Deli Profitability: Fill & Download for Free

Because it sells a lot of those things at a very tiny profit margin. Cents per product. But it sells billions of those products. (Likely trillions, globally in a year.) It also sells some products at a high margin: store brands, service counters (like the bakery or deli) and shelf space to products like detergent and cereal (the makers of which pay Walmart for the shelf.) Still, the profits are slim and getting slimmer.

Vision.Bezos knows exactly what he wants Amazon to be: the most efficient retailer on the planet.He's always thinking 3 moves ahead. Amazon began life as a bookstore, but Bezos's original business plan was for it to become a general retailer with selling books as a first step. Prime Air wasn't a great idea for delivering Amazon packages, but it's a great idea for delivering Whole Foods deli dinners. Amazon Go is a game changing technology that no competitor can match, because nobody has both machine learning and retail expertise.But he's also flexible when needed. AWS was not anticipated in his business plan, but he didn't squash it. Now AWS is responsible for all of Amazon's accounting profit (because all of retail's profit is reinvested).[1][1][1][1] This shows that Bezos has the humility to accept new ideas he didn't think of - a tough thing for a visionary leader.He similarly set out to craft a very specific corporate culture. Everyone claims they are data driven, but Amazon really is. Frugality is a company value, and everything and everyone has a cost. It's ruthless but efficient.Everyone else is thinking about the next quarter. Jeff Bezos is thinking about the next decade.Footnotes[1] ​All of Amazon's 2017 operating income comes from AWS | ZDNet[1] ​All of Amazon's 2017 operating income comes from AWS | ZDNet[1] ​All of Amazon's 2017 operating income comes from AWS | ZDNet[1] ​All of Amazon's 2017 operating income comes from AWS | ZDNet

All of the large US retailers—KrogerWalmartTargetCVSLowe'sBest BuyOthers. . .—sell a number of items at a loss or for no profit at all. It's because of how each of them does business. For example, many grocery stores now sell many common, generic prescriptions for a dollar; Walmart sells many electronic items at a loss (TV's, etc.); Target sells canned foods with no profit margin. Target and Walmart make their money back on clothing, impulse items and sundries.The reason has to do with the psychology of shopping and how each of them makes their margin. With grocery stores, there's the added revenue by essentially "renting" shelf-space. In this case General Mills wants certain "eye level" shelves that allows children to beg their parents for a certain cereal while putting a certain cereal at eye-level with Mom to entice her to buy one targeted at her.While this is only one avenue for profit, there are certainly more. For grocers (excluding drug stores, hardware, general merchandisers, wholesalers), the main sources of profit will never come from things like eggs and milk. So they don't even bother. They can convert their "non profit" on those items (and prescriptions as mentioned) into a selling feature.Because eggs and milk are considered essential nutrition items (especially for children), they can draw in people by advertising the lowest prices there and look charitable in the process. Since their key profit areas are the service counters (bakery, deli, butcher, dry cleaners, service desk, etc.), store brands (many stores have their own brands) and selling of shelf space (like for cereals, or cleaners), they simply never try to make a profit off the milk and eggs because those areas would have to be marked WAY up to do so, but such a price hike would drive away customers entirely.