your force multiplier, and then market like crazy and find customers willing to pay … you can make a business out of nearly anything, I guess. This would pretty much be the proof of that.

But … franchising? Buying a franchise? It’s not like dog shit is a patented product that you need a license to collect the stuff. I can’t imagine the specialty tooling that would be required on which a patent might be applied. And it is simply beyond me that the process can be in some way “branded” to an extent to command the kind of “brand loyalty” that would make a franchise business even possible.

So, no. I don’t see the kinds of margins in a business such as this that would make it a feasible franchise. If the market exists for the service, there are no barriers to entry that I see. Start picking up dog shit and do your own marketing, and cut out the middle man.

Someday you’ll be able to tell your grandkids, as they come to visit you on your palatial estate, “Yes, kids, this is the house that dog turds built!” Enjoy that dream.

Yucko’s appears to be a huge success. Been at it 25 years and support several interstate billboards.

You don’t necessarily think about dog parks and homeowner’s associations.

I still think it depends a lot on your location and competition. A franchise would need to cover a huge area.

There are franchises available. I heard of one guy who bought into one for $15,000 and his yearly fee to keep it was $10,000. Instructions on easy business operation included! Don’t ask me how they afford the new vehicle with the shrink-wrap graphics!
But they only charge about $9.95, or some other odd fee, not an even one or enough to make it work. Too many scoopers and not enough clientele for each business/area means no one can make enough to keep the scoopin’ going for too long. So they must fail, and the franchise seller sells to another, and the whole thing starts over again.
A scam, and a shitty one at that.
At least, that’s my thought… Any others??