The wear-and-tear is going on employee vehicles rather than company vehicles, the additional distance they travel will increase their personal insurance rates, and as with rideshare they will need to pay additional riders on their policies. (If they don't have the riders their policies will be canceled as soon as they make a claim!)
These additional costs make the deal worse for employees and better for Walmart in ways which are hard for the workers to understand. But I guarantee you that Walmart has studied it to death and knows exactly what advantage it brings them!
That's pretty patronizing. I wouldn't assume people are stupid just because they work for Walmart.
This could be a great deal for people who need extra money. If I'm driving down a street anyway, it's not much of an imposition to drop off a package and not much wear and tear on the car.
The Big Ugly for anyone working in retail the past 20 years is that stores have done almost nothing to improve workers' productivity. Price scanners were a 1990s innovation and there hasn't been much to follow. So it's very hard for workers to make an economic case that they should be getting paid more. (There's a human-decency case, but that doesn't always prevail.)
In fact, average retail wages were 62% of the national average pay in 2000, and they're 55% now. More numbers are here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2017/05/23/the-loo.... What was a bad job then has become a worse job now.
Wal-Mart's new initiative isn't entirely beautiful, but it represents the first effort in a long time to say: "Hey, we discovered something about you that's more valuable than we realized. Your commute home is a potential asset to us, and to date we've paid you zero for it. We've now got a mechanism to pay you something for it, as long as you're willing to do Task X for Payment Y."
It's a lot easier for wages to go up -- in any field -- when workers create more value. We can argue about whether Wal-Mart has defined Task X and Payment Y properly, but at least this is a fresh idea in a field that's been devoid of them for a long time.
They also got their lesson with Amazon and other online retailers taking productivity to the max by streamlining warehouse operations and removing physical retail with its inefficiencies and expensive leases out of equation.
Currently US retail market can be broken down into three large groups - already bankrupt (Circuit City, Good Guys, Borders, Forever 21, Payless Shoe Stores), close to bankruptcy (JC Penney, Sears), or scaling down in order to avoid bankruptcy (Target, Macy's, Fresh and Easy).
Improving worker productivity at this point is as useful as optimizing horse-feeding stations a year after Henry Ford has unveiled Model T - you're likely to achieve a local maxima and claim a success, but the global maxima meanwhile changed significantly.
The difference between the two parties is information asymmetry, not intelligence.
Walmart is organized and concentrated and can bring to bear entire departments of lawyers and analysts. It gets to repeat the transaction N times and amortize its costs across all the transactions.
The individual workers do not have such resources and are not unified. Each of them is at a severe disadvantage in the negotiation.
The result is an inefficient labor market.
The return on investment for such a massive deployment of capital isn't huge and Walmart could adopt your strategies at any time, undercutting your value proposition. I'm also 100% certain there is a lot more collusion going on but with CEOs smart enough not to write it down in an email.
That said, a tightening labor market is forcing Walmart and other competitors to slowly raise pay.
However, turnover is actually not as large of a problem as most would like to believe. Cashiers are the positions with the highest turnover rate, many other departments have employees that have been in the same store for many years.
Maybe it could have been worded differently, but I interpreted it as being that the workers would have a hard time computing the totality of their costs, not that they are of particularly low intelligence. I suspect most people in the US don't know how to work out the financials on this deal.
In fact, I find it pathetic that you call concern for the bargaining strength of low paid workers patronizing. That is a standard right-wing play, an every man for himself narritive, where rich coastal liberals look down on hard working Americans.
If Wal-Mart was being fair, or employees had a better negotiation strategy, or there were fair labour laws, there would be no question as to whether Wal-Mart would be the insurer, and employees would know exactly how many dollars they would earn, without having to gamble with life-altering risks.
I think even if the workers had a stronger negotiating position, it might not yield much, as anything they'd offer collectively would have to be a better deal for WMT than Instacart.
If someone purports to be a professional about something, I expect them to be, particularly about matters as serious as law. I suspect we hold them accountable because those are the people society has entrusted with such matters. Same goes for doctors and medical malpractice.
One alternative to this program would be to buy each store a Fedex style van (or a few) and have a few dedicated drivers make deliveries all day. Once you think about that for a few minutes, you start to see all of the costs that they're offloading to employees. Not just insurance, but also vehicle maintenance, gas, etc.
I'm sure Walmart has done a ton of cost/benefit analysis and churned through a lot of data before deciding to offer a program like this, and the employees will almost certainly not get all the details.
The question is whether or not it's actually favorable to employees and whether or not Walmart will inform them of the costs they'll be responsible for. "Here's $10 to deliver this" sounds great until you realize it's $5 in gas, your insurance is going up $50 a month, and your car will wear out a year faster.
People who make ten bucks an hour are really sensitive to these kinds of costs. If Walmart institutes a program that isn't worth it for employees everybody's going to know within a week.
