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Re:The Full Automation Fallacy by Majromax on Sunday February 07, 2021 @08:58AM (#26055050)
> Starbucks in 2019: Made $26.5 billion dollars

Hold on a minute, that's Starbucks' revenue, not profit. You haven't accounted for any non-labour expense.

From its financial data (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SBUX/financials?p=SBUX) (Yahoo link for convenience), that $26.5b revenue is directly offset by $19b in cost-of-goods-sold (including some salaries already paid). Other overhead and depreciation accounts for another $3.5bn, and interest expenses contribute $235m.

The net pre-tax profit for Starbucks is $3.9bn, and if that were distributed equally among all employees (from your figure) it would result in about $11,200/worker over and above their existing salary.

That's closer to the break-even-wage-rate that Starbucks could conceivably offer, if it's intended to have zero return on capital (about $19bn in current assets for FY2019). And that figure is volatile; if you repeat for this fiscal year you'd calculate about $3200/worker.

Re:The Full Automation Fallacy by pydry on Sunday February 07, 2021 @09:39AM (#26055315)
It's net revenue, not "revenue", and that accounts for salaries. Arguably depreciation ought to be included in that number, but not capital investment.

When Amazon made zero gross profit for a decade (or was it two?) it wasn't because they weren't making profits.

Re:The Full Automation Fallacy by Majromax on Sunday February 07, 2021 @10:00AM (#26055448)
> It's net revenue, not "revenue",

Check the financial statements again. The $26.5b figure you cite is gross revenue, of which $24.4b is operating revenue. From that revenue you deduct the $19b cost of goods sold (including salaries) to find $7.5b of operating profit, and from that you deduct depreciation and administration expenses.

New investment does not show up as an expense on a financial statement, since it builds capital -- at the accounting level it's a transformation of one asset (cash) to another (land/equipment/etc).