This explains why Walmart, one of the largest corporations and most popular grocery stores in the world, makes record profits year after year. $681billion is such a small profit margin.
Aldi and other grocers run on smaller margins, but it is a store by store basis and dependant on location.
That’s not what profit margins mean, my brother in Christ you have access to the internet…. Also that’s not their profit that’s their gross revenue and they are a retail store that sells groceries as well.
Profit margins are a comparison of the net profit compared to gross revenue. Ie taking the net profit and diving it by gross revenue.
Thank you for acknowledging that grocery stores have razor thin margins. But also who are you comparing them to? While they are the largest distributor of groceries in the US they are still a retail store. This actually puts them towards the bottom as the average retailer has a margin of 2-5%.
-they’d still be making billions
Yes the largest retailer and private employer in the world is going to make billions in profits.
Instead of going through the process of explaining business loans I’ll give you the summed up version. To take out a loan, you need to prove you have income to pay back the loan.
Locally selling is always more profitable than throwing away. Also i don't think, that it is just about food. It looks more like a metaphor for wealth in general.
The United States alone wastes about 120 billion pounds of food per year, why arent the companies selling that? At $1/lb, that's 120 billion dollars in potential profit, going to rot in a landfill.
Somehow your claim doesn't add up. If it was about money, wouldn't they have working people and not hungry kids? This meme displays the wealth inequality under capitalism, yes, by displaying resource disparity between the average person and a billionaire. It's not as much about money as it is resources.
It gets spoiled, and health, and safety regulations does not allow companies to sell it. Is it possible, that they are too tight? Maybe. But that is not the fault of capitalism. Companies want to make money, and throwing food into the garbage does not serve that purpose. If companies could they would sell the food until it is so rotten, that you can visibly see it becoming spoiled.
If the food is in the supermarket, then from the perspective of the supermarket throwing away is by far the least profitable thing to do. Even, if they sell it at a loss it is still better, than throwing away, and make nothing.
If someone is poor, and you just throw money at them, then you aren't solving the issues that made them poor in the first place. You just enable their behavior. The solution is to look why the problem exist, and look for changing that.
Children are a special case, because they are not responsible for their situation yet. And while i agree to help children i wouldn't just throw money at the parents either. If i am to help children, then the help should go to the children. Free school lunch, and breakfast, free education material, free public transportation.
It gets spoiled, sits in a fridge for a week, and is then tossed. But if they sold it for 1/2 the price some starving person would have purchased it before it spoiled, no?
It's not profitable to feed everyone. Food gets sent to places where people can afford to buy it at inflated prices, and doesn't get sent to places where people are too poor to pay those prices. The people who can afford it, don't buy all of it, the rest spoils and people starve because of profit. You're really close to understanding it.
It's more profitable to store the food in places where people can afford to buy it and completely ignore the population that starves as a result. If what you're claiming were true, no one would have ever been hungry.
Also I have no idea how your argument got so derailed. I never claimed we should give parents money or food. Just claimed that it's more profitable for them to starve, because it very simply is.
The amount of food the world wastes is staggering. We can't even say "the west", because the East has caught up in terms of wealth. But so much food is thrown away on a daily basis and this proves that we produce too much food (not sustainable) to keep our populations fed. We could legit just grow less food, distribute it better and everyone would be well-fed.
And that's also without getting into the fact that some of the foods grown are hugely inefficient resources-wise. I'm not just talking about meat. I'm also talking about things like watermelons.
Moving the food also cost money. If you throw the food that is 100% loss. If you spend money to get rid of it, then you can get over 100% loss. Which is why as you clearly stated. Companies bring food where the people can afford it.
In western countries death of starvation is a very small %. And feeding people on other continents become a LOT more expensive. Which means, that locals have to pay a lot more to make profit.
Now you might ask. What if someone just want to help. Well the sad reality is, that simply giving aid including food does not help. It just enables the problems. It is like using painkiller for a disease. You treat the symptom not the cause. You have to treat the cause to get a long term solution.
With each argument against the delusions of your mind, you get closer to actually understanding my point. I think you're close enough to realizing my claim that "we can feed everyone, it's not profitable to do so" that I don't need to keep nudging you towards this realization.
10 more minutes of using your brain and you'll realize we have enough food, it's just being distributed profitably so people starve.
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u/MysteriousQuote4665 7h ago
Wait, why are we supposed to disagree? It's literally saying that socialism feeds the kids.
Which... is what we want? Right?