When you try and connect the success of a company to the fact that it’s stock split X number of times, yes I think more specificity would be helpful. Is it your contention that my statement was incorrect? If so, please elaborate. If you wanted an easy way to describe the relative success of the company, simply pointing to it’s position in annual profits with respect to its peers would be sufficient, and more informative.
You’re point?
My point is that it’s common for businesses to provide guidance to their employees on how to maximize available benefits. Providing guidance on how to sign up for FMLA, disability, and even medicare and medicaid is consistent with that. Since you were responding to the idea that Walmart ‘counts on’ or relies to some extent on the availability of government assistance, perhaps you’d like to make a point regarding that idea in a way that’s different than every other company assisting their employees.
Except for the fact that it’s a ridiculous analogy you are right…they are just the same! Walmart offering jobs and people taking them is just like putting a gun to their heads and enslaving them! Damn, why didn’t I ever see it before? It’s so clear now that you’ve lowered the bar to a few microns off the bottom of the ridiculado scale!
I’ve noticed several posts presenting Walmart as a postive force in society because they “create jobs”. The term “job creator” has slowly replaced the term “wealthy” in this country–and it is based on a myth. Jobs are created by consumers, not by business owners. When people buy your products or services, they create jobs. No one just arbitrarily decides to hire more people because they have extra cash.
More specifically, Walmart doesn’t create jobs. As I’ve posted before, this has been discussed here , and here,
among other places.
Other posts endorse Walmart’s business acumen based on their profits.
High profits don’t automatically make a company worthy of admiration or emulation.
What about the banks and brokerages that nearly brought down the world economy in the wake of their pursuit of high profits? Hell, what about the drug cartels?
Still others point out that everything Walmart does is legal. Here we arrive at the root of the problem in America, as I see it. The large corporations have gained so much power and influence in this country that they have engineered the laws through lobbying and political financing so that the laws suit their purposes with little regard for their affect on the rest of society.
I chose Walmart as an example of this state of affairs, not as the sole perpetrator. McDonalds exhibits some of the same behavior.
American society is out of balance. And it is economically divided in a way that I have not seen in my lifetime, and have only read about in history books when they talk about the Robber Barons. I’m in favor of free enterprise. I’m in favor of a society where it is possible to improve your socio-economic status regardless of where you start from.
I’m not in favor of a pure Darwnian society/economic system where the strongest/meanest/greediest/cruelest are rewarded for sociopathic behavior without restraint.
The free enterprise system requires constraints. When they are removed, we arrive at the place we are now. I don’t view everything in life in terms of a “market”. Business has a place in society. I don’t want it to be the fundamental basis of society.
I was going to say this was a distinction without a difference, but it isn’t. It’s just wrong.
Businesses create jobs, because they think they perceive a need for a product or service. Sometimes this perception is correct; sometimes not. But it’s the perception by the business that creates the job. It might be closer to correct that jobs are maintained by consumers, because they buy the product or the service and that creates the revenue out of which the employee is paid.
Sam Walton perceived a need for very low-cost products. So he started a business and hired people to sell them. Turns out he was right. Then he looked at his spreadsheets and thought that he could expand. Sure enough he was right again. Now Wal-Mart is where it is. It appears lots of you folk think that people really want a business more like Costco. Those who run Wal-Mart disagree.
As I have said before, why do we have to do anything? If it turns out that people really want Costco and don’t want Wal-Mart, then either Wal-Mart will become more like Costco, or go out of business.
Or the Wal-Mart people are right, and Wal-Mart will be much more successful than Costco, just serving a different client base. Because their perception of what their clients want is better than those who want them to be Costco.
True enough. Nor do they give raises for the same reason.
Your excellent post made me think that the root cause of many of our problems is an increasing unwillingness to address externalities from corporate behavior. WalMart is full of these. Paying little enough so that employees need to go onto food stamps is one. Welfare was supposed to pick up the slack for those who couldn’t work for some reason, not for those who did. We have the unsafe factories overseas, which both hurt workers there and workers here. We have the destruction of a diverse retail base.