"Hey, there's $10 in it for you if you drop off a package on your way home." Let the employee decide if it's worth it or not. So long as there is no coercion, I don't need Walmart to educate the employees on maintenance, the cost of gas, etc. I do think it's fair and reasonable to disclose/inform/explain the insurance situation.
That's like saying criminal defendants shouldn't have lawyers because they aren't "idiots".
The problem is that the negotiation between the corporation and the worker is skewed by information asymmetry. Furthermore, the cost of changing jobs is high, and the same negotiation disparities exist elsewhere.
Collective bargaining would address those concerns, as it allows workers to amortize the cost of analysis across all their transactions. But labor unions are a heavyweight solution.
It would be nice to see other suggestions from people who don't wave off concerns over information asymmetry as paternalism.
I assume that's because of "we only want people on this who are insurable drivers in good standing to begin with" and not because of "we expect your personal policy to cover this".
>These additional costs make the deal worse for employees and better for Walmart in ways which are hard for the workers to understand. But I guarantee you that Walmart has studied it to death and knows exactly what advantage it brings them!
Walmart isn't Uber. I suspect they're much more cautious about making sure the relevant risks have the appropriate insurance. I also suspect they'll pay for mileage, but will probably try to get away with some "estimated increase in commute" rather than paying for the full distance to delivery.
The costs I enumerated accrue to the employee even if Walmart has insurance covering drivers while they are "online" and actively making deliveries.
If that even got by you, what chance does the average worker have?
Not that I disagree that Walmart's cutting out hypothetical fleet maintenance costs with what they're doing. I'm sure there are a variety of advantages for them however they're structuring it.
Not much difference between this and, say, LaserShip, aside from it being a small part of the overall job.
... later ...
"Wait, you don't want to do an after work delivery again? Dude, this is why we hired you."
The opt-in nature of this from existing employees is what makes this suspect. The question is will Walmart use their current employment relationship with these people to try and coerce them into opting in. Hiring outside help from people that Walmart has no previous relationship with doesn't raise such questions.
Walmart also doesn't have a great public image, so people are more likely to go over their actions with a fine-toothed comb.
Would you be happier if they just forced their employees to do it? Most job descriptions include a phrase like "and any other duties as required" and as long as they paid the employees and followed the relevant regulations it would be perfectly legal to do this.
Agreed.
At any job I've worked at, doing the bare minimum for awhile will probably get you fired; if you want to stand out or get a promotion, you're expected to do more than you're asked.
We don't give toddlers handguns because our pre-frontal cortex allows us the foresight to see that it's a bad idea -- we don't need to actually wait and see if one toddler shoots another.
Like, if Walmart was offering employees extra money to dispose of toxic waste or collect debts from delinquent customers or something, I'd see a huge potential for abuse and wouldn't consider it to be at all a good idea. Those things need special training and the potential for problems is high.
But this is package delivery. It's a relatively unskilled, low-end job. Its abuse potential seems to be to be on the same level as the abuse potential of, say, lifting boxes, or stocking shelves, or mopping floors. "Walmart pays people to stock shelves" wouldn't get anyone up in arms, so why would this?
Do they want to go a different direction than than directly home -- say to go to their daughter's birthday party? Again, if it's elective, there's no problem but if it becomes coerced then Wall-Mart is directly exploiting that need to keep that job.
In fact, I don't see how this is much of a win for the workers. I only see how Wall-Mart is leveraging its indentured workforce, including passing the risk on to them, to expand its profit base. This is late-stage capitalism, pure and simple.
What is late stage capitalism, and why is this representative of it?
Wall-Mart has a lot of power; its workers almost none. In fact most of its workers are kept part-time so that they don't have benefits and more than half of the full-time hourly make less than $25,000/year[1]. Remember that almost 60% of Americans don't have $500 in savings. These people are often terrified of losing their job.
The notion of using workers to make deliveries is representative of late stage capitalism in that at first it sounds like Wall-Mart is letting its employees "hustle" for a bit more money, but instead it's really putting itself in the situation where it can leverage its employee's circumstances. Note that, even in this proof-of-concept stage, the risks and insurance costs are already passed to the workers[3].
Please note that I don't think Wall-Mart as a company is particularly evil or would ever try to not pay its workers for this service -- on the contrary, they will certainly, always compensate. My concern is that that compensation will not cover the costs when all variables are factored in and that while it might start as voluntary, if it's indeed profitable, that would start to be pushed toward a work culture pressure of, "Do you want to keep your job? Deliver this at a net loss to you."
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-23/more-than... [2] http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/12/pf/americans-lack-of-savings [3] https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/walmart-begins-testing-usi...
Where is that stated in the article? I couldn't find it.
If they were able to cut wages in the future, surely they'd do it regardless.
I could imagine working at Trader Joe's. Downside, running a supermarket is a very tedious and unrewarding job. Upside, you don't have to take your work home with you, I like their products and business model, and the firm treats its employees really well, in terms of both pay and conditions. People I've met socially who work there love their jobs, and it's a big reason I choose to shop there. On the other hand, I would have to be truly desperate to ever consider taking a job at Walmart.
