For a much more charitable view, Everyone everywhere in the US knows walmart and how to get employed by them. Further, they trust walmart will pay on time. How many people know of Dave's cabinetry shop? How many people trust Dave's shop?

To me, a large part of the actual problem here is a marketing problem. It's really hard for a small shop to market that "hey, we need workers, we are willing to pay a premium, and no we aren't a scam company".

Well, and you have to put up with Dave. He might be an asshole if you're not drinking buddies with him, for all we know. Dave can't afford to pay me enough to put up with his toxic abusive bossiness.

Yeah, my point exactly on why someone would take a Walmart job over a Dave job.

Well, and you have to put up with your Walmart boss. S/he might be an asshole if you're not drinking buddies with them, for all we know. Walmart can't afford to pay me enough to put up with their toxic abusive bossiness, and don't offer much guarantee that the potential boss is better than Dave.

What makes it harder for many of those smaller shops is that they require the new worker to own their own tools. WalMart does not require workers to supply their own forklifts, nor bring their own mops & buckets when they start working there.

Working in "the trades" is an entirely different thing.

who the heck requires someone to own their own forklift

Walmart might be the biggest scam company in the United States — they've stolen over $100 million in unpaid overtime, and pay wages so low that they've recommend their employees utilize foodstamps. Then there are the standard corporate playbooks: a popular one is to keep a significant amount of employees just under full-time so you don't have to legally give them benefits.

There are hundreds of Dave's at corporate Walmart, and they care so little about the employees at any given location that they probably wouldn't even return an email, let alone talk to shift workers face-to-face.

Idk if you've been to a Walmart or an oil change place.. but they get people to work pretty hard and efficiently for low wages. That's basically their secret sauce. My Walmart appears to be staffed by zombies, yet for the most part the store functions pretty well day in a day out, 365 days a year.

Yes but they also get people who will just do the bare minimum and make everyone around them pick up the slack until someone takes the effort to fire them. There's essentially an entire category of people who do this.

They get paid the bare minumum and do the bare minimum in exchange. I don’t see a problem here. What do you do BTW? I would bet that not assembling cabinets.

The problem is that they put the whole store behind, then Walmart blames everyone for the store being behind and pressures them accordingly. Which is Walmart's fault, of course, but Walmart might as well be a force of nature as far as its workers are concerned; they can't change Walmart.

They're actually dead weight that the entire organization carries around, I honestly think in some cases they'd be better off being paid to not come to work.

What I do isn't really relevant unless you're trying to make some personal slight.

Custom cabinet work does not have a low bar. You need to be familiar with multiple joinery techniques and finishing methods, even if your parts are coming straight off a CNC. Getting them perfectly square, face framed, mounted etc takes a lot of time and attention. For houses where the framing was done poorly, it takes even more time.

I believe fairly competent cabinet assemblers / installers are making $40-75 / hour depending on location. Everyone else paying less is half-assing it or doing a poor job.

Sure, but an apprentice can learn the basics to be useful on the job in a couple days.

That's not the point anyway, working entry-level retail is pretty much a 0 stakes job — quality has been mostly engineered out of it. Even a basic cabinet assembly job requires some quality control. Some people do not want to do anything of quality.

IMO we'd all be better off if people had a universal basic income and these people could spend more time finding something else to do with their time.