I wonder how people opposed to big government in the form of a large welfare budget can support corporate policies which add to the welfare bill. Now Cantor and his fellow scum want to solve this problem by cutting food stamps, but Dopers
are more moral than that, I trust.
So we wind up with the ironic situation where WalMart cuts sales forecasts because its customers are tight on cash - when their pay policies, which are influential because of their size - is causing their customers to be short of cash.
Maybe a simple answer is to restore the minimum wage, inflation adjusted to where it was at some point in the past, and then peg it to productivity improvements for the country as a whole. That’s better than inflation, I think, since it prevents a wage price spiral which I’ve lived through.
My problem with the Walmartization of the economy is that it is so damn self-perpetuating. A head-of-household trying to make a go at it on minimum wage+welfare isn’t going to be able to give their kids a better life than they had. Likely their kids will attend crappy schools and graduate with crappy educations and be unable to enter the middle class for lack of skills and social contacts. What kind of job will they be able to get? Cashier at Walmart. Walmart employees begetting more Walmart employees. Wealthy corporate executives begetting more wealthy corporate executives. Neither the twain shall meet.
Fifty years ago, people with no skills could get factory jobs and easily support a good-sized family without relying on charity. Now, maybe all of that “wealth” was a gross distortion of the free market and it was always a big ole bubble waiting to burst. But damn, why were the high school drop-outs working at Ford and GM so much more valuable than the college graduates working at Walmart now? The jobs are different, but their hands are still producing enormous wealth. The economy didn’t crash back when low-skilled factory workers were given some financial dignity and allowed to spring-board from working- to middle-class in a single generation. I sincerely doubt it would happen now.
Even if people want to make this out to be the failure of individuals, it’s hard to ignore the social implications of having a workforce that must rely on public assistance to get its needs met. You can blame the individuals for their “poor choices” all you want, but their offspring will be the ones supporting you in your old age. I don’t like the idea of a bunch of minimum wage earners being expected to shoulder the expensive pensions of folks from more abundant, wealthier times. It’s more than just unsustainable. It’s immoral.
So, the mystical Invisible Hand of the market will magically fix everything if we just leave it alone. Is that right? Paul Krugman doesn’t believe in the confidence fairy. And I don’t believe in the market fairy.
I see the thread is now on the normal trajectory, and as I don’t feel like beating my head against the collective wisdom of the board I’ll bow out at this point. I did want to address one point though:
[QUOTE=monstro]
Fifty years ago, people with no skills could get factory jobs and easily support a good-sized family without relying on charity. Now, maybe all of that “wealth” was a gross distortion of the free market and it was always a big ole bubble waiting to burst. But damn, why were the high school drop-outs working at Ford and GM so much more valuable than the college graduates working at Walmart now? The jobs are different, but their hands are still producing enormous wealth. The economy didn’t crash back when low-skilled factory workers were given some financial dignity and allowed to spring-board from working- to middle-class in a single generation. I sincerely doubt it would happen now
[/QUOTE]
Why is a good question. Consider…what has changed in the last 50 years? Simply look at the auto industry itself. Once they needed to employ your no skilled or semi-skilled workers in huge numbers to build all of those cars. And they could command fairly large salaries for their day because industry depended on them…you had to have workers in large numbers to build things. And the work was difficult or extremely repetitive, demanding and harsh. Today…it’s not. What’s changed is not the workers. They are no more productive today than they were then on a person for person or skill for skill basis…hell, they are probably less capable today than they were then, mechanically speaking or physically fit wise. The difference is the expert systems and automation available today. Ironically, at least in my own opinion, a lot of the automation came about directly due to those high worker salaries (well, maybe more the benefits, especially retirement benefits).
In the specific case of Walmart or more generally in the case of stores, consider what today’s checkout clerks actually have to DO. Basically, they have to take an item and hold it up to a glass. When they have taken the last item out, they press a button which totals the purchase and displays that total to the customer. The customer either runs their own credit or debit card through a reader, where the customer does all the work of answering questions or typing in PINs, or the customer hands them cash…which the clerk types into the register and gives the clerk the exact change (in the case of actual change, i.e. coins, they are dispensed to the customer via another automated machine). The only other complication for the check out clerk is if the customer is buying liquor or tobacco products, in which case the clerk has to check the ID (by typing the date from the ID into the register and getting approval or not) or calling a supervisor over if they are underage or having been trained to take the ID (you have to do a half day class to be certified to do this :p).