So yeah, everything you say is true in theory, but would you honestly want to work for Walmart in practice?
> Would you honestly want to work for a Walmart Store in practice?
I state that because the corporate level options are extremely lucrative. Walmart Tech holds many events, seminars, and speakers for associates to attend during work hours. Although, there is the annoying Walmart Chant...
But I see no reason to single out this particular detail out of this gigantic evil company. Of all the things to hate about Walmart, paying their workers to deliver packages would be pretty close to the bottom.
Hey, you haven't been doing any home deliveries lately, is everything ok? Oh, well we have to reduce your shifts next week.
Important Caveat though, you can only do it once in a lifetime.
I thought just the opposite, in terms of efficiency and miles driven, etc.
My understanding is that Fedex and especially UPS trucks are very highly optimized for their work and for fuel efficiency and that their routes are also extremely optimized (for example, UPS truck routes almost never include a left turn).
Meanwhile, J6P at walmart is driving an F350 diesel truck designed to tow 10k pounds of horse trailer[1][2] and is doing a stop and go mail route through his town that cannot possibly be as optimized as a UPS route.
[1] Remember, you can never have too much truck.
[2] The payments for which are almost the sole driver of the job in the first place, but I digress...
Apparently UPS trucks get around 10 mpg [1]. Not many consumer vehicles are that inefficient.
I'd be surprised if UPS's ORION is better at route optimization than a consumer app like Google Maps. From UPS's own press, it sounds like ORION doesn't account for traffic at all [2]. Even if it did, Google has the most traffic data. I don't know whether Google Maps considers the cost of left turns, but if it did, it would likely factor it in as an extra cost in the optimization problem, rather than a crude "no left turns if possible" rule as ORION seems to use.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-miles-per-gallon-do-UPS-truck...
It's mind-boggling that Google, Apple, and other consumer-grade routing providers haven't gotten that particular clue yet. Seems clear that none of them have the vaguest concept of cost functions other than input from the local DOT traffic cameras.
True, UPS has the advantage of denser delivery routes. But I'm sure Walmart has done the analysis and determined that they can deliver (some) packages more cost-efficiently than UPS despite this. Same with Amazon, which has been hiring their own couriers in some areas.
Source:https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/walmart-begins-testing-usi...
And you can block location requests(and the like) for the app, after work, Either with Android 6-7 or Lineage's privacy guard.
I see that you also do not work at walmart.
I can say with absolute assurance that it does not.
I mean, if you're paying me to drive home and drop off a package at my neighbor's house, that's fine. But 10 packages are going to take quite a bit of driving around to deliver, and so you better be paying for time and equipment cost.
Unlike Uber, whose greatest contribution yet is allowing me to use an app to hail a black cab instead of a phone, this is actually a smart innovation that leverages the fact that employees actually drive home.
If it was a startup I bet a bunch of critical comments would have been supportive instead.
On the whole, if employees are offered better options than the ones they have now, isn't that progress?
It's a financial incentive for employees not to use transit but instead personal autos to and from work in order to be available for such deliveries, so it's actually environmentally hostile.
* I bet this isn't really "optional"
* I bet they're not going to get paid enough to make it worthwhile
So obviously it is a totally different universe than the bourgeois internet tech startup reality I inhabit and therefore is scary and uncivilized and prone to a different set of rules.. the laws of the jungle.
This is not likely. Highly recommend the part about being a Walmart employee in the book "Nickel and Dimed". As another commenter wrote, these guys are just offloading benefits and depreciation and other capital costs on employees who are already living in poverty. These guys are most literally evil.
Which of course is omitted, so they get the free advertising for their new service but you are not troubled by any specifics that might shape your decision of whether or not to use it.
I strongly suspect that workers will be given the opportunity to opt in...or find other employment.
If you take the concept at face value, this is Walmart offering to let their employees make some extra money in exchange for a bit of extra work, once they've clocked out. What a nice company.
But realistically, this is Walmart shunting the costs of delivery onto their employees. Instead of paying their employees a living wage, or offering benefits befitting a delivery driver, they can offset all of the risk, deprecation costs, etc associated with delivering a package all for the low cost of what amounts to a tiny raise in their existing payroll.
Walmart chooses what they pay their associates, and what hours they get. So it's not really appropriate for them to start becoming arbiters of opportunities to make extra money "outside of work." This is shady as all hell.
>Instead of paying their employees a living wage, or offering benefits befitting a delivery driver,
Obviously you can criticize Walmart's current practices. The issue is whether this policy is any worse than what they had before.
>they can offset all of the risk, deprecation costs, etc associated with delivering a package all for the low cost of what amounts to a tiny raise in their existing payroll.
Do you give the same objection to every other company that pays for mileage for work-related travel? Is that also "shunting off depreciation costs"?
