4 ms·

McDonalds had a gross profit of ~10B and net income of ~6B in 2018. Maybe we have different ideas of thin margins.

• gruez 5y ago
  1. what's their revenue? Walmart has 13 billion in net income. That might sound like a lot, until you realize that they make 559 billion in revenue, which works out to a relatively thin margin of 2.4%. 2. not an accountant, but the fact that mcdonalds licenses their brand to franchisees probably messes with their profitability figures. They might be making 50% margin on franchise fees, but that doesn't mean the actual restaurant has 50% spare cash to spend on employees.
  • ziddoap 5y ago
    Revenue was ~21B, =~ 28% margin. I'm also not an accountant so I'm not about to speculate on the rest. Maybe your right and it's a factor.
    • brewdad 5y ago
      That's at the corporate level though. They are largely making their money from selling food or renting space to franchisees. The individual store's margins (the ones paying the actual burger flippers) would be quite a bit lower I assume.
      • tharkun__ 5y ago
        Assuming franchisees make less margin (which I guess is fair to assume): What does that matter? If the parent company took less margin overall and distributed that ver each franchisee they could pay more. According to a quick Google there are a bit more than 38000 McD restaurants in the world. So still around 500k. I'm not sure what number of people an average McD employs as I'm reading numbers that differ wildly.