Adios Walmart

Oh, don’t worry, Walmart isn’t going away, but we are, as customers.  It has taken awhile, and personal expressions of concerns from dear friends, but we finally see the true Walmart situation and we can no longer participate in such a situation.  Walmart won’t notice, but we will feel we’re doing the right thing.  We see Walmart as being a huge and hugely successful corporation that treats all of its ordinary employees as simply undervalued tools, using and then discarding them if need be.  The salary scale is lamentable for the ordinary, everyday Walmart employees, their hours are many times kept to part-time in order to avoid paying certain benefits, and they expect these underpaid folks to do at least the job of 1-1/2, perhaps two people.  None of this sort of attitude is particularly unusual in the modern American retail management behavior.  In fact, far too few managements understand the basic, commonsense relationship between a reasonably compensated, well-trained, relatively contented workforce and the status of low turnover and healthy work attitude that creates great success. 

Walmart has so far quite successfully avoided such concerns, but that may be about to change.  A business can apparently avoid certain restrictions when it is growing and developing its myth.  However, now we have a country whose workforce is becoming increasingly aware of the disparity between the fabled upper one percent earners and the rest of us, and the additional awareness that that one percent group achieved its status through not only the very hard work of everyday workers, but through a calculated effort on the part of management to keep salaries low so as to keep profits really high.

Now the ironic thing is that studies have shown that when workers are paid a decent wage, which is estimated to be at least 27 percent more than what most Walmart employees receive, those employees become Walmart customers to a much greater extent, the increased salaries become a stimulus effect of their own, and ultimately companies such as Walmart, with its estimated 2,200,000 employees, would realize even greater profit.  For more information on this, go to demos.org, and read the November 19, 2012, article by Catherine Ruetschlin.  This is an excerpt from that article:

“Large retail employers can afford to pay wages that match the value that workers bring to the industry, and some do. Employers like Costco and Safeway pay decent wages and still manage to satisfy customers with low-priced goods, and earn a profit. When other companies write poverty-level paychecks, all Americans end up subsidizing those firms with sacrificed buying power in the economy and lowered standards of living. At a time of weak economic growth and declining incomes for most Americans, large retail firms are in the position to raise take-home pay and boost the national economy, all while improving their own outlook for growth.”

But will they do it?