Why are you assuming that they won't have an insurance policy for such deliveries or pay for mileage like every other company?
Edit: clarified which part was responding to what
As someone who is probably a professional salaried employee somewhere, it's hard to think about why this is bad.
When you're stuck in one of these gigs, you need to be in good with the floor managers to get hours -- those folks control you because they have the power to starve you out with limited hours or "on call" shifts (i.e. you wait around and be ready to report to work within 15-20 minutes), or just fuck you over by assigning you impossible shifts and firing you for attendance issues.
So it's pretty much a given that if you are that guy who doesn't agree to deliver crap on the way home, you're not going to be around for long.
They are replacing UPS/Fedex/USPS for a reason -- cutting corners on things like insurance, depreciation, etc allows them to make an incredible inefficient operating model cheaper.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/walmart-begins-testing-usi...
Workers also have to ... provide proof of insurance.
Judging from the way most companies compensate their employees for extra work I bet it won't be much. Just a guess.
The fact that they're piggy backing on employees going home, regardless of extra pay, tells me that they're doing this on the cheap. If this part is on the cheap, there's no reason to assume that the rest isn't.
Win win!
I'm tired of people wrapping shit in a pretty bow and trying to pass it off as a gift. It keeps happening, and people keep going along with it. Maybe this time we'll unwrap the policy to find a nugget of gold, but fool me umpteen times...
I'm against exploitation of workers, too, but at the end of the day there is only so much you can do with jobs that require relatively unskilled labor. If a 15 year old can do your job as well as you can after a few months of training, it's not a safe job that you can expect anything out of. It's gonna get automated away anyway.
But here Walmart (whatever their other faults), offers a way for workers to make money doing something they already have to (thus it has more utility than their normal role), and they're evil?
If people's regular jobs paid a "living wage", people wouldn't have to Uber, but it's how the world works.
Kind of damned if you do damned if you don't isn't it?
Yet there is a world of a difference between Walmart jobs and Costco jobs. Unemployment in the US is lower than some countries with better worker's rights.
> If people's regular jobs paid a "living wage", people wouldn't have to Uber, but it's how the world works
No, not the world, mostly just the US. For the rest of the world, the line between employment and unemployment is not so bad that you have people with full-time jobs and still need food stamps. I feel that setup is a covert government subsidy to corporates. But hey, we shouldn't mess with the "job-creaters", right? Or else.
Working at Costco sounds like a dream in direct comparison. Benefits, decent pay, etc. Hell, they have an entire wall dedicated to employees of the month that go way back. It's funny how a little goodwill towards your workers seems to have a ripple effect, making shopping at Costco a lot less stressful since the workers are relaxed and happy, willing to small talk while they ring ya up, the managment is roaming around managing, etc.
Being treated like a suspect for visiting the pharmacy without a membership card is my big gripe with Costco. However we just transferred my grandparents stuff to a better, more competent pharmacy. Now I have no gripes.
"If people's regular jobs paid a "living wage", people wouldn't have to Uber, but it's how the world works." Just because some folks have to do it to get by doesn't make it right or desirable. If we can do things as a society so that people don't have to Uber just to get by - and we aren't doing it - we as a society are horrible people. And that is more where we are at now.
Walmart is known for high wages.
For the Uber/Ubereats and other gig economy estimates, $11/hr is well above the industry take home.
Walmart is in progress of raising it's minimum wage to $11/hr, 22% more than federal $7.25 minimum wage. The Times covered this in the past https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/20/business/walmart-raising-...
http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-sta...
Walmart has turned, e.g., food assistance programs into a subsidy for themselves.
Sure it is, if they are willing to accept more rapid turnover and the workers they are competing for have no better offers.
Certainly, some folks in the world survive on $1/day. That doesn't work in the U.S.
We know that Walmart wages are insufficient alone, because workers there tell us that they need, for instance, SNAP to feed their kids.
Thus SNAP is, in part, now a subsidy to Walmart.
SNAP is a subsidy for every industry that sells products that people on SNAP might purchase. Every dollar not spent on food is another dollar someone might collect in rent, or cell phone service, or clothing. Wal-Mart may benefit greatly from SNAP, but it benefits far more from its customers having more income that they don't have to spend on subsistence than it benefits from its employees being able to accept a lower wage. And of course Wal-Mart accepts SNAP payments from its customers because Wal-Mart sells groceries.
You're missing my point. SNAP is a direct subsidy to Walmart not because they sell food, but because many of their workers cannot live where they live without being enrolled in SNAP due to the low pay.
SNAP subsidizes Walmart by supplementing workers' paychecks.
That's similar to what welfare was like before welfare reform in 96 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_...
I'll circle back to the question I asked several levels ago. If SNAP suddenly disappeared, do you believe that would cause Wal-Mart to raise its wages? If not, then your point is moot since it's not saving Wal-Mart any wage costs.
As another example, there's the people working 70 hour weeks across 3 jobs - no one of those is paying what's necessary to sustain the employee.
