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... the Walton family is greedy. WHY pay the employees well, if you can keep it yourself?
...
Wal-Mart is a publicly traded company - owned by stockholders. The Walton family still owns a lot of shares of stock, but they aren't running the company. Lots of folks posting here probably own some shares of Wal-Mart via their 401k Mutual Funds. Approx $75/share is what it takes to become a shareholder in Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart is a publicly traded company - owned by stockholders. The Walton family still owns a lot of shares of stock, but they aren't running the company. Lots of folks posting here probably own some shares of Wal-Mart via their 401k Mutual Funds. Approx $75/share is what it takes to become a shareholder in Wal-Mart.
With some of the responses, i am starting to think some of these people are stock holders in Wal mart
Sam Club and Costco would be a better comparison.
Because Costco actually cares about their employees and wants them to be able to live without government assistance (or donations from other employees lol), while all Walmart cares about is profit.
so... where are they now? Most of them are gone/in decline.
I'm not saying that it isn't possible for small towns to have other stores... I'm just saying that to operate on a national basis which includes rural areas, Walmart has a different business model... And times have changed too, small towns did do well but then globalization happened, Walmart came after that but it didn't really cause the small towns to decline by itself. Just that Walmart saw an opportunity to do business from the gap that the other stores left, so they took it and developed a business model that worked.
basically, don't like Walmart, then don't shop there... but not shopping at Walmart does nothing for the minimum wage... you have to lobby for that separately.
You kind of pretty much missed the point. I'm not going to argue that Walmart is evil, but it is an overall negative on the economy, while appearing a positive. Walmart alone didn't destroy small business, but it sure had a major impact. They did not "come after globalization happened" but were in those small towns early on. In fact their major expansion strategy was to get big stores into as many small towns as possible and then drive the local mom & pops out of business. That's how they got so big -- not from opening stores in major metro areas, but in every hamlet and burg in the country.
The net result was many businesses were lost and former middle class owners had to become low paid employees.
Oh, and while it's easy to say "don't shop there" it's a lot harder in practice when almost 90% of the local stores are gone. When you look into the vast majority of the country, Walmart is, in fact, a monopoly. So much so that often they are their only competition.
Where is this mythical Wal-Mart that has neat shelves and adequate inventory?
Yes, I was wondering this as well. ValdeMart shelves are frequently empty, have been for years, and they have gradually stopped carrying many items I used to buy there. At this point, even if I were willing to shop there - which I am not - they carry very little I would buy.
What they do have is of grossly inferior quality. I have some washclothes I bought about 8 or 9 years ago, which were not great quality - but compared to the items they sell now, they were way way better. The first time I washed the "new" washclothes they lost so much substance as lint, you could see through them in places. They were all rags in just a few months. ValdeMart sells crap these days.
Also, in the 80's when Sam was still alive - ValdeMart employees started at $10 an hour, they were nearly all full-time if they wanted to be, they had profit sharing, and they had benefits. Minimum wage at the time was $3.10 per hour, went up to $3.35 in 1981. So basically ValdeMart employees made about 3x minimum wage at the time.
In fact, at the time, I was a highly paid entry level programmer making something a bit over $12 an hour. So $10 an hour was good money back then. Sam could do it; but apparently his children can't manage to pay a living wage.
Compared to now, 30 years later - they are making LESS than they were 30 years ago, they are mostly part-time, there is no profit sharing any more and hasn't been since shortly after Sam died, and most have no benefits.
There is even a new category of worker - the "temporary" worker. These workers are allowed to work only 1000 hours total PER YEAR, and don't have to be paid benefits or overtime. ValdeMart has a lot of these "temporary" positions - where it is the WORKER who is temporary. The job is permanent. They just hire someone else when the current guy hits 1000 hours.
Salary alone: $10 in 1980 had the buying power of $28.86 in 2015. In order to make 3x the minimum wage workers today would need to be payed $21.75 per hour. However you look at it, worker salaries have not kept up with inflation. In order to just keep level with what workers were paid between then and now, you would need to triple the current salary for workers. That's not even counting the profit sharing. OR the benefits.
This, Sam, is why people need unions. Because guys who are willing to pay their workers a decent wage eventually die, and then the people who take over from you are free to screw them over.
On top of that, when Sam was alive, he implemented a policy of buying and selling only American made goods - the only things you would find that were not made in America were things that no company was manufacturing here, pretty much only some electronic items such as CD players and VCRs. Today you would be very hard pressed indeed to find anything in a ValdeMart that had been manufactured in the US.
Last edited by NeonGecko; 07-14-2015 at 04:00 AM..
Yes, I was wondering this as well. ValdeMart shelves are frequently empty, have been for years, and they have gradually stopped carrying many items I used to buy there. At this point, even if I were willing to shop there - which I am not - they carry very little I would buy.
What they do have is of grossly inferior quality. I have some washclothes I bought about 8 or 9 years ago, which were not great quality - but compared to the items they sell now, they were way way better. The first time I washed the "new" washclothes they lost so much substance as lint, you could see through them in places. They were all rags in just a few months. ValdeMart sells crap these days.
Also, in the 80's when Sam was still alive - ValdeMart employees started at $10 an hour, they were nearly all full-time if they wanted to be, they had profit sharing, and they had benefits. Minimum wage at the time was $3.10 per hour, went up to $3.35 in 1981. So basically ValdeMart employees made about 3x minimum wage at the time.
In fact, at the time, I was a highly paid entry level programmer making something a bit over $12 an hour. So $10 an hour was good money back then. Sam could do it; but apparently his children can't manage to pay a living wage.
Compared to now, 30 years later - they are making LESS than they were 30 years ago, they are mostly part-time, there is no profit sharing any more and hasn't been since shortly after Sam died, and most have no benefits.
There is even a new category of worker - the "temporary" worker. These workers are allowed to work only 1000 hours total PER YEAR, and don't have to be paid benefits or overtime. ValdeMart has a lot of these "temporary" positions - where it is the WORKER who is temporary. The job is permanent. They just hire someone else when the current guy hits 1000 hours.
Salary alone: $10 in 1980 had the buying power of $28.86 in 2015. In order to make 3x the minimum wage workers today would need to be payed $21.75 per hour. However you look at it, worker salaries have not kept up with inflation. In order to just keep level with what workers were paid between then and now, you would need to triple the current salary for workers. That's not even counting the profit sharing. OR the benefits.
This, Sam, is why people need unions. Because guys who are willing to pay their workers a decent wage eventually die, and then the people who take over from you are free to screw them over.
On top of that, when Sam was alive, he implemented a policy of buying and selling only American made goods - the only things you would find that were not made in America were things that no company was manufacturing here, pretty much only some electronic items such as CD players and VCRs. Today you would be very hard pressed indeed to find anything in a ValdeMart that had been manufactured in the US.
There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else. Sam Walton
The customer is the reason the wages are so low at Walmart.
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