How a career in fast food could make you richer than becoming a lawyer

Would you like fries with that? Yes and a six-figure salary too, please

(Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Smart suits, shiny skyscrapers and high-stakes court cases, or bright red and yellow uniforms, drive-throughs and deep fat fryers?

Yes, a career in law certainly seems more glamorous, exciting and lucrative to most people than working in the fast food sector, but we could actually be very wrong in our assumptions.

If you reach manager level at a fast-food restaurant, you can expect to earn a surprisingly high salary - at popular US burger chain In-N-Out, for example, managers earn around $120,000 (£94,500).

And despite the high-flying lifestyles depicted in the majority of law TV shows, it turns out not all lawyers earn as much as we tend to think - the average salary of a US lawyer is $114,790 (£90,400), just less than an In-N-Out manager.

What’s more, restaurant managers are likely to have a much better work-life balance than lawyers, who notoriously have to work exceedingly long hours.

And sure, you may get to travel the world and stay in swanky hotels as a lawyer, but there are a lot of lesser-known benefits to jobs in the fast food industry.

McDonald’s, for example, was named the eighth best company to work for in the UK this year, where staff members are incentivised by the prospect of winning Employee of the Month, Quarter or Year prizes.

Of course, if you’re just working at the till at your local Maccy D’s you're not going to earn as much as the average lawyer, but there’s a lot of scope for climbing the ranks: 95% of McDonalds’ managers began as hourly paid employees, as did the whole UK operations team and three of the top five executives.

What’s more, In-N-Out managers have been offered all-expenses-paid holidays since 1980 as part of their benefits package, often including a generous per diem as well, according to Bloomberg.

And if all that wasn’t enough, as a fast food restaurant manager you’re likely to be simply happier than a lawyer - according to a study, lawyers are 3.6 times more likely to suffer from depression than non-lawyers, making them the most at-risk occupation.

So if you’re considering a career change, it might be worth seeing whether your local fast food eatery is hiring before you start studying for those law exams.