If you're clever about it, the markup on a grilled cheese sandwich can be enormous. Fifty cents worth of bread and cheese sells for eight bucks if you make it l

If you're clever about it, the markup on a grilled cheese sandwich can be enormous. Fifty cents worth of bread and cheese sells for eight bucks if you make it look fancy enough. Simple menu, assembly-line cheese-grilling, minimal cleaning and packaging, and simplified payment system and you can serve a lot of people in one lunch hour. As long as they can keep the customers rolling in (which is just a matter of (a) marketing and (b) making good grilled cheeses) it's a licence to print money.