Is it time to lift my personal boycott on Walmart?
I’ve been avoiding shopping at Walmart for years.
Years.
Part of the reason has been that I hate to see employees treated like they don’t matter. Walmart has been one of the biggest offenders in my opinion.
What if paying workers more, training them better and offering better opportunities for advancement can actually make a company more profitable, rather than less?
They kept wages down, limited hours to avoid being obliged to provide benefits, and would cut people early like it was a slow lunch shift at a seafood restaurant. Except in this case, the employees didn’t have a chance to make their own tips.
The left brain in me though had admired Walmart’s operations management and extremely efficient way of doing business.
For example, Walmart runs their own weather center to predict needs in the market, and help route logistics. Their swift response in many natural disasters bests FEMA because they have the real-time data and the ability to act fast.
The efficient use of resources is admirable when it means making the best and most cost-effective use of machines, and other resource inputs to make the operation run smoother. When it becomes deplorable, is when Human resources are treated in the same way.
It looks like there may be hope for Walmart yet.
The following snippets are from an article in the New York Times
How Did Walmart Get Cleaner Stores and Higher Sales? It Paid Its People More
What if paying workers more, training them better and offering better opportunities for advancement can actually make a company more profitable, rather than less?
Individually, employers may think they are making rational decisions to pay people as little as possible. But that may be collectively shortsighted, if the unintended result is less demand for the goods and services they are all trying to sell to these same people.
Just maybe, in other words, employers across the country are pushing down labor costs like Walmart, circa 2014 — and this is one of the major culprits behind disappointing economic results since the start of the 21st century.
“The management philosophy that became popular in the 1980s that led companies to cut pay for low-wage workers, fight unions and contract out work may have been profitable for the companies that practiced it in the short run,” said Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist and leading scholar of labor markets. “But in the long run it has raised inequality, reduced aggregate consumption and hurt overall business profitability.”
Originally published at Chris Handy.
