This line of argument is entirely unconcerned with numbers, but the numbers are all right there on WalMart’s annual report.
WalMart makes $15B of profit on $480B of revenue, for a minuscule 3% profit margin. It has 2.3 million employees. Let’s assume that 2 million of those earn WalMart’s current $10/hr minimum or close to it. If their wage was raised to $15, that would mean a $5 per hour raise. With 40 work hours in a week that adds up to $200 per week, or $10,000 per year per employee, or $20 billion total for all of WalMart’s workers.
$20B is more than WalMart’s entire net income. There is simply no way for a company with such tiny margins to increase its costs without transferring the entire increase to prices. Even if the Walton family wanted to pay the higher wage bill without raising prices, the entire $100 billion they accumulated in 55 years would run out in 5.
The other option is to raise prices for WalMart’s 230 million weekly customers. Most of those are much poorer than WalMart’s employees, like the 95 million adult Americans who are out of the labor force shop and earn no paycheck at all. Raising the wages of WalMart employees will result in a massive wealth transfer from lots of really poor Americans to the few not-so-poor Americans who are lucky to keep a job at WalMart.
Even at $10 an hour, WalMart gets more applications per open position that does Harvard.
Fuck this author. He needs a punch in the dick.
Walmart exists ONLY because of the US security safety net. They dropped their prices so low they couldn't pay a living wage, force out businesses that DID pay a living wage, and then push their employees to get welfare and food stamps and emergency room health care ... which is all paid for by all of the employees of companies that pay a living wage!
The author points this out in his amazing calculations that show raising employee wages would cost more than Walmart makes in a year!
Well, duh! No shit, sherlock. That's their entire useless fucking business plan!
Step 1: Open a store in a small town.
Step 2: Offer prices too low for any local competitor to meet.
Step 3: Employ all the competitor's laid-off workers at 1/2 their previous pay scale.
Step 4: Point out that if they can't live off the Walmart wages, that the Gummint will support them.
Step 5: Move profits into overseas banks and manufacturing, to protect it from US taxation.
Step 6: Let the American taxpayer pay the bills that Walmart abdicates paying.
This isn't even interesting. Or hard to figure out. They do nothing to hide it. All the information is right there, out in the open, available to anyone who wants to look at it.
And they STILL get away with it.