You are a level 20 Wizard, legend among worlds- And yet some bizzare entity comes to you.
"You! I shall send you to another world as my tool."
You awaken in a world of silver and Mechanics, Towers larger than any Wizards, people in garb far beyond standards seen in your homeworld.
The Being Speaks to you, "I have sent you here with a Task- You must make a chain of restaurants, larger in size and number than that of the McDonald's restaurant Chain in this World Today. You have Five years. Should you fail in that time, you shall cease to exist, and all you have been for will have been naught."
"In addition, you cannot cast spells on any of the beings of this world- Your magic will slip off of them like water, as will their hands on any magic they might attempt to use. It's like this for every living being in this world. To Take Another's Effort is even worse, so no buying another restaurant. And to make the food yourself is a great sin- Should you partake in these horrid acts, I will wipe you from existence."
So you, a level 20 wizard with WBL, have five years to make a chain of restaurants that dwarfs McDonalds. How do you do it?
TL;DR
-You are a level 20 Wizard who has to make a restraunt chain larger in number and size than McDonalds has today.
-No casting spells on anything living.
-No having the populus use magic items.
-No buying a franchise/restraunt.
-No cooking yourself.
Can you do it?
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Use magic spells like Fabricate to become insanely wealthy.
Use a tiny amount of the money to create one burger restaurant, through legal modern day efforts.
Buy McDonalds and forcibly convert all restaurants to that of the restaurant you just made.
Alternatively, if that doesn't count, just summon meteors or planar bind outsiders to destroy all McDonalds restaurants, since one is larger than zero.
If you wanted to get pedantic, you could just create a few restaraunts of incredibly large size, so each is bigger than any McDonald's restaraunt.
Use magic spells like Fabricate to become insanely wealthy.
Use a tiny amount of the money to create one burger restaurant, through legal modern day efforts.
Buy McDonalds and forcibly convert all restaurants to that of the restaurant you just made.Alternatively, if that doesn't count, just summon meteors or planar bind outsiders to destroy all McDonalds restaurants, since one is larger than zero.
Dang commoner mind filling my words with loopholes- No destroying McDonalds, that does not please the God. And no destroying the competition.
If you wanted to get pedantic, you could just create a few restaraunts of incredibly large size, so each is bigger than any McDonald's restaraunt.
GAAAH GRAMMAR. No making massive restaurant malls.
Aww, I accidentally caused the rules to be changed.
Can I at least get a consolation prize for creative thinking?
Simplifying the problem: make McDonalds.
Looks like there's a little shy of 37,000 McDonalds in the world.
An inn takes 90 days to build, and requires 33 points of Goods, 3 points of Influence, 32 points of Labor. 33*20gp + 3*30gp + 32*20gp = 1390gp
Total cost: 37,000 * 1390gp = 51,430,000
That's about 60 times your WBL.
All right, lets look at our world. It's somewhere from a million to two million to open a McDonalds. You have 880,000 gold pieces to spend, or 17,600 pounds of gold (at 50 pieces to the pound). That's going for around $338,304,600 right now, giving you only $9,143 per location. No good. Gold's always been more than ten times as valuable as silver, so that's easy to rule out. What if you instead had 88,000,000 copper pieces, or 1,760,000 pounds? It goes for about $1.80/lb., only giving us enough for a handful of locations.
How about if we're just trying to earn the money? Let's take that low-end one million estimate for per-location investment. That's $37,000,000,000- cheaper than the $97,283,000,000 pricetag to buy all of the McDonalds stock, so no easy out there.
