[_delirium]

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.

[yummyfajitas]

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.

[eru]

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.