Walmart greeters are a huge counterpoint to anyone who argues that companies will only hire the absolute minimum amount of people to work for them.
Some companies hire more than the bare minimum, for various reasons.
I don’t think there is anyone in the world who shops at Walmart over other stores because of the greeters, yet they have them anyway.
The idea is that having someone make eye contact and greets you verbally reduces shoplifting.
Walmart would not do anything on that scale that negatively affects the bottom line.
That’s an example of what I wrote about in my previous post. You’re just assuming that if WalMart does something, it must make sense. Why? Maybe it’s a bad idea but WalMart is big enough to absorb the cost of a few bad ideas.
This has been addressed, but do you think if they could sell the same number for a nickle more, they wouldn’t?
Input prices effect supply. If input prices go down, the company will supply more. It has nothing to do with economies of scale. If I can suddenly make widgets for half the price it used to cost, but I can sell them for the same price as always, I am likely going to make more widgets. Profit maximizing is where Marginal Cost=Marginal Revenue. If input costs go down, MC goes down, MC=MR at a higher level of production.
McDonald’s sells about 550 million Big Macs a year, that would be an extra $27.5 million in profit for a company that makes a little less than $5 billion (a little more than a half percent increase in profit).
Bahahaha. Wow.
Cite for that, by any chance?
Show me one scientific study that gives evidence that walmart greeters reduce shoplifting, as opposed to other controls that retailers like Best Buy, Fry’s and Costco do where they have a guy who checks your receipt as you walk out the door.
runner pat, you are a True Believer in Capitalism, aren’t you?
Work in a Global 100 company and then tell me they don’t have extraneous workers. And they can spend years and years on R&D or developing new markets.
The premise that “business” only hires more people when there are unmet orders waiting to be filled is like most proverbs an over simplification.
The OP seems to think that the only people a company ever hires are people working on the factory floor to produce the widgets. Certainly most managers think they only hire enough factory workers to meet demand for the product, but humans are notorious for making mistakes. Fortunately, they have the market to send them signals to correct mistakes.
But also keep in mind that spikes in demand might not trigger the hiring of more workers if the managers don’t think that demand is sustainable.
Plenty of them - but most of those cases are justified under “projects that never see fruition” - you don’t get approval for headcount for building an empire, you need to have a justification for it. And if there is too much bullshit in your justification, you don’t make it too far, because its pretty dog eat dog when corner offices are involved and it doesn’t take long for Bob the EVP-Finance to point out that you’ve expanded headcount 20% but haven’t delivered on your objectives. You’ve justified the expansion on an unmet demand (not necessarily for widgets - it could be for producing TPS reports). And eventually, the vast majority of companies enter into a cost containment cycle - where employment tends to shrink.
I think you are right in that at any given time at any large company there are people employed to apparently surf the internet (several of them hang on this board) and that a lot of the time headcount is added when there really isn’t a clear idea of what the job is because the opportunity to hire is there (I just did it as I was walking out of my previous job - the headcount was there, we didn’t want to loose it, so we filled it - though I knew I was hiring my replacement, “we” didn’t know quite what we were going to have her do).
By the way, a big reason I left my former company was because they weren’t really interested in having people DO my job (internal audit), they were much more interested in having people IN my job that they could point the external auditors to and scapegoat if necessary. It was a demand - not one I was interested in participating in.
I used to work for a Fortune 50 company, and think the point is - if the company thinks there is unmet demand, has an upcoming product that could take off and have buyers, or see’s market changes coming up that would be profitable they hire to fill the needs, to build the product line, etc. They hire to meet unmet demand, or what think is future demand.
If they get an income tax cut, a payroll tax cut, negotiate lower healthcare costs, negotiate lower pc rental costs, find cheaper raw materials, etc. - they don’t hire as a direct result. Now clearly, such things would give them money to hire, if they didn’t already have it, but without the landscape in the first paragraph, they won’t reinvest, they’d keep it as profits, bonuses, pay down debt, etc.
That is the supply side vs not argument.
I now own my own business. If a law changed and suddenly I had to pay no sales tax, and no income tax, I wouldn’t hire anyone, I’d just be happy making more money, and maybe give my employees a raise if I was a good boss.
If 50 million people got a small income tax cut, and had a few more dollars in thier pocket, or got jobs when they were unemployed, or got a higher minimum wage and could therefore suddenly afford and want my product, and I couldn’t keep up with the sudden new demand as a result - then I hire, so I can either make more money or at least compete and stay in business.
That cite quotes one person saying, “It never made economic sense to have a greeter, but that wasn’t the point.”
And that cite says that one WalMart with a shoplifting problem hired a greeter to alleviate it. Sam Walton visited the store and liked the idea and implemented it throughout the chain.
The article says that the greeter supposedly reduces shoplifting but it doesn’t offer any numbers to back this up. It may just be that WalMart people believe greeters reduce shoplifting without having ever testing the theory.
Hypothesis. 
Not if the extra widgets you make are going to sit in your warehouse for six months. You’d probably try to find the optimal new price point to maximize increased sales through a decreased price and also improved margins. But unless there was some kind of shortage, why would you think making more will increase sales?
I’m very involved in a product whose production is driven by sales forecasts. We could make more - but that would be dumb. And a decreasing cost of production has not made a dent in levels of production.
Some R&D projects (like the ones I work on) inherently take years and years. R & D hiring is dependent on company leadership and how they see their future product mix. If you are in an industry with a rapidly growing demand for new products, like Google, you hire like crazy. And it is of course longer term and riskier than hiring to meet an immediate increase in demand.
In any case, the point isn’t that companies only hire when demand increases, it is that they don’t hire to increase production when demand is not increasing or not forecast to increase.
Not just in industry - in science departments in universities lab space is directly correlated with power.
Here’s an example I use in my class, from a friend of mine. He was chief scientist at a company which made a cheaper and smaller piece of electronic equipment than was out there, and it was very good. (We bought some.) He went with the sales guys on sales calls, expecting managers would jump at the chance at saving money and space.
Not hardly. Their power depended on space also - buying this and giving up their space was not seen as a plus. Further, the usual equipment was so expensive that buying some often required a presentation to very high management, sometimes even the board, which increased the managers’ visibility. Buying the less expensive product could get approved only a level or two up. Another negative. Power is so important…
Yeah, I also screwed up the tense. It should have been either “without having ever tested” or “without ever testing”.
That seems like a pretty easy data mining exercise- not every Wal-Mart has greeters on 24/7, so they should be able to look at the shifts where greeters were and weren’t on duty and see what the difference in shoplifting might be. They’re also big enough to get meaningful statistics out of it as well.
As you said, its easy - and Walmart is pretty good at data mining. I’d bet its been mined, it hasn’t been made public and is considered confidential. They still have greeters. Greeters either increase sales or reduce shrinkage.
This is exactly what I am talking about.
You have no evidence. What you have is basically faith that Walmart must know what it’s doing.