There is a very big difference between Costco and Wal-Mart: Wal-Mart is MUCH more labor intensive. Costco can pay more because thenworkers leverage a lot of capital investment. A typical Wal-mart stocker is putting individual products on shelves. A stocker at Costco is probably driving a forklift and stocking entire cases of product.
From the two references below you can see the revenue per employee for the two companies:
Costco:
Wal-Mart:
The result is that Wal-Mart has revenue per employee of around $240,000. For Costco it’s $717,000.
Note this is revenue, not profit. And another way yo look at the data is that Wal-Mart employs almost three times the number of people per dollar of revenue as does Costco…
It should be obvious that Costco has a lot more room to pay its employees more than Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart’s whole business model is cheap goods, and they are heavily dependent on lots of workers. There is very little room for them to pay their workers more without destroying their business model. A model which primarily benefits low income people.