• architect@thelemmy.club
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    15 hours ago

    Walmart’s gross profit rate was 24.1% of net sales in fiscal 2025, and operating income was $29.348 billion, or 4.4% of net sales.

    So for every $100 Walmart keeps $4.40 after paying everything including corporate staff but before taxes.

    For Walmart, the “3%” is basically net profit margin for fiscal 2025, Walmart reported $680.985 billion in total revenue and $19.436 billion in net income attributable to Walmart, which is about 2.85%.

    3% sounds like nothing but 19.5 billion in profit definitely is but nothing.

    Wording it like this is a struggling company is a really…special way to go about this.

    • FishFace@piefed.social
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      15 hours ago

      I’m getting my numbers from here: https://stock.walmart.com/financial-information/income-statement I believe the difference in figures is between US and Worldwide, and aren’t different enough to affect the conclusion.

      I’m not “wording it like” Walmart is struggling; I’m saying that Walmart (and the grocery sector in general) works on razor-thin margins, and trying to ignore that fact by talking about “record profits” is misleading and either stupid or dishonest. I’d encourage you to re-read my comment and try to decide which words made you interpret it that way - I think you’ll find that they aren’t there, that I was just reporting facts in neutral language, and you’ve made that interpretation because I’m going against the narrative.

      What a low profit margin means is that if an average shopper buying a $100 basket of goods decides to swipe a $2 chocolate bar, their profits are nearly halved. Problems that seem small have large effects to a company operating like this.

      The narrative Lemmy commenters tend to believe is that the cost of groceries went up in the 2020s due to corporate greed and lay the blame for their current struggles at the foot of retailers like Walmart. The actual facts don’t bear that out. They then mock complaints about theft from shops attributed to self-service checkouts as price-gouging fat cats whining that their cost-saving measure isn’t saving them costs, ignoring that, with profit margins relatively steady/down since before the pandemic, those cost savings are being passed on to them, the consumer.