Is this course any good?

Actually, I am considering getting in the food court stall business. From a quick look I found that the profit on these can be about $30,000 a year, so if a person gets two of them in the same food court (easy to supervise) you can bring in pretty good money and every few years get a new stall ...

You are better off getting a food truck. There was a show that rated the 10 best mobile food trucks out there. The best one I thought was called Sams chowder house. They would do an outdoor clambake with lobster, clams, corn, and red potatoes. The others were serving a custom niche and appearing to make a fortune doing it. There was ice cream, waffles, french food, korean-mexican, pulled pork sandwiches, pastries and donuts. All of them were custom and unique. And all of them were mobile food trucks where they cook the food right there on the spot. The most successful ones looked to be in the downtown areas. One building full of hungry people can result in a profitable venture.

Interesting idea! Right here in the Philippines where I am currently located the sidewalks of major streets are filled with small food carts. It has been suggested that a really good income here would be own a bunch of them and rent them out at P100 a day, or about $2.50 a day. Keep in mind that I am living in a 1 bedroom apartment that costs P4,0000 a month, or around $120. I was also looking at a 3 bedroom place for around P10,000 a month.

I am still trying to figure out if it's back to civilization or staying here. Currently being located in Manila is not an ideal solution (crowded, noisy, dirty ...), so I am trying to find a better place in the Philippines.

Something that hasn't been mentioned is that an IT expert could be a real help in a small shop where the owner doesn't know a lot about computers, and is running at a major disadvantage because of it. if he reads paper prints and programs the machines on the control, and you could learn CAD/CAM, wire up all the machines to a network and send programs to them from a central computer, he might be able to take on more complex jobs, and run them more efficiently.

Jon

Jon,

I am not so sure that a 'small' shop can afford to hire a person who can do that. I would think that a small shop may just hire a recent network graduate and work him hard setting up a network as fast as possible and then bring him back to fix stuff when need. The biggest problem I keep seeing is really that most places will have one IT person and expect that person to pick up any skills imaginable. While I enjoyed learning and trying out new stuff the worst part was that I usually was made to implement new stuff that I knew was stupid but was someone's new great idea up to well past the time the great idea was a great big stinker.

The shops you mention above have pretty much already done gone out of business about 10 years ago..