Your numbers are off. Walmart's pretax income was ~$19B, so that's ~$8k profit per employee.
>One could make the argument that if Walmart had to pay each employee an extra (say) $3k annually
If they were pressured to increase wages, they would adjust their business model to employ fewer, "more productive" employees (e.g. invest more in automation). The government would still have to subsidize the cost of living of those who would have otherwise been unemployed.
3,000 / 1,936 = $1.55 more pay per hour. Nothing to sneeze at when you make minimum wage (which they don’t all make), but hardly “transformative” imo.
Honest question: why not make it $5k or $10k?
Is there something magic about $3k that leaves Walmart employees unaffected, and — if so — why will $5k not achieve this?
Walmart earns $13k of profit across each of their 2m employees. One could make the argument that if Walmart had to pay each employee an extra (say) $3k annually [1], management would instead choose to shut the whole thing down and return capital to the shareholders, which would be a choice available to them. But I don't find that argument compelling in the slightest, and Walmart does not have any compelling IP that would preclude letting management shut it down and have the likes of Target/Kroger fill the gap in the market.
1 - an additional $3k annually would be transformative to the life of the average Walmart employee.