People always talk about companies having low profit margins. Whenever any tax or expense falls on these companies, folks point to the low profit margins and say the expenses will go to the customer.

And yet these low profit margin corporations have executives and CEOs making millions of dollars a year. It doesn’t make any sense. Why not just pay the executives and finance people less?

(My comment does not apply to the small business board game company the original op thread link was about. My comment is only a direct reply to what this other comment is saying)

In a company where the revenues are tens or hundreds of billions and the profits are billions, the CEO’s salary is 0.1% or less of the conversation. It’s rounding errors. Then you talk about 54% of revenues, it’s catastrophic multiples of profit (I.e., insolvency threatening losses).

I don't agree with high CEO pay, but in the general case even with very-well paid CEOs, if you took their salary and divided it out to the other employees entirely it isn't that much. Apple for example, Tim Cook's salary is every employee at the company making about $450 extra a year.

I think you are deeply disconnected from manufacturing if you think most of the companies in the value chain have CEO making millions.

Most of the intermediaries are SME. Despite what you might believe from the media, SMEs are the heart of the economy for most actual people. Their share of jobs is far higher than their impact on GDP and they have neither the means nor the know how to optimise their supply chain like large corporations.

Most SMEs CEO earn less than a software engineer. There is absolutely no way they can take the hit without passing it to customers.

> My comment does not apply to the small business board game company the original op thread link was about. My comment is only a direct reply to what this other comment is saying

The other comment is directly targeting companies which are in every points similar to the small business board game companies.

I don’t understand your disclaimer (which I somehow missed when I replied first) nor why my reply is downvoted but so be it.