We need quick billions of dollars. A billion dollars is in the ballpark of sports teams, fighter jets, and round trips to the moon. Fabricate isn't going to cut it producing fighter jets- the craft DC is probably "impossible". Round trips to the moon aren't bad, though, thanks to Interplanetary Teleport. No use trying to teleport people, but if you could convince the US government to give you NASA's 2011 budget for two years, you could teleport all the probes they've built to wherever they need to go. Let's one-up that, though. We recently discovered a planet orbiting the nearest star that's in the Goldilocks zone. Spend a year proving you're a level 20 Wizard. Offer to drop a probe off, collect some notes, and come back for a cool forty billion dollars.
tl;dr
FTL travel is worth a lot, even if you can't take people with you.
Alternate solution by exploiting a loophole.
You can't use magic on living people. Nothing mentioned about dead people. Selling life assurance to multi-billionaires will get you pretty far pretty quickly. Since you're a Wizard, you'll probably need to use Limited Wish to cast Raise Dead (plus some more castings to remove the negative levels), but that won't cut into your margins much.
20th level wizard, you say?
Method 1: Cast Wish
"I wish I was the proprietor of a restaurant chain that dwarf's in every aspect the fast food chain McDonalds, and that my restaurant chain will continue to do so for the next fifty years."
Method 2: Simulacrum
Create a dozen simulacrums of yourself, then have them cast Prestidigitation on everything they serve, making it all taste incredible. They can also use Fabricate to create massive, perfectly prepared portions of food instantly. For bonus points serve salads and incredibly healthy food on the cheap. Create traps of Fabricate, each operated by a simulacrum. Make a profit. Rinse. Repeat. Take the First World by storm.
You can continue to change the terms of the challenge, but at that point, it is truly an impossible challenge.
20th level wizard, you say?
Method 1: Cast Wish
"I wish I was the proprietor of a restaurant chain that dwarf's in every aspect the fast food chain McDonalds, and that my restaurant chain will continue to do so for the next fifty years."
That's well outside the scope of Pathfinder's Wish.
Method 2: Simulacrum
Create a dozen simulacrums of yourself, then have them cast Prestidigitation on everything they serve, making it all taste incredible. They can also use Fabricate to create massive, perfectly prepared portions of food instantly. For bonus points serve salads and incredibly healthy food on the cheap. Create traps of Fabricate, each operated by a simulacrum. Make a profit. Rinse. Repeat. Take the First World by storm.You can continue to change the terms of the challenge, but at that point, it is truly an impossible challenge.
I don't think that one actually does it for you. It'd take fifty years to produce enough copies of yourself to staff just one at each not-McDonalds.
Assuming a 20th level wizard has 4 7th level spell slots, 4 2nd level spell slots, 4 1st level spell slots, and a belt of giant's strength +6
1 Cast blood money: provides all material components, deals 1 str damage per 500 gold cost of spell. (so 10 strength damage for a 10 HD Simulacrum). A 5th level wizard can cast up to 5th level spells.
2 Cast Simulacrum: Create your Simulacrum
3 Cast Limited Wish: duplicate Restoration. Heal that nasty Str damage
4 Cast Sculpt Simulacrum: No point raising suspicions as to why they all look like you.
This should net you two Simulacrums a day. But Wait, there's more!
Start by creating a Demiplane with the Flowing Time trait. Cast Greater Demiplane, double the amount of time that passes there, permanency it, then continue casting, each time doubling the speed of time within the plane. Within a month you should have 2^(4*30-1) = 2^119 = ~6.646*e35 seconds pass on the plane for every second in the real world. Take the Immortality discovery. Within another month you should have three Simulacrum's for each and every person on the planet. With four years and ten months left to figure this thing out. But with 3/4's of Earth's population now being Simulacrums of yourself, it'll be pretty easy to outpace McDonalds.
Edit: Why stop there? Use Interplanetary teleport to start setting up Simulacrums on other planets. Take over Mars. Mercury. Venus. Pluto. The Asteroid belt. Nobody said you were limited to Earth. Create the greatest restaurant chain the galaxy has ever seen! All set to serve your ever-growing army of Simulacrum-wizards that don't look like you.
Okay, gonna try a different take, then, to please the God that evidently dislikes technical victories.
