Walmart is the canonical example of a low-margin / high-volume business. Especially during their growth phase, every time they would find a way to reduce costs, they would funnel that savings into lower prices, rather than taking the savings in the form of a higher profit margin.

Very true, Walmart is a bit of a loaded example.

But I found data more useful to the tech industry. If MS or GOOG pays their employees $200k/year, then employees are capturing about half of the value they create [1]. Worse than Walmart, but not that bad.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/05/14/congratulations-google-s...

[1] This is actually a fallacy, since it assumes all returns are due to labor, not capital.

To address the fallacy: Just state that labour and capital get half the returns each. We don't need to decide who or what creates value to make that statistic interesting.

It's a retail business - they are inevitably tied to the price they get from the manufacturer, and compete extremely strongly with a million other places, big and small. That really limits the margins they can make. Some retail businesses can get slightly higher margins due to exclusivity or just general scarcity, but overall the vast majority of profit is probably due to either 1. Cost Savings or 2. Economies of Scale such that you can eek some additional padding out of your vendors (WalMart is notoriously aggressive with vendors).