That’s it. So, what value does the clerk add to the business? The only one I can think of is perhaps a sunny or at least congenial disposition to the customers. From a labor perspective, however, they add nothing…it’s the automation and expert systems that have added the value and productivity increases to the system. Behind it all you have the expert logistics systems which track every product being moved into the store and every product being purchased…a job that used to be done by lower level management or supervisors directing stocking staff but is not done automatically by bar code in the palettes coming in and the products going out.
Except that minimum wage earners make up less than 5% of the work force, and even though Walmart has a fairly impressive (well, to me) total number of workers at a bit over 2 million (most of who don’t make minimum wage), it’s such a small fraction of the total US workforce (around 150 million workers total) that it hardly registers.
I don’t know what the answer is to the fact that automation has made low or semi-skilled workers less valuable and thus have less to offer of value for their labor. From a purely market perspective, companies such as Walmart and most of it’s competitors simply value the labor at the low end less…i.e. the individual workers labor is not worth that much to them since it’s really their own automation and expert systems that are adding the real value and productivity increases that have let them make so much. And the large profits are fed either into leveraging those value adds by building new stores or otherwise expanding their markets into other countries or they go to the shareholders who are invested in those businesses, and who stay invested because of those profits. Let those profits drop measurably and the capital will flee to some other business that’s doing better.
My WAG is this is a long term trend and eventually you’ll see it everywhere. The Europeans are struggling with this themselves, as are all first world nations, and eventually you’ll see it penetrating into low cost labor nations as well, as automation and expert systems replace even the lowest cost human manual labor. In the US it’s already well established, as every year more and more things are automated. The store I go to (and yeah, I don’t shop at Walmart either, but not for the reasons many 'dopers seem to have…I simply hate the crowds) has recently put in automated check out stations…about 6 of them. So, now you don’t even need the clerk to hold the item over a glass window, you can do it yourself. Even the CUSTOMER, with no training at all, can accomplish the process of checking themselves out of the store (the one I go to even has a window for liquor where you have to scan your ID…still need a manager to verify of course).
This is an excellent post. I’d like to add that while you correctly identify part of the reason for stagnating wages at the low-skill end of the spectrum (i.e automation and rising productivity) you’ve ignored another huge one - the rise of manufacturing in Asia, particularly China. Hundreds of millions of people have been added to the effective workforce at the lower end of the spectrum. And what many Americans ignore in their lamentations is that for the most part, these hundreds of millions of people are better off for it. So while the average American worker may not be particularly better off in terms of income now than he/she was 40 years ago (although I would contest that it’s not so clear cut in terms of quality of life) the average worker around the world is. And people who truly care for other people, not just other Americans, ought to be celebrating this.
It assumes that cashiers are the bulk of the Wal-mart workforce, when it’s pretty obvious from spending any time in the store that they are dwarfed by the number of people keeping merchandise on the shelves/racks. AFAIK there is no automation yet that performs those tasks. Or the pharmacists’ jobs, or the auto mechanics, or the managerial duties. I know of no automation that cleans the floors or the coolers or replaces the light bulbs. It’s still people that go out in to the parking lot to collect errant shopping carts, that drive the trucks that bring the merch to stores, that unload the pallets into the store. XT asks what value a cashier brings to the business, but there’s always a person there, even at the self-checkouts that most stores have now, to answer questions, help with errant machines, and to act as a de facto security guard. Automation has not in any way replaced the vast majority of human-accomplished tasks, at least not at retail businesses in the U.S.
