I don't understand why profit margin is being conflated with profits?

https://beta.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/walmarts-4t...

Indicates Walmart $3.69 billion, or $1.27 per share in the 4th quarter. By comparison Apple made 11.5 Bil in the 2nd quarter last year.

https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/31/technology/apple-q3-earning...

That doesn't seem like a non-profitable company

Profit margin, or profit per employee, indicates how much room the company has to pay more to its employees if they wanted. User minikites commented that business models that have to pay poverty wages aren't good business models, to which Bostonian responded that "Walmart is a very profitable company, and its wages are not high."

I inferred Bostonian to mean that because Walmart is very profitable, and it has low wages, then it shows that minikites' comment of "business models having to pay poverty wages are not good business models" to be wrong.

To which I am responding that because Walmart's profit margins are tiny, implying that they have to pay poverty wages in order to stay in business, which in my opinion is not a good business model as it doesn't leave much slack or moat.

Of course, "good business model" is subjective, and some could consider Walmart's efficiency to be a good business model, but I am looking at it from the perspective of an equity owner looking for returns.

That's a pretty disingenuous presentation of Walmart's profit. The margin matters little when referring to them as a very profitable company. They reported $3.6 billion in their most recent quarter[0]. I'm unsure of what kind of world we're living in when $3.6 billion in profit is not very profitable. The prior quarter was $3.8 billion in profit. And another $3.7 billion in Q1 2019.

So ... $11.1 billion in profit so far this year. Sounds very profitable to me.

[0]: https://ycharts.com/companies/WMT/net_income