Thank you very much for the question, Ms. Taylor Roy. I appreciate it.
I'm going to try to unpack this.
You talked about the team members, and it gets me a bit. They're on the front line, as they have been now for three years. They had to face the pandemic. They then faced inflation. Families are trying to feed themselves, and the ends are tight because mortgage payments are tighter, because interest rates are going up. Groceries are more expensive. They don't care about the food supply chain and all of the other niceties we all talk about. It's tough.
Our team members are on the front line and they're getting blamed. I don't blame the people blaming, but it's tough on our team members, so thank you for saying that.
I think that business is balance. Mr. Singh, you talked about how much profit is too much profit. You have to make profits, but you have to make profits with values. That might be different. We might have a difference of opinion on that and what that means, but I think that most companies are a kinder capitalism than they used to be. Maybe “capitalism” for some people is a dirty word. I think it's good, as long as it's kind and there are values.
Investing and balancing things, making sure people are treated fairly.... The capex we put in—we're putting over $800 million in this year—creates jobs constructing stores. More people have jobs. More people have better paying jobs.
Dividends are not a bad thing in my book, because a lot of people when they retire have pensions. A lot of people in this country do. We have to make some profits and pay some dividends so that they have something to retire on.
It's all balance. I can see some companies buy back shares. I think it's good. I think sometimes companies go too far and they don't balance it right. Our job as CEOs is balance—