Moreover, if you're okay with high turnover, there may be people willing to work for you unsustainably for a time just to lower their burn rate.
Car? What car? You are walking, biking, riding the bus.
It's doable, barely, just barely and there will be troubles if anything comes up.
I doubt it.
But none of those things were specified in OP's post.
I don't disagree. Not a good life.
People live on a buck here and there and change they find in vending machines as far as a "living" goes. Technically they are "alive" but it can't be nice way to live.
Kind of makes one wonder exactly what level of "living" is acceptable. I suppose preferences vary.
Go look at the size of a log cabin, they were about the size of a single bedroom today and large families lived in them.
The amount of money and extra time that we spent on just one baby was astounding - clothes, doctor visits, food. Many more trips to the store/pharmacy/doctor, etc, than normal.
The USDA's child cost estimator [0] says that raising a child in the midwest costs about an extra $12000 a year, on average. Not all of that breakdown may apply, but even if you were to ONLY look at food costs, an extra $1500/year in food (when you're only making the hypothetical $800/month discussed in the GP) is not "a little".
I want to emphasize in this context (gig delivery) that the recent UberEats Stockholm posting indicated even less than $5/hr.
Doctors can choose to moonlight and get paid extra, and I don't think anyone is complaining about that. And overtime is certainly a thing.
Coming from Walmart's perspective, I'm assuming it just seemed like a smart business decision rather than something maliciously intended. Like hey look, we can make our customers and employees happier in a profitable manner thereby keeping up with our competitor (Amazon).
If the employees have complaints about this then I guess perhaps it can be called into question. But at the end of the day won't most employees be happy about this?
I think that's exactly what the parent comment was criticizing:
>> Ugh. I think that this sort of attitude (which was my initial reaction too) is a big part of what's wrong with our current economy.
To restate: what's wrong with our economy is that we evaluate things, first and foremost, on if they're a "smart business decision" or not. That leads to "smart business decisions" are shady when looked at from many other perspectives.
Doctors have that choice, and yet they don't do that. I wonder why?
http://medicaleconomics.modernmedicine.com/medical-economics...
There is also a massive difference between a doctor taking a side job because they enjoy it and a WalMart associate taking a delivery job because they have no choice.
> There is also a massive difference between a doctor taking a side job because they enjoy it and a WalMart associate taking a delivery job because they have no choice.
I suggest you become more familiar with what medical interns get paid and their lifestyle. They are certainly moonlighting to pay the bills.
Perhaps you mean residents? The article discusses their options and does mention they might look for the extra income to pay down loans.
Regardless, the average salary for a family physician in the US somewhere around $175,000. Most specialists earn more. Yes, they can make poor financial choices and end up needing extra income, but at those income levels, I have to assume most of them are doing it for "fun".
They are paid poorly. I think the base rate is about $35k/year. But, at this point, they are still effectively students. I believe the MD is granted upon completion of the internship (or maybe they have the MD, but not the license to practice, I can never remember).
Don't assume!
Everyone assumes doctors are these fabulously rich people when many of them don't make a whole lot of money when considered on an hours-worked basis.
Just looking at the figures as presented, it seems the average rate of moonlighting is in the range of 34%, and of the types of moonlighting reported, I'd only characterize about 37% as direct medical practice. So that adds up to 13% of practitioners who are actually practicing medicine somewhere else in their free time. Not unheard of, but far from the norm, so I stand by my point. The great majority of doctors are not picking up shifts somewhere else, because the great majority of them don't need the extra income.
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/the-doctor-as-moon...
Or startup founders driving for uber.
So it really happens? I though it was joke in "Silicon Valley" TV series S04E01.
It's a nice thought on the outside...but ultimately, deliveries are best done by actually specialized outfits.
I can also imagine a manager changing everyones' schedules around the deliveries. That could seriously impact people.
Well then, I suppose the people involved will just have to do the math and see if it makes sense to them. The horror.
Just label all the people who refuse as not being team players. Dock them on their performance reviews for it. "Johnny over there wouldn't take a short detour on his way home, so we had to send someone out to deliver a package. If he's not willing to help out, maybe he should go work some place else."
There.. a required voluntary program. This is the natural language/playbook for every manager out there.
Once you have a sheet with times and delivery points for each employee.. it becomes a measure of the employees willingness to assist. If other employees are willing to drive 10 minutes, and you're not willing to drive 2 minutes, it raises the question of why.
And that question is definitely going to be asked if the alternative (30 minutes for regular delivery) results in an additional cost to the company.
But as I said, we'll have to wait and see.
This can become abusive in a hurry. Suppose the net after gas is that delivering packages pays $5/hr. Walmart knows how many deliveries their workers take, how many they need, and what hours get scheduled. More packages need going out? Cut hours for folks not delivering, schedule the folks delivering for more days with short shifts or split shifts.
Sort of like driving for Lyft or Uber?
