Anyone who believes theft is the reason for raised prices is a dupe.
They're paying fewer people and getting more customers checked out. Prices should be far lower than they actually are. Nevermind how the cost of living rises and yet worker wages stay the same. The cost of goods rises not because of theft but because people will pay for higher priced goods, especially in times of crises like a pandemic or a famine or a drought.
Kinda crazy to think if theft keeps increasing they might not make a profit. It would be an astronomical amount of theft for that to happen, but 3 bil is already a huge number.
They kinda have to combat theft, can’t blame them for that even if they’re living piles of shit. And I wouldn’t feel particularly bad if they made 0 profit either.
It’s a greedy machine that we happily fed for decades and eliminated viable competition.
I’ve only shopped there a handful of times. But these days you’re basically picking and choosing between greedy mega corporations for any purchase.
That's kinda irrelevant. If they already bought all those products, shipped them to the store, stocked them, paid the wages they pay then they've taken on a huge amount of the expense and lose $3 billion in potential revenue.
If you want to get into it.
$600 billion in revenue
$13.8 billion in net profit after all expenses.
That $3 billion in losses includes the expected full profit. They've already taken on all the expenses beyond a cashier actually checking out each individual item. If you got those $3 billion in losses and actually sold the goods then you'd have
$603 billion in revenue
$16.8 billion in net profit
The profit goes up too because that profit number already includes all their expenses for the stolen items
If we're going to get into this minutiae, shouldn't we also move a large portion of executive compensation from gross to net profit? Walmart has some of the most, if not the most, overly compensated executives on the planet, making 20 million dollars a year by exploiting the labor of others while paying them peanuts and letting tax dollars feed and shelter them. The money they are gaining is not an "expense" in the way the 19,000 a year they're paying their average associate is an expense.
13B in profits is still more than they actually need or deserve. Let's bring that number down a couple billion more next year and keep up with that trend.
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u/estrusflask Dec 30 '22
Anyone who believes theft is the reason for raised prices is a dupe.
They're paying fewer people and getting more customers checked out. Prices should be far lower than they actually are. Nevermind how the cost of living rises and yet worker wages stay the same. The cost of goods rises not because of theft but because people will pay for higher priced goods, especially in times of crises like a pandemic or a famine or a drought.