How much of your current Walmart receipt goes to the non-executive-management in-store staff?

The implication of course is that it would be significant.

It's echoes of the uninformed arguments around the UAW though. Back in 2008 the $70 was all anyone could talk about. That despite the fact that included funding for benefits the Japanese automakers didn't provide because they were socialized. Also completely ignoring that total labor cost was around 10%. Just how much did people think it could be cut?

Cut compensation and benefits in half and you save a whopping $1,500 on that $30,000 car. You know, the domestic one that's already cheaper that you weren't considering in the first place.

So would I tolerate my grocery bill being 2% higher to give cashiers/stockers/etc a living wage? Absolutely. I pay a lot more than that just to avoid shopping at Walmart in the first place (the parking lot is always packed, the lines are long, the aisles a mess and it's further away than Fiesta, the asian market, Albertson's, Kroger's or Target).

What if the receipt was 10% higher? If it provided a living wage, decent benefits, and improved their stores generally then yeah, I probably would. The spread between the asian market and Target is already much much higher than that.

More than that? Not unless they excelled in some area. For packaged meats Target does a real decent job. For produce the asian market is where it's at. For bulk items at low prices Fiesta rules. The others are sort of middle-of-the-road in offerings, at decent, if not amazing prices.

But I seriously doubt anything like or above 10% would be close to necessary to achieve what was proposed.

- Krugman, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/12/17/robert-reich-chal...

"The employment effect of the minimum wage is one of the most studied topics in all of economics. This report examines the most recent wave of this research – roughly since 2000 – to determine the best current estimates of the impact of increases in the minimum wage on the employment prospects of low-wage workers. The weight of that evidence points to little or no employment response to modest increases in the minimum wage."

Schmitt, https://cepr.net/documents/publications/min-wage-2013-02.pdf

That means you're missing The Allusionist! http://www.theallusionist.org/

Too few skills (reading, maths) and now automation is coming to agriculture even fast food restaurants, and at $15 min wage, you can hire a high school dropout, if you really need manual labor.

That assumes that these workers are coming from countries where opportunities for paid work are equal to or better than those available in the US, and are equally lucrative. Many workers come from communities destroyed by the drug wars, or from economies ruined by corrupt governance. If those structural factors don't see improvement, the impact on net low-skilled migration to the US won't budge much.

For a lot of people, decision making is based on which option allows them to just live another day; relative to their circumstances, we are exceptionally privileged to be able to make decisions based on the extent to which macroeconomic indicators impact our standard of living.

And, as minimum wages go up, high school graduates become more willing to work. At $10 you may not find manual labor worthwhile, but at $15 it looks more enticing. Now, immigrants typically work a little harder, but not so much to overcome a lack of education and poor communication skills --which can take years to develop if Eng is not their native lang.

As tech advances and "hollows out" low skilled labor from advanced economies, these economies will struggle to keep their mid skills labor market employed.

One plausible exception would be for items so expensive that they're often financed with debt: A car manufacturing company might plausibly generate more than a dollar in revenue in the short-term if its employees borrowed money to finance it.

Another plausible exception would be if you gave someone a temporary raise, and they immediately started spending more and going further into debt(think buying a bigger house, bigger car, funding a bonus vacation on a credit card, etc.). Then when you cut their wages 6 months later, it's possible that for some items you would've convinced your own employees to spend more money than you gave them on your own products.

A third exception might be for companies that completely control the employees' spending. For example, a prison or a camp full of debt slaves might be paid $3/hour, but they could only spend it on overpriced company goods. Raising it to $4/hour still wouldn't exactly generate direct revenue over the long term, but it wouldn't cost the company much at all since they'd capture 100% of the spending. Anything short of that 100% is savings, and people might be more willing to spend down their savings if they thought money was easier to get. So you could - in the short term - make money by raising wages. Doubly-so if you extend them credit(on top of whatever debt they're working off).

I can't think of a way that the "giving people more money gives them more money to give back to you" argument actually works that doesn't involve saddling them with debt. And these are merely plausible - I don't know that they're what would actually happen.

Actually, what does them being employees have to do with the argument? If that argument were valid, why wouldn't my local grocery store hand out free $20 bills to anyone who comes in, since this would spur them to buy stuff? Or if you were truly convinced that this would make the companies more money, you could easily be a millionaire by buying up a local McDonalds(with a government-backed loan), raising everyone's wages, and then when your income goes up by x% reselling the business for an x% increase on the $300,000 or so you bought the McDonald's for(and repeating this a couple times).

If the companies are searching for a way to leverage lower wages for employees - that isn't real value creation. Driving wages too low, we get our current economic stagnation.

I don't actually have an opinion, but your statement is missing the point.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/14/walmart-prof...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-15/walmart-fire-16000-...

When Walmart tried to compete with ALDI in Germany, they couldn’t. They gave up after just a few years, because ALDI managed to have lower prices and higher wages, because they had optimized every single process to maximum efficiency.