The wear on vehicles alone adds up quickly into large maintenance bills... yet many people still drive for them on an amateur level, making long term profits questionable (buying new tires after 1-2 years instead of 3-4, for example).
Labor unions, when they work, are a beautiful thing.
All of this hypothetical except for the fact that Wal-Mart is known for a) ruthless schedule management like keeping workers locked in warehouses b) a known price-cutter both on vendors and employees to the point their employees often qualify for state aid for under-employed / under-paid (i.e., welfare benefits).
Given that, it'd be surprising if an non-exploitative option will be available for the workers who will be doing these deliveries.
But of course, we'll see.
I'm not assuming anything, I'm giving Walmart the benefit of the doubt. As you said, "we'll see", no need to shit on them providing their employees with an additional revenue stream before the program is even implemented.
Let's keep it civil.
1: http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/20/news/companies/walmart-pay-r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour#Surplus...
If it's not, I'm curious why this theory holds so much sway for some people, given its glaring flaws. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what it's saying, but just because an engineer can add $1M in marginal revenue to Google's bottom line absolutely does not mean they deserve $1M in salary, because they can only do that using the construct that was created by the other engineers at Google in order to make that much money for Google. If they couldn't make that $1M on their own without the rest of Google's help - the existing brand, infrastructure, and ideas when they join - they're not being "exploited", especially if they're also shareholders. And the longer you spend there, the larger a shareholder you become (unless you choose to sell your share to someone else, which many do).
And to say that the value of a product can be based on how much labor it took to make is completely insane - mud piles can take tons of labor to make, but they're usually also completely useless. The amount of effort expended did not imbue those mud piles with any sort of value to anyone.
This isn't to say that I think the current ownership structures of companies is ideal and can't be improved upon, I don't think that. But I find what you linked to be filled with such flawed reasoning that I'm curious what people see in it. Or maybe it requires operating under different axioms.
This is a big assumption we'll have to find out. It's important to state that delivery competitors UberEats, Roadie, etc are also per diem. (and come with fewer benefits than a walmart employee would already have)
The article says the app finds possible deliveries that are on the employee's route home, so no extra out of the way driving is to be done... only a 30 second stop to get out and carry the package up to the front door. Seems very efficient to me.
> I can also imagine a manager changing everyones' schedules around the deliveries. That could seriously impact people.
Again, from the article, the program is 100% volunteer.
> but ultimately, deliveries are best done by actually specialized outfits
Which are incapable of same day deliveries usually (there's a few exceptions, but they usually cost a figurative arm and leg). Typically local courier services are used (such as with Amazon's same day deliveries, but note that Amazon subsidizes that service and the customer doesn't pay the actual cost typically), but they are making a special trip to pickup the package and a special trip to deliver the package, which means it costs more to WalMart, which means WalMart passes that cost onto the customer.
Seems like this program can be a big win-win for everyone involved. We'll have to wait and see how the trial run goes.
Dude, you're engaging in fantasy. Walmart is going to want to use this for more people than just those who live on busy commuter roads that happen to be used by a Walmart employee. "On the employee's route home" is probably going to mean a detour below some limit that Walmart decides. Also, it only takes 30 seconds to deliver a package if it's small and you know exactly what house it's meant for, both of which are unlikely to be true in the real world. It regularly takes more than 30 seconds just to hunt for an unfamiliar house number.
Evidence that it would typically take more than 30 seconds to drop off a package to an unfamiliar house, even on a route you know? Or that Walmart is motivated to ship to people who aren't directly on its employee's commutes, and it likely will use this to do so if it goes forward with this idea?
My evidence is common sense. If you'd like a time-motion study, or a recording from Walmart's boardroom conversations, you're out of luck. Anyway, the stronger claims are those I was disputing, which don't pass the smell test.
Did you miss the part where this is a voluntary program? If the employee doesn't like the route, they don't have to take it.
> Dude, you're engaging in fantasy
I suppose it's fantasy simply because you hate Walmart (I presume). If this was, say, Amazon... I wager most would take a different opinion. "Look at how ingenuitive Amazon is! They'll deliver packages even faster and cheaper, and pay employees more while they're at it!"
You have no idea what the compensation is, but immediately assume it's big bad Walmart beating up on poor employees. Many just immediately assume this is some new devilish ploy to exploit workers... that's absurd, especially given how few facts we have about this program so far.
The facts, so far, state this is a 100% volunteer program... will only suggest package deliveries along the employees current (and specified by the employee) route home... and the employee will be compensated for that delivery above their normal wage... and Walmart will pass the savings to the customer, and offer faster delivery.
How is this not a win based on what we know so far? It's pure conjecture and bias that leads to the default assumption this is some absurdly evil, exploitative scheme...
There are all kinds of comments in other threads talking about how "voluntary" it may end up being in practice.
> I suppose it's fantasy simply because you hate Walmart (I presume)....
You presume quite a bit, and your presumptions border on fantasy.
