I worked retail in high school and college in the same era as you mentioned and even 20 years ago, a store manager at a Best Buy or a Costco was clearing $250k or more, at least in the wealthier-Atlanta area where I lived (I know a lot of HD employees being from Atlanta and my knowledge of corporate and sales manager salaries at HD aligns with yours too), as you said, based in part on bonuses related to store revenue (the Best Buy stores I worked at when I was 16 - 22 were two of the top-ranked stores in the southeast region by sales, with some departments being among the top 10 in the whole company). For some of the chains, I think that has decreased as in-store sales have shifted but places like Costco notoriously pay their store managers extremely well.

Best Buy desperately wanted me to quit college and be fast-tracked into store or sales management (I would spend my summers as a manager of a department and they agreed to keep me at that elevated hourly wage even when I was part-time during the school year), trying to lure me with tales of just how much money the top of the foodchain people make, but I never took it seriously. Given the ebbs and flows of the economy (I graduated from college in 2008) and the collapse of the retail market from its early 2000s high in favor of ecommerce/Amazon, that was almost certainly the right decision -- but it was an instructive lesson for me at a young age about the very disparate differences in compensation between the hourly workers and the people at the top of those stores.

20 years later, I reckon there was a lot of storytelling here advantaging the arguments of the right-wing, but I’d still be curious what are the true figures.

the question the book asked, explictly, was then if they're making minimum wage, why not just get any old crappy job at McD's or as a janator? if you're making minimum, why not get a job where there is no risk of getting shot or sent to jail?

workin McDs or Kinkos is eating shit every day, wearing a uniform, etc. and is fundamentally emasculating when compared to gang culture.

Isn't that ... good?

The demographic in every region or neighborhood is different and has different tastes, incomes and budgets, so it's your job as store manager to identify the needs of that demographic, and order merchandise and organize it on shelves, run sales, etc. in order to move as much of it as possible to maximize sales and profits. Sort of like targeted advertising but IRL and less privacy invasive.

Paying based on this seems like the only way to incentivize this performance.

I quit mid june after I realized they weren't hiring/scheduling more staff for the summer even though every day was very busy, constantly running between helping customers and taking care of other things.

There are a lot of ways to make profit and show good metrics that aren't good for line employees.

Sure, but this is in line with every major (European) tech company I ever worked at. Pay employees peanuts and pay senior mangers amazing, therefore you were incentivized not to do well as an IC, but to put up with bullshit and fight your way to climb the corporate ladder to management, and then exploit the other poor schmucks who come below you with the same perverse incentive structure.

Yes this leads to a huge turnover, unhappy workers, and to a lot of arguments, back-stabbings and fights. But their stocks were always rock solid and managers were always wealthy so I guess they saw that culture as a net win. It seems to be the M.O. with ever major company everywhere, I think it's called the "GE model".

Paying ICs at the bottom great wages and incentivizing them with stock, is mostly unique to US/SV and new-age software start-ups from the Google/Facebook era, but rare everywhere else.

I got this feeling that what's most important for a Big Bad Company is to be able to get well of with management of other Big Bad Companies to be able to land contracts.

It works because it exploits several flaws in our society and in human psychology like greed, wealth inequality, conformity of the masses to cultural norms, fear of missing out/of being left out, and the crabs in the bucket mentality, which leads to a rat race to the bottom form which it's difficult to check yourself out as an individual if the majority does it.

This isn't something big bad corporations have created, it s just something that has existed for hundreds of years, they're just exploiting. The same mechanism and behaviors were in place during the communist rule in my home country 35+ years ago, when people were fighting to climb up the party ranks, because that's what gave you the best QoL. Now it's climbing the corporate ranks.

Because it's cheaper to compensate one manager 10x average (and get the best candidate) than pay more to hire an entire team of more skilled ICs.

FAANG gets away with it because they amortize their engineering costs over an extremely customer base. Which also multiplies the value in output quality difference.

Most companies are not building EC2 or BigTable.

And so... it makes more sense to hire minimal cost engineers, then corral them with a single high-cost manager.

I don't think you get better managers by paying them more though, over some threshold. You'd probably just get more "competetive" managers in the meta game of becoming a manager. Like engineers at Google are not some elite just becouse they are paid more. Only athletics actually can be evaluated in an accurate enough manner I believe.

But it's likely a direct transfer from sales or retail orgs, where it's very much measurable and true.

Only for those at the lower end, usually at the expense of growth and opportunities for those at the higher end, but since those are fewer in number their votes are less important.

>How is it that European tech workers can't bargain for higher wages?

