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Sainsbury's profit margins are about 3.8%. Any individual profit might have a larger margin than that, but the maximum downwards pressure on price you can exert overall is that much, which equates to 10p on a £2.75 bar of dairy milk. Is that what you mean by a public service?
3.8% over what time period? If that's still compounding from the 7.2% from last year isn't that still an overall increase for the shareholders?
You make it sound like they're so close to losing money
I'm calculating this from this article linked up the thread, dated April 2025, which says their profits were "just north" of £1 billion on £26.6 billion of revenue.
I'm not an accountant so I dunno if this is the exact right figure - further down the article it says their pre-tax profit was £761 million, which gives you a lower gross margin of 2.9%. I'm sure these different figures just reflect different ways of looking at the same numbers but the point is the same - Sainsbury's is not, overall, gouging people on prices. Surely some products are overpriced, but others are loss leaders.
I suppose I'm trying to tie the disconnect between their costs and their stock value. In my mind, these two metrics would be intimately tied together such that as costs increase, their stock value decreases as they try to keep prices level to compete.
I'm not seeing that trend, it really seems like they're still rewarding their shareholders whilst passing the costs on to the consumer. I simply do not buy their poverty argument
In a rational stock market (and there are numerous reasons why that might not apply) the value of a share reflects the expected future earnings from holding the share. The expected future earnings come in the form of dividends that the company distributes from the profit they make. So if a retailer's costs increase, they put prices up to maintain the exact same profit, and sales do not fall, then you would not expect share price to change, because you would not expect any change to the future earnings from holding a share.
Of course, when prices change, it influences sales. But not always in the same way (because goods can be more or less elastic or - less so at supermarkets - luxury goods) and not always predictably; and since the expectation is about predicting behaviour, that means share price doesn't even necessarily reflect what actually happens.
1 billion is still a lot of profit made on something that we require to live (not chocolate specifically, but food,) even if the margin is low.
And the companies making the products are also profiting.
Looking at total profit instead of profit margin is pretty silly though. My food bill is not affected by how many people shop at the same supermarket as me, even though that increases the total profit of that supermarket. Should I be annoyed that my bill didn't go down in that scenario?