Quote:
Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
The statement that stores have seen profits rise as food prices have climbed, as if it's some sinister thing that betrays evil profiteering, just sounds dumb to me. Yeah... if an item used to cost 1.00 and your profit margin is 20% for 20 cents, and it now costs 1.10 and your profit margin is identical, that's 22 cents. It's expected that "profits rise as food prices climb".
If I make 100 bucks in profit a day, and the value of money changes by 10%, and I now make 110 bucks in profit, my profits have increased... but nothing has really changed.
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But that's not really what's happening. Here's Loblaws' Net Income and revenue by year for the last 5 years:
2018: $766M on $46.7B in revenue
2019: $1.08B on $48B in revenue
2020: $1.11B on $52.7B in revenue
2021: $1.88B on $53.2B in revenue
Last 12 months: $2.14B on $55.3B in revenue
So revenue went up by 18% and Net Income went up by 179%.
Empire (who owns Sobeys, Safeway, FreshCo, etc.) has seen similar growth:
2018: $160M on $24.2B in revenue
2019: $387M on $25.1B in revenue
2020: $584M on $26.6B in revenue
2021: $702M on $28.3B in revenue
2022: $746M on $30.2B in revenue
Revenue saw 25% growth and Net Income roughly tripled (2018 was a down year, so I compared 2022 to their average net income in the years around then).
Now the companies claim that the huge increase in margins is because they're seeing more business in their their higher profit areas (pharmacy and whatnot), but neither has provided any evidence of that and their financial statements don't show that.