Revenue tells you scant little about the health and profitability of that business. Care to share profit and gross margin numbers? Grocery stores are notoriously low-margin.
Those numbers aren't available, but they're irrelevant to the point anyway.
The post I replied to (currently the top post on the article) is trying to paint a picture of some harried manager of a struggling grocery store having to fire up networking tools, which is ridiculous. A company doing tens of billions in revenue employs or contracts some of the "laptop class" (to use that post's terminology) to do that, regardless of what their profit margin is. They don't get a "shift-work labor class" employee to take a break from stacking shelves and check the firewall config.
I agree; you post some revenue numbers to try and prove a point that theses businesses have a lot of money. When someone reminds that revenue is not the same as profit, you state the numbers aren't relevant.
Companies try to cheap out all the time, in incredibly stupid ways. Especially when they are thin margins, fat ones usually try and protect the cash cow.
Revenue and profit are indeed different, and revenue is the relevant number here. If you need an explanation of why, perhaps someone else can furnish it. It's 2am here and I'm going to bed.
> Companies try to cheap out all the time, in incredibly stupid ways.
Yeah, and sometimes that results in someone turning their freezers into ovens. I don't think we disagree on this bit.
Having had a wonderful 4 hours of sleep, here's the free lesson I couldn't be bothered with last night:
Grocery store owner A's revenue last year was €500,000. Its profit was €0. It does not have an IT department because it's a corner shop that employs 2 people and has one computer.
Grocery store owner B's revenue last year was €50,000,000,000. Its profit was €0. It has an IT department because it's a huge fucking corporation with a thousand massive stores, multiple office blocks, 150,000 employees and all of the networking and IT infrastructure an operation of that size needs. It's considering opening a bank.
The number that tells you the difference between the scales of these two companies is the revenue, not the profit.
I need to stop wasting my time on the pit of ignorance this site has become.
I have worked at several different companies, of various sizes. One place sold equipment, 1 machine was between 100 ~ 250k, they usually sold 10 or so a month so revenue would be ~12 million. IT department was 1 guy, he eventually was able to get a helper.
Another place I worked at used to have IT on site at every location, they cut that as a cost savings. It became a small team at corporate HQ, then was outsourced after that. Regional offices and factories worldwide.
A story about their policies; They decided to ban USB drives in the name of security but there was equipment that you needed to get data off that could not be put on the network. Their solution was "Get a computer that we not controlled by IT, Login to Teams on that computer and use it to send the files to yourself."
This is a company that has over 5 billion dollars in revenue...
I think neither revenue nor profit can give you a good idea of what a company's IT ability is.
Myself, I have no idea why the fridges would be on the network/ internet but wouldn't be surprised that the utilities requested it be done.
I don’t have profits numbers but, as a customer, what I can tell you is that the large majority of those supermarkets are doing fine. They are renovated like brand new every couple years, they pop everywhere, they have money to innovate (E.Leclerc for example now have automated drive-throughs where your groceries arrive to you on a conveyor belt, serving dozens of clients in parallel directly to their car).
We also have a struggling supermarket chain (Auchan) and I assure you you can tell just by entering the supermarket that there isn’t a money issue.
Thin margin ? Sure, probably. But if there is enough money to build and develop brand new factorio-like contraptions, I’m sure they can handle fridge controllers well.
And yup, I worked for one of those three actors in their tech department and they are as much as tech-savvy than the other startup. And they have the same tech culture as your favorite startup : no real money issue and not a lot of care given as long as it is shipped.