As for why people aren’t all weepy-happy at the fact that 1 billion Chinese people can now afford new shoelaces once a year instead of once every two years, well, how would you feel if you came home to find your cupboards bare while 40 strangers patted their now-full bellies? That’s how it seems to many in the U.S. It’s not that people here “may not be particularly better off in terms of income now than he/she was 40 years ago”, it’s that they are noticeably & particularly worse off then they were, and than their parents were, and they don’t see the trend reversing (or leveling out) anytime soon.
Everyone likes a riding tide that lifts all boats. Not so many like to see other boats lifted because theirs is being pushed under, and that’s the perception that many Americans have, not just of China and other Asian countries, but of the CEOs of companies like Wal-mart (and BofA and AGI, etc.) and of many politicians as well (which is why the Occupy thing got so much traction last year, IMO).
Sorry, I’m not going to celebrate my own neighbors being dicked over just because some guys on the other side of the world get to eat three bowls of rice instead of one. The welfare of the first affects me much more directly than the other. If my “family” is fucked over, so I am. This is just common sense.
I mean, are you really saying that if America and India should one day swap GDP’s, we should all be happy? Would you want to live in a society where there are slums on the side of the interstate highway and naked children walk the streets begging for coins? I don’t. I don’t think I’m a selfish American for not wanting my own countrymen to descend to such levels just so that China and India can buy some more TV sets and automobiles. There has to be some reasonable point where everyone on this planet can live and work with dignity, and no one gets shat on just so someone can be mega-rich instead of just really really rich.
Standing in line for SNAP benefits while one is wearing a work uniform isn’t dignified. Yet I don’t want to live in a society where there is no SNAP since the normal ration is three bowls of rice a day and everyone can afford that! That’s where we would be headed if we allow China and India to dictate our minimum wage. No thanks!
[QUOTE=Snowboarder Bo]
I disagree; it’s a ridiculous post.
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Well, considering you didn’t seem to understand it I guess I can live with the disappointment that you think it’s ridiculous.
Um, if that’s the assumption you made then either I wrote it poorly on my little iPad or you didn’t get it. I made no such assumption, and simply talked about the clerks because it had been brought up so often in the thread, so it seemed a good place to make the example. I could just as easily have talked about the logistics, which is of course done by expert systems. Yeah, the menial work of stocking the shelves is done by other workers, but even there automation has given workers new tools. Have you never seen the electric palette drivers, or the hand held PDAs that the stock people use? Never seen the electric cart drivers that help the stock people gather up the shopping carts from the parking lot and drive them in? Again, what VALUE do the workers bring to the system? You don’t even need strength anymore, since there are automated or electro-mechanical aids to help with all of it, backed by expert systems that do all of the mental heavy lifting wrt logistics.
Then you should really do some additional research, because there is. The only menial step left is lifting the can from the carton you drive up with your battery operated cart and then lifting the scanner to log it into the system as being on the shelf.
The pharmacists who use automated pill counting systems and computers and automated call systems to physicians? THOSE pharmacists? The auto mechanics who use computer based and expert systems to diagnose cars, as well as the same sorts of automated logistics systems? And, of course, in all of these cases we aren’t talking about the lowest level employees, but skilled workers who CAN command more money. But they ALL use expert systems, automation and logistics systems.
The floor people who use floor polishers? You have me with the bulbs…though even there there are specialty tools that make the job easier, and of course you need those automated logistics systems to know that a store uses a bulb and a fresh one needs to be stocked. Cooler mechanics would, again, be a more vertical specialty, so wouldn’t be the lowest level workers that I was actually talking about.
A PERSON…instead of (in the case of my anecdotal example) 6 that were needed before for 6 checkouts (maybe more than 6 if you have a roving bagger). Seriously…you didn’t grasp what I was getting at there at all, or in most of my post, did you? It’s kind of frustrating that either I am totally unable to convey the actual point or that you didn’t actually bother reading it and absorbing what I was trying to say, but instead went off on all these tangents to no purpose as far as I can tell.
You are completely wrong. Automation has and will continue to reduce staffing requirements, especially at the low end. If you haven’t grasp this then there really isn’t anything more to discussion, sadly.
Then explain why you care more about your neighbor than the guy on the other side of the world. To me, a Chinese person is just as worthy of a job as an American.
