(Untitled)

[hawver]

Thought experiment:

Imagine that WalMart decided to take it's entire 2007 net profit and distribute it equally amongst it's 2,100,000 employees. How much money would you guess each employee would receive ? No cheating and looking at the balance sheet, I'm interested in your perception of WallMart's profits.

Poll Walmart

Comments

[msdaisy]

net profit from sales? or are you counting stock (they are publicly traded, I think)?

Net profit from retail sales is a deceptive number, ime. You can hide a lot of income to execs in cost of sales figures.

[hawver]

Walmart is publicly traded, but I'm just counting net income (line 25 on the balance sheet). Also, salaries aren't counted in general cost of sales, that's a separate line item on the balance sheet. If they were siphoning money from operating expenses into their own pockets I would imagine they'd be in quite a bit of trouble :)

[msdaisy]

I'm not talking about siphoning money so much as the allowable business expenses/losses that are losses to the company but which benefit execs. Also, salaries may not count in general cost of sales, but they certainly lower the net income.

[anitsirk]

worlds colliding! bah!

[rayden7]

Very, very interesting... I couldn't resist after guessing, so I did some quick research:

2007 Q1 Net Income: 2,615
2007 Q2 Net Income: 2,083
2007 Q3 Net Income: 2,647
2007 Q4 Net Income: 3,940

Fiscal 2007 Net Income: 11,285,000,000

Divided by 2.1M employees...

cash given to each employee (ala-Robin Hood profit-sharing payment plan): $5373.81

(information taken from http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/104169/000119312507065603/dex13.htm, page 39)

It would be interesting to do a similar analysis of some other corporate titans who have far fewer employees to compare results (Microsoft, etc.)

[volve]

*paging Doctor Evil, paging Doctor Evil...*

[contrariety]

You need a button for "I honestly have no idea." The world should be more open about encouraging people to be aware of their own complete ignorance.

Anyway, I have no idea. :)

[smandal]

I said $1000 -- cheap-ass retail seems like a low-margin business.

$5000 surprises me, but only a little.

[sweetbaboo]

So the only wrong answer is >10,000 ?