You say it like it's one or the other.

> Walmart annual gross profit for 2025 was $169.232B, a 7.12% increase from 2024. Walmart annual gross profit for 2024 was $157.983B, a 7.06% increase from 2023. Walmart annual gross profit for 2023 was $147.568B, a 2.65% increase from 2022.

You're telling me poor walmart just HAVE to increase prices because they have to pay a living wage ? All thanks to those darn Unions ?

This false dichotomy.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/gross-...

Far be it from me to defend Walmart, but… The relevant number here is not gross profit, but net income, which was more like $20B. And that’s on a gargantuan $680B of revenue, so the profit margin available for increasing wages is less than 3%.

It’s more that American consumers are addicted to cheap imported goods Walmart sells than whatever wage Walmart pays in stores.

Consumer goods have been low inflation (ex cars/food/housing) for decades because of overseas labor arbitrage and automation.

I feel like my siblings are missing the point that Walmart is only so profitable because the goods it sells cost almost nothing, where if people demanded less, higher quality stuff, Walmart couldn't demand the margins that make Walmart rich

But consumers don't want what little union-made stuff they could afford, they want more and bigger and cheaper and don't care what labor is behind it

European nations with heavy unionization and worker protections yet also have equivalent stores.

The implementation details matter a lot. How did they get a vastly different outcome than what this suggests?