If you buy and hold a stock for many years, you'd hope to be making a profit. Furthermore, you'd generally like to see the share price rise faster than the market. Unfortunately for shareholders, while the UniFirst Corporation (NYSE:UNF) share price is up 24% in the last five years, that's less than the market return. Zooming in, the stock is actually down 12% in the last year.

Since it's been a strong week for UniFirst shareholders, let's have a look at trend of the longer term fundamentals.

See our latest analysis for UniFirst

To quote Buffett, 'Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace...' By comparing earnings per share (EPS) and share price changes over time, we can get a feel for how investor attitudes to a company have morphed over time.

UniFirst's earnings per share are down 7.0% per year, despite strong share price performance over five years.

The strong decline in earnings per share suggests the market isn't using EPS to judge the company. The falling EPS doesn't correlate with the climbing share price, so it's worth taking a look at other metrics.

We doubt the modest 0.8% dividend yield is attracting many buyers to the stock. In contrast revenue growth of 5.0% per year is probably viewed as evidence that UniFirst is growing, a real positive. In that case, the company may be sacrificing current earnings per share to drive growth.

The image below shows how earnings and revenue have tracked over time (if you click on the image you can see greater detail).

We're pleased to report that the CEO is remunerated more modestly than most CEOs at similarly capitalized companies. But while CEO remuneration is always worth checking, the really important question is whether the company can grow earnings going forward. So it makes a lot of sense to check out what analysts think UniFirst will earn in the future (free profit forecasts).

What About Dividends?

It is important to consider the total shareholder return, as well as the share price return, for any given stock. Whereas the share price return only reflects the change in the share price, the TSR includes the value of dividends (assuming they were reinvested) and the benefit of any discounted capital raising or spin-off. It's fair to say that the TSR gives a more complete picture for stocks that pay a dividend. We note that for UniFirst the TSR over the last 5 years was 28%, which is better than the share price return mentioned above. The dividends paid by the company have thusly boosted the total shareholder return.