Buy a large quantity of onyx gemstones. Use them to animate zombies or skeletons, up to your limit. This is only 80 hands of slave labor, but workers you don't have to pay, feed, or let sleep is invaluable. Again, keep them out of visibility, because the public seeing them is going to be a problem.
Use these undead to gather animals for you. Ordinary hamburgers aren't going to cut it, because a ton of places do that already and to be able to catch up, you need to be able to corner the market with something they don't have. You need something exotic, either a luxury that is too much trouble for people to mass farm, or something they've never tried before.
Raise farms of these exotic animals (I will assume something suitably exotic and delicious can be found with a Knowledge (Nature) check), using your eternally loyal undead as farm workers, so you have this secret farm of mystery meat that people will love and want to buy. Make sure to hide it with illusions.
Hire somebody to cook for you, have one of the skeletons do it, or summon an Unseen Servant to cook. Either way, you're just selling, not cooking. (Which seems like an arbitrary restriction to me, since how likely is the wizard going to have 20 ranks in Profession (gourmet chef)?)
Start with a small stall to sell it, one of those portable ones. Try to give it a nice catchy name that doesn't sound awkward in the wrong context. You might be a trillionaire, but you need to start public awareness from the bottom. If your face is known globally for your wealth, use Alter Self and adopt a second identity while you're selling burgers.
You'll want to keep at this until word of your little stall spreads, then make a building. Hire enough people to act as cashiers, cooks, and janitors. Paying wages isn't a problem because you're secretly insanely wealthy and people aren't going to really question your bottom line unless it's suspicious. Make sure you have a drive-thru, and branch out into delivery as well since I don't know many burger places that do that.
At this point you are starting to make quite the name for yourself. You can start branching out; make conventional burgers using ordinary meats for the customers that want them, but continue to have your exotic burger on tap. You don't want demand for the exotic burger to outpace the amount the farm can process at maximum capacity. If you need to, start creating golems for the farm to help expand it.
As you make more buildings in the area, nearby businesses may find they can no longer compete. Buy their land and use it for more strategically placed restaurants, making sure you have enough restaurants that deliver to offer complete delivery radius in the region. Buy some open lots in other states, and start construction there, using the same system of incredibly delicious, incredibly exotic burgers, with the options for other people, to expand your popularity and expand further.
As your franchise gets competitively large, you will definitely start stealing customers from the big M. If they are forced to close down their own stores due to lack of sustainability, you can buy the land and build a restaurant there yourself. When your profits allow it, funnel all your proceeds into making more golems, or making the golems you have more efficient.
Because you are offering something nobody else can compete with, are able to offer all the same options and more as them due to your economic strength, and are charismatic enough to win people over with your charming second identity, other restaurants just can't compete. While yours is growing, theirs are shrinking. Does it still count as destroying the competition if I'm doing so economically rather than destructively?
It's just a matter of time before you become the number one burger franchise on the planet. Or people discover your super secret farm and you're ruined. One of the two.
EDIT: That took very long to write on a phone, and in the intervening time, people beat me to it. Aww...
1. Summon several Succubi
2. Use them to control Apple's board of directors.
3. Announce that Apple is opening a chain of coffee shops.
4. Profit.
Spend a year proving you're a level 20 Wizard. Offer to drop a probe off, collect some notes, and come back for a cool forty billion dollars.
I feel like if you need a year to prove that you're a 20th level wizard, then you're probably not a very competent 20th level wizard.
so- unrelated to the discussion, just reacting to the thread title:
Kentucky Fried kobolds.
My work here is done.
Well I mean, you could ask the guys at subway what they did. Last I checked they had beat out McDonald's.
But using magic,as previously stated use called beings or simulacra to run your shops, use money making magic schemes (and possibly ruin the world economy) but the clincher for saving material costs is of course hydras. Find a way to get hydras and you have an unlimited supply of meat.