Because investors there don't have as much money, and those who do don't risk it starting tech companies. And also because Europe is not a single country with one law and one language, but 27+ with different laws and different languages, means scaling a business beyond the original country is difficult and expensive.

It's the US who's the exception in tech success, not EU for failing to match it.

The leverage a company has and the leverage a union has both come from the same place: A lack of alternatives. But then that's the problem.

If you have a competitive industry, the union can't demand much because the company's margins will be slim and they won't be able to give the union much without raising prices, losing customers to competitors and going out of business. This is actually fine because in that case workers still get the money in the form of lower consumer prices, but then it's not the union which is getting you the benefit.

Conversely, if the industry isn't competitive then the company will be a huge conglomerate with a lot of leverage against workers/consumers. They'll be big enough to exert political influence in the government and also big enough for the company's union to become infested with politics. In particular, the union knows where its leverage comes from, and it's workers with skills in high demand, so any union that doesn't keep them happy and keep them from moving to another company/industry is going to have to contend with a pissed off conglomerate with a lot of political influence. So the money goes to the people with high demand skills (or political connections) and the rank and file still get the scraps, but now it's even worse because lack of competition and high levels of organizational inefficiency means high prices when they go to buy things.

It sounds like you have never worked busy retail, more than anything else. You wouldn't accept your own job being that level of busy dealing with unserved and frustrated customers at that pace.

For whom?

If the pie was shared more fairly, then yes they would be better off and I daresay that their incentives would be better aligned with getting those numbers up. And yes, that would mean managers not pulling down millions.

Perhaps it can work situationally, but I've not seen it anywhere I or any of my friends have worked.

If your goal is long-term success, those incentives might be misaligned.

Don't know how it was at Home Depot, and my experience at Walmart was ~20 years ago, but asst managers were in-building 10-12 hours/day, usually there 6 days a week for various reasons, and at that time were only making $50k salary to start. Unless there were other bonuses I was unaware of, it was absolutely not worth it.

I wasn't making a living wage as an hourly associate, but they were super strict about me working beyond 40 hours, and when they "requested" beyond that (it was rare but never truly optional if I wanted to keep climbing) I was well compensated because they were terrified of lawsuits by that point. Small blessings.

I can picture the faces of all of my managers, ASMs. I can't picture the face of either of my store managers. I'm not sure I actually ever saw them. They definitely weren't in the store often.

I loved my first store and HATED my second store. If you're full-time at HD you have no control of your hours at all. They'd schedule me to close 11pm-12am then open at 5am the next day at the second store. I just quit one day. I constantly got sick from getting no sleep.

If you're part-time there you have 100% control of your hours. Tons of people in college who worked 2-4 hours a day. It was miserable watching them come and go.

    best performing stock in the S&P500 going back to 1981

    Home Depot (HD) had the highest return in 1981 by a US stock in the S&P 500 (GSPC), returning 66.9%. [1]

It is not easy to find a single stock with the highest return since 1981. The best I could find was 20 years: Monster (energy drinks) [2]

Other research shows the highest single year return on a stock ever was Qualcomm: +2620% in 1999 [3]

[1] https://www.statmuse.com/money/ask/best-performing-stocks-in...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/08/sp-500-stock-has-the-highest...

[3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/top-sp-500-stocks-by-annual...

Compare that to Apple who is up about 150,000% since IPO and less since their S&P inclusion.

She's moving every 1-3 years because they transfer her to a new store, and because she's running the higher profit stores they send her to trash stores to try and fix them. She has no practically no vacation, has to fill in staff shortages, works every weekend. I think she's around 30-40k. So she's doing all this to eventually (6 years in now) break into the corporate world, where she'll then have to move 1000 miles away to I think Georgia.

To... probably make 60k.

I'm really curious where she'll be in 5-10 years, she's managed so many stores I feel like she'd go regional manager route or something. OR training would keep her at corporate instead.

Are the people working under her unambitious and incompetent?

I don't think she'll ever wind up at corporate.

If you survived the politics of being moved from store to store, never knowing your schedule, and blatant, miserable sexual harassment ("hey let's go out for drinks and discuss how I might let you sell large appliances instead of small electronics"...oh wait..."you didn't go to my apartment...we have this opening an hour away that you have to take with no advancement opportunity".

Okay, assuming the sexual harassment is gone/obsoleted by solid company policy, there's the "chasm" from peon to management that you can only aspire to if you never make a mistake or make them quietly. Or never leave the job to get a degree. Or get lucky somehow.

Those positions at management level above peon required a lot of sweat equity and risk on the part of the worker bee. If it doesn't pan out, well, that's what...3-15 years of your real actual life flushed down the toilet.

I'm with GenX. Screw that noise.