It's a similar situation to Amazon, where they're still quite a hefty profit, but it's not as much profit as the shareholders want, so they keep leaning heavy on Bezos and frequently tear him down because he has this bizarre, unamerican aspiration to serve the customers above the profit. It baffles shareholders and straight outta Harvard MBAs like particle physics.
Are you kidding? Amazon's profits are nothing. 239m for their first profitable quarter in years. On 17 billion in sales. Amazon gives two shits about customers - they're following the Google business model, whereby you drive all the profit out of an industry so that nobody will compete with you when you're the only firm left. Apple gets clobbered when they declare quarterly profits of only 13 billion dollars, but if you add up all the profit Amazon has ever made you don't even make it to $5b.
Yeah, no. Amazon follows the Blitzkrieg model - raid and pillage then roll that money back into the war effort. Expansion uber alles. Works great until there are no more lands to conquer. I'd be curious as to what their actual cost on Amazon Prime is - they started it at $79 in 2006. Simply adjusting for inflation it should be $95 now and shipping costs have been up. Amazon's P/E ratio is over $600-1. Walmart's is 15. Amazon operates at negative cash flow. Apple has one tenth of ALL THE CASH. I look at the way Amazon operates and I think Enron or Worldcom. I'm not a smart enough or savvy enough investigator to make my case, but I get nervous nonetheless.
Even if Amazon made money, it really wouldn't be similar to what I'm talking about. Amazon is notoriously bad to its employees. Workers deserve a fair shake in the world. Costco, while certainly not perfect, at the very least treats its employees with dignity and fair pay. That's a start. And they do it while still making a ton of money, thus lending credence to the hypothesis put forth by some economists that raising retail workers' wages can be good for the bottom line. The fact that Wall Street sees their high pay as a negative is what's fucked. They see revenue being eaten as wages and nothing more. The analysis stops there, no matter how many words come after in the final report.