Fresh Thinking: How Modern Supermarkets Compete

From the reading: Fresh Thinking: How Modern Supermarkets Compete

In 2023, the global grocery market was worth roughly $12 trillion — and the battle for that money had never been more intense. Tesco in the United Kingdom, Walmart in the United States, and Carrefour across Europe all operate on extraordinarily thin margins: a typical full-service supermarket earns between one and three cents of profit for every dollar of revenue it generates. That arithmetic forces every major player to obsess over volume, efficiency, and footfall in equal measure. When margins are that tight, a single percentage point of market-share movement can represent hundreds of millions of dollars in lost or gained income.