> The facts, so far, state this is a 100% volunteer program...
> and the employee will be compensated for that delivery above their normal wage...
Correction: the company PR so far, this is all based on a Walmart blog post. Anyway, let's play quote the OP:
>>> Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is testing a program...
>>> Wal-Mart didn’t specify how the employees will be compensated.
You're right that it's all-volunteer now, but it's reasonable to question how much that will remain true in the future, especially since it's still being developed. It could even turn out to be de-jure voluntary but de-facto mandatory. Walmart could also shower money on its employees for this work, but history suggests otherwise.
Our economy is so broken that the only people who win are people who know how to abuse the system, and who have designed the system to be easier to abuse and harder to survive by honest hard work.
I read once that Walmart uses their resources to take advantage of current (broken) laws to allow them to keep paying pennies for hard work, and forcing the government to pay the rest of a living wage. (Most of our friends are also receiving at least one or two forms of public aid.) I wouldn't be surprised if they also use their resources to "influence" laws to ensure that it stays this way.
I have never understood this complaint. I'm 100% onboard with the idea that, in a society as affluent as ours, no one should be going hungry, unhoused, etc. But how is that not our collective responsibility, as opposed to the responsibility of an entity who happens to be buying their labor?
The idea that Walmart is "forcing" the government to take care of poorer citizens is frankly idiotic: if you accept that there is a responsibility to take care of the poor (as I do), that responsibility is on all of us, and the government is the canonical expression of our collective will and action. Trying to shirk this responsibility by desperately shoe-horning it into the labor market is just a messy hack (the same is true of the idea that employers should be the de facto providers of health insurance, as opposed to the gov't). I can't help but think that people who think that this is somehow the ethical approach have a status-quo bias as a poor substitute for actual moral reasoning.
I don't know how you get, 'Everyone else is turning their backs on the poor and forcing Walmart to take care of them' from 'Walmart should pay their employees a living wage.'
The only other alternative would be to drastically increase social services and tax people - like the Waltons - a LOT more.
It seems like you've completely failed to understand any of my comment. I'm taking issue with the entire construction of the claim you're making. If I buy a guy's used car from him on Craigslist, and he doesn't have a job and that was his only income that year, am I "increasing my own wealth by refusing to pay him enough to live, which then requires everyone else to make up the difference"? No, and your claim makes as little sense as that one does.
My whole point is that I've never heard an argument for loading the purchase of labor with the responsibility for arbitrary parts of the seller's life. The only arguments I've ever heard in support of it (like yours) are just a poor excuse to shrug off the responsibility that society owes to its citizens.
> The only other alternative would be to drastically increase social services and tax people - like the Waltons - a LOT more.
Well _duh_. That's entirely my point. And it makes infinitely more sense to target governmental revenue intentionally (ie through a progressive tax code) than to resort to the current messy workaround and all the distortions of the labor market that it implies.
I honestly cannot see how anyone can consider subsidizing a massively profitable multi billion dollar business is an "ethical approach".
In any case within a few years these jobs will likely be automated, and walmart will stop hurting all those poor employees.
[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/03/walmart-can-afford-15-minimum...
What difference does it make where the money is coming from?
If we force Walmart to pay more, low-income ppl who shop will have to pay higher prices as opposed to now where all the taxpayers are footing the bill.
EDIT: Basically there is no correlation between walmart's costs and how much the consumer pays.
[1] http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Wal-Mart_(WMT)/Data/Gross_Pro...
http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/wmt/financials
The ~100+ billion number is revenue - cost of goods. Actual profit after _all_ expenses is around ~13 billion or so. Big number? Yes, but only around 3-4% profit margin. And it's been declining.
Walmart has 2.3 million employees. $13 billion doesn't make for huge pay increases when you've got that many people to cover.
[1]http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/wmt/financials
What's stopping them from passing on costs to consumers, given they have eliminated all competition in large parts of the country.
> What difference does it make where the money is coming from?
Because taxpayers are subsidizing Walmart's business, for one. That's unacceptable, especially if the subsidy is the result of conscious policy on Walmart's part.
> If we force Walmart to pay more, low-income ppl who shop will have to pay higher prices as opposed to now where all the taxpayers are footing the bill.
They will also get paid more to pay those prices, and the taxpayers will not longer be subsidizing Walmart's profits (if the grandparent is correct).
We can assume then that taxpayers are subsidizing all businesses with employees making under $11 and hour, so why isn't the government changing minimum wage laws from $7.25/hr and $2.35/hr
> so why isn't the government changing minimum wage laws from $7.25/hr and $2.35/hr
Because it's been captured by people who like to pay their employees as little as possible.
[If nearly doubling "expectations" is slimy, what does it take to exceed expectations]
Are you operating on old assumptions? The average hourly wage is $13.38 for full-time workers and $10.58 per hour for part-timers [1]. While that might not get you far in the bay area (which doesn't have many Walmarts FWIW), its a pretty good wage for unskilled labor in much of the interior country (which is prime Walmart territory)...
