Class warfare summed up in a simple joke (with an accompanying cartoon)

No, I blame Walmart for not having the social consciousness to bring their jobs up to a higher level.

I'm not talking about paying them $25/hour for a cashier. But at the same time, they can crank their rates up from $9 an hour to $12 an hour and not feel too much pain.

As I posted earlier, there were some other grocery chains that do the job right. They make money, and they treat their workers better. Wal-Mart had to be shamed into providing even a minimum of benefits for its workers, and even then, as has been pointed out, many of the workers use public benefits instead.

 

Until the day comes that people are banging on the shareholders' doors with pitchforks and torches.

At the rate the U.S. is going, it may be a couple of decades, but we're on our way.

 

1. Thanks for posting the This Modern World cartoon by Tom Tomorrow. Dan is da man!

2. Walmart is more than just a convenient target for those looking to dump on corporations. It played a key role in the downfall of unions.

Sam Walton and his shrewd marketing crew went national in the late 1980s, early 1990s with their "Buy American, Shop at Wal-Mart" campaign (the name was hyphenated then). This was a clever way around the fact that they were a union-hating operation with a business plan to buy in bulk and undercut whatever prices the local stores could offer.

This, of course, led to the "always the low price" campaign and a convenient and quiet dumping of the Made-in-the-USA sales pitch. Good luck finding something "made in the USA" in Walmart (or most stores) today.

The main thing Walmart has done over the past two decades is change Americans' mindset. Instead of thinking of ourselves as "workers," we all consider ourselves "consumers."

Give the devil his due.

 

This. Anyone who shops at Wal-Mart knows that the "But these are entry level jobs" argument really hasn't been a valid one for years. More and more people are working or have worked second jobs.... RickStain and I are just two examples right here on the board, and I am guessing there are others.

 

$9 an hour? Whoopee! That would be a $0.70/hr raise for my wife, who works at Publix (one of the companies consistently praised for doing right by their employees). She received a rating of "Role Model" --- the highest you can get --- on her latest evaluation, and received a 15-cent/hr raise. And the majority of employees you see at Publix are part-time. There's a reason for that, you know.

I had a lawn service that was charging me $35 to cut my lawn.

I suppose I could have paid them $40 "and not felt too much pain."

Instead, I got rid of them and hired another company to do it for $20.

In other words, we're really more similar to evil CEOs than we would like to believe. We do not want to pay a penny more for anything (product or service) than we have to.

 

You realize that you just raised their labor costs by 33%, right.

No business can sustain that.

 

Walmart has never been known for shrewd marketing.

They're very old fashioned. They've grown because they've driven costs down and they pass them along to their customers.

A few years ago, they hired Julie Roehm to update their marketing. Google her. It didn't begin or end well.

Also, some of you people who profess to be "green" should read up about Walmart. Part of how they've driven down costs is by pushing their vendors to reduce packaging.

If you remember, a used to come in a cardboard box. The weight of millions of those cardboard boxes added up an it took more fuel to deliver them. And, they all ended up in landfills.

Now, a stick of deodorant doesn't come in a cardboard box. That's because of Walmart and there are hundreds of other examples like it.

 

This is true. I like to save money as much as anyone. Last year, I switched my car insurance from All State to Geico. Not only did it save me $100 per month, it also increased my coverage from 50/100/50 to 100/300/100.

But at the same time, it's ridiculous that one of the wealthiest families in America can get away with paying such cheap wages and poor benefits.

And Publix is based in the South, which has a much cheaper cost of living than the Northeast. The majority of them (roughly 70 percent) are in Florida, which has no state income tax. Publix also offers their employees health benefits, something that Wal-Mart had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing.

I found this one cost of living calculator. $9/hour in Albany, NY (the state capital, which I felt was a fairer comparison than the extremes of NYC or Buffalo) is the equivalent of $7 in Jacksonville, Tampa, Bradenton, Palm Coast, and Fort Myers, $8 in Miami, Vero Beach, Sarasota, and Orlando (They didn't have Tallahassee listed).

http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.html

 

Ole Sam put on a good act, but he always surrounded himself with top-notch people - even in marketing. I'm not sure why you bring Roehm into it. She wasn't canned because she was bucking the staid tradition of WM's marketing.

But Sam's gone now. Ivy League-types and MBAers are running the show, not an old Arkansas hillbilly with his huntin' dog and beat-up truck.