The British public struggles to distinguish between large numbers and large margins. On Wednesday, amid swirling debates about the government’s nudging of supermarkets to implement price caps, I made the apparently controversial observation on X that supermarkets tend to operate on very small margins, and so should not be vilified. Tesco, for instance, makes somewhere in the region of about 4 per cent. In most sectors, this would not exactly qualify as gangster capitalism. 

The response was telling. 

Those that disagreed did not really dispute the margins themselves. Instead, the objections were to the fact that I had mentioned them at all rather than the actual numbers. ‘Tesco made £3 billion profit’, came the reply, delivered as though the figure were sufficiently obscene to end the discussion on its own. 

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Tesco turns over about £70bn annually. A business operating at that scale will naturally generate large nominal profits even on comparatively thin margins. These are not contradictory statements, but the same phenomenon expressed differently. 

Yet increasingly, Britain seems unable or unwilling to think proportionally about commerce. A large number is assumed to be evidence of exploitation, no matter how small a return as a percentage. 

The irony is that supermarkets........

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