Tesco make massive profits
Yes, they do - because they are a massive company. But they also have a vast amount of shareholders money invested in their business.
If you bought Tescos shares in the last 12 months, you would have paid somewhere between £3.19 and £3.87, depending on when you bought it. You would have received £0.1496 in dividend, a rate of return of between 4.7% (if you bought cheap) and 3.7% if you bought at the height. Whilst this is a bit better than you might get in the high street building society, its hardly excessive, bearing in mind the risk - those people who did buy at £3.87 stand to lose 60p per share if they sell today.
If you look at the average number of employees (expressed as FTE - full time equivalents), and then divide out into sales per employee and operating margin, you can see that Tescos makes £6742 before tax for every employee that works there. Of that £6742, 23% will go in corporation tax, leaving £5191 profit per employee, out of which must come those 14.96 pence dividends to the shareholders and any future investments.
Again, thats a decent rate of return, but I don't think anyone would call it excessive. Would you go to the trouble of employing someone to make £100 a week from it?
Or look at it another way - if you ran a business employing 10 people that made 52 grand profit per year, would you think that was excessive? I wouldn't. The only difference with tesco is that the scale is different.
Not having a pop at you particularly Zeb, but I hate the way we treat success in this country.