1: http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/20/news/companies/walmart-pay-r...
Edit: Sorry, when I said bay area I was thinking of the area immediately surrounding San Francisco.
The Bay Area has, from a quick Google search and review of the list of locations, something like 25 Wal-Marts, which is substantially more than zero.
My main worry is the safety. Who is controlling how many hours are worked? This may not seem safety related at first, but many state DOT's might have a problem with 8 hour shift employees then going and working 5+ more hours on the road. What is the safety oversight? For UPS, Fedex, etc, there are state guidelines about how many hours they can drive consecutively in a day, in a week, so on and so forth. Are these employees going to have to get a DOT health certification (checking vision and such)?
I think it'd be a good practice to examine competitive offerings for delivery per area, e.g., offerings such as Postmates and similar. If there's someone willing to pay them more, then I feel that the employee may have enough options for fair treatment. However, if Walmart is the only game in town, then I agree with a lot of your apprehensions.
Walmart's net income has been declining for years. Their sales have topped out. Their margins are razor thin. Amazon is beginning to cut deeply into their business. Some non-trivial percentage of Amazon's growth over the next ten years must come directly from Walmart.
Walmart is in trouble, Sears style circa 1990. And you want them to raise wages significantly when they already can't afford the employee base they have. Good luck.
How does this sound instead? Fire a million workers, try to get the sales to employee ratio closer to Costco by automating anything and everything they can. Then raise the salaries modestly of the remaining million employees that are higher value labor. Then the fired million people become 100% subsidized by tax payers because there are no jobs for them and are not going to be. Nothing can stop some variation of that scenario from happening, the only thing slowing it down is the low cost of the labor in question. Raise that cost, Walmart will be forced to accelerate the employee reduction as their net income continues to contract.
Your sole choice re Walmart & a living wage, is full government subsidization of the low skill employees, or partial. Besides, Canada, Australia and every European welfare state uses a public subsidization system for low value labor: the top 50% pay for the welfare (healthcare et al) for the bottom 50% that do not earn much (who do you think is paying for the welfare costs of France's perpetually high unemployment rate?). If you take a job in the UK making minimum wage, you are not covering the cost of all of your benefits such as healthcare, and the UK has a relatively low corporate income tax rate, who do you think is subsidizing that low pay rate on the labor? This is common all over the developed world.
>Instead of paying their employees a living wage
Walmart (and any other employer) doesn't arbitrarily pick wages. They pay the market rate which is no more than the employee's marginal productivity. This is why Walmart was offering entry level employees $17+/hour in North Dakota during the height of the fracking boom.
Walmart is, in many markets, a big enough employer in the low skills employment marketplace to be a price setter not a price taker.
> unless you think North Dakota Walmart employees are twice as productive as Walmart employees elsewhere.
No, not at all. Walmart was merely paying the market rate. It's important to recognize that at some point with fewer workers the per-employee marginal productivity increases--a kind of inverse way of talking about diminishing returns. You can be sure that the Walmart in North Dakota paying $17+/hour was not hiring nearly as many workers as a Walmart paying people $8/hour.
EDIT: I want to add one more thing. Not only would the $17/hour Walmart not be hiring as many people as the $8/hour Walmart, but they're also going to have a lower over-all productivity rate unless the $17/hour workers had their labor complemented by additional technology. The cost of purchasing the additional technology is price prohibitive until labor costs rise.
By indirectly force, I mean, "you will effectively get fired for some BS reason like poor performance if you don't do some deliveries and take the meager compensation" type stuff.
I for one rarely go directly home after work. I have other things I like to do in the evenings before going home. I don't want work telling me I need to do otherwise.
It emphatically needs to be voluntary.
And yes, they can also "opt in" whether to find a new job, and quit Walmart.
I can't do everything for you. This is basic life skills.
But even if it wasn't this way, so what? Walmart isn't making their employees worse off. They are giving them low skill jobs that the economy is desperately short on. Companies like Apple hire orders of magnitude less low skill employees relative to their profit than Walmart.
No one is protesting Apple over that. If we just taxed companies like that bit more, and distributed the money amongst the poor, it would be vastly more effective than making walmart pay a few percent more. In a few years Walmart will automate most of their jobs anyways. As many industries already have. Increasing the minimum wage doesn't solve that.
At Sam's, I'm constantly bombarded with questions of if I need help.
When you get some time, search for and skim though "The Conquest of Bread" to see a hard Leftist complain about taxes. Be warned, the author is kind of a nutbar.
American left-libertarians exist, but may not identify as libertarians because right-libertarians have kind of monopolized the label.
The headline makes it sound coercive but that actually sounds like an efficient use of time and energy (less big trucks on the road, less miles driven, more money for people who want it).
I wouldn't mind dropping a few things off on my way home and earning a few extra bucks as long as it made sense financially. I'm very interested to see what incentive they have for it.