Elizabeth Warren recently went on social media to blame rising prices for Thanksgiving on companies wanting higher profit margins.
Here’s why that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
The largest store in the US currently is Walmart.
559 billion is the projected revenue for this year.
13.5 billion dollars is the projected profit.
A profit margin of 2.4%.
Last year that margin was 2.8%.
In the last decade, Walmart despite being by far the largest seller of food in the US, it’s never produced a profit of over 4%.
After that, let’s look at oil, which Warren also claimed high margins.
On that one, let’s look at the largest oil company, ExxonMobil.
Exxon has so far this year made 200 billion dollars exactly in the first three quarters.
14 billion is the profit.
Profit margin of 7%.
Which is higher than the 22 billion dollar loss they had in 2020, but that was a global collapse and they ran a 12% loss.
Looking at a more normal year, 2019, Exxon pulled in a profit of 5.2%.
Which is lower over the margin this year, but the 1.8% different wouldn’t be enough to contribute for gas being nearly $1 more a gallon over the 2019 average.
Doing this, I’m not going to go through the margins of every company making turkey, stuffing or potatoes, but my guess is every company will be in the single digit margin zone, with numbers not changing over 20% more or less from the year prior.
I believe Elizabeth Warren is a smart person, but there’s a degree of dishonesty with this.
Everyone is upset over the price of goods now and instead of pointing out obvious issues with the supply chain, inflation and other factors, profit just isn’t a huge piece of this.
Anyway, happy Thanksgiving to everyone and know your turkey costing more wasn’t a product of guys smoking cigars raising profits.