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Walmart Anticipates a Store Manager Shortage Despite $200k-a-Year Pay

47 points by prostoalex 4y ago

joshstrange 4y ago
https://archive.ph/IY3fL https://archive.ph/IY3fL
bruceb 4y ago
"In addition to increasing wages, Walmart last year dropped the dollar-per-day fee employees paid to participate in the company’s subsidized university degree program, a move that boosted participation by 44%, said Ms. Morris." Participation might have increased but I wonder if completion rates decreased. If you can't pay $365 a year for college, even on Walmart wages, might not actually be that driven to complete courses/degree.
- LazyMans 4y ago
  Even at $1 a day, there is still a barrier associated with participaing. Having to log in, find out how to change the setting/talk to someone. Fewer barriers are better, I bet the net graduation rates increased, even if the completion to participation ratio dropped some. I agree that if you can't be bothered to figure out how to contribute the $1 a day, then you're probably not all that driven.
- sumthinprofound 4y ago
  In 2020, the average wage of an hourly worker in a Walmart store was $14.76. Over a year, that $1 a day comes out to a month's car payment, or child care. I believe you can be driven to complete college courses and still not be able to afford it given the average pay at Walmart.
  - gruez 4y ago
    The parent poster's point remains. Regardless of how much of an impact $1/day (or $30/month) can have, if your financial/living situation is such that amount makes a difference, you probably don't have the free time/mental energy to finish college courses in your spare time.
    - sumthinprofound 4y ago
      from the article > Walmart last year dropped the dollar-per-day fee employees paid to participate in the company’s subsidized university degree program, a move that boosted participation by 44% Apparently it had a significant difference.
      - MichaelBurge 4y ago
        The OP comment that you are attempting to disagree with says "Participation might have increased but I wonder if completion rates decreased." and you are citing participation using the exact same quote he did as if it was new information.
      - gruez 4y ago
        Right, but the GP was talking about completion rates. People might have been enticed into attending those programs (it's free, after all), but actually following it through is whole different matter.
        sumthinprofound 4y ago
        Agreed. I was considering attendance, but completion would be a much different (and meaningful) metric.
- JaimeThompson 4y ago
  Or you have high rent, another mouth to feed, sick parents to take care of, or any of hundreds of other things that could make every last dollar important.
- shepardrtc 4y ago
  $30 a month is gas for a few days or food for a few days. When you're poor, you're more focused on survival and that amount can put a lot of fear and hesitation into someone.
- chickenpotpie 4y ago
  I think a company charging their employees $1 a day for a perk speaks more volumes about the character of the company than it's employees.
  - CyanBird 4y ago
    It is to weed out lack of commitment, which can be very common for people entering these low entry level jobs I don't event live in the US, but I see it as a smart move
    - throwaway92394 4y ago
      How does this weed out commitment? Or in other words - if you don't want to stick around what is the negative of paying the 1$ a day? Presumably if you're only in it for the benefits then the benefits far outweigh 1$?
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  > If you can't pay $365 a year for college, even on Walmart wages, might not actually be that driven to complete courses/degree. Some people _can_ pay that much money and blow off the whole thing. The notion that disposable income is a useful metric to measure one's "drive" is one of the most managerial, tone-deaf, over-privileged, peak-hacker-news comments I have ever seen. Please reconsider your position on this. Or at least, please - don't become a manager.
LazyMans 4y ago
Talent pipeline? I'm not familiar with the history of how Walmart provided internal growth opportunities in the past, but it does seem for a majority of companies these days, internal growth isn't focused on as much as it should. I guess Walmart is coming to realize it's better to invest in your own workforce than hire externally.
- at-fates-hands 4y ago
  This was one of the things I've heard many senior people at Target talk about. They constantly have a pipeline of people they're pushing into leadership roles. If you come in and show some promise managing projects and people, they essentially start grooming you immediately and focus on pushing you up in the leadership ranks. AFAIK they've never had any issues with having enough people in their org either on the retail or corporate side who want to be in leadership roles.
  - LazyMans 4y ago
    I really feel like this is the correct way to operate. Create real career paths for people, get employees to buy into what they're doing. It results in happier employees, happier customers, and ultimately everybody wins if the entire company isn't turning over constantly. Costco can drive much more productivity from each person because they work to retain these people. Turnover is bad for morale, and training a new person takes time and money.
  - ilamont 4y ago
    Relative worked at Target retail at a very junior role ... the group responsible for restocking. It was a very unusual management structure at the local store; just a nebulous "team" with no real point person like at a grocery store which has specific managers, assistant managers, and department managers. It seemed a little loose at times (and abusable from a staff perspective), but I could also see it was flexible and the store did very well.
- dopamean 4y ago
  I worked at walmart for a few years when I sort of lost my way in my mid 20s and I have to say it was an eye opening experience. Everyone knows a lot of the bad stuff about walmart so I wont dwell on that but the good stuff I saw were things I had no idea about and was pretty impressed with. At the time I was a college dropout with a pretty bad attitude but I needed a job and I wasnt afraid to work long boring hours and so I got a job stocking shelves at a walmart near my parents house. It was a mind numbing job but it actually paid ok at the time (12$ hour, I was in orlando, this was 2008ish). After simply showing up on time and doing my job properly for just a few months I was told that if I wanted I could take on more responsibilities. I met with our store manager who showed me stats about how walmart really likes to promote from within and that if I stuck with it I could get to be an assistant manager in a store in just a few years. The store manager telling me this had a GED and had worked at walmart for 15 years. He told me his salary was "close to 200k." I couldn't believe it. In my few years working at that store I saw several people get promoted from shelf stocker to department supervisor to assistant manager. One of those people is a store manager at a store in Georgia now. I left my job at walmart with a pretty evolved opinion of the place. For a long time I told people who were directionless and worried about what their future would look like to seriously consider working at walmart and to make it clear to their bosses they wanted to move up. There were other benefits back then that were pretty solid. I worked with a couple of women who got a lot of their tuition reimbursed. Both of whom are nurses now. I really did feel like if you could put up with some of the BS you get working at walmart you could actually get something good out of the experience for yourself. Anyway this was a long rambley way of saying that at least in 2008-2010 when I worked at walmart they really valued promoting from within. Oh final note: there were lots of programs like the tuition reimbursement one tha I was told about when I was hired but assumed there was some catch or some way that it wouldn't work out. The HR manager at my store told me once that some of these things just required you do sign up and that she was shocked how low the participation rates were.
blakesterz 4y ago
"To keep up with an onslaught of sales early in the Covid-19 pandemic and worker absences, Walmart hired around half a million people over six weeks between March and May of 2020, said Donna Morris, Walmart’s head of human resources, who started the job in February 2020 after decades at technology companies." WOW. That number is mind boggling.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  That really is. I've been studying WW1 recently and those are the kind of numbers you see associated with the largest offensives in the war. To consider the scale at which Wal-Mart operates that it grabbed up almost .01% of the nation for hiring. That really is crazy to consider.
  - recursive 4y ago
    0.01%? I'm pretty sure you're too low by at least a factor of 10. More so if you consider only those in the labor pool.
- vecinu 4y ago
  > Donna Morris That name surprised me, I forgot she left Adobe years ago. I have no idea how these people keep getting compensated so well for a job that is barely technically demanding.
noja 4y ago
What is going on here? This is the company where something like ten percent of staff are on food stamps!
- legitster 4y ago
  This is a pretty petty attitude. The point of these social programs is that they are tied to household need - not employment. What's the point of welfare programs if they should only be tied to unemployment? Moreso, EBT eligibility is usually determined by household size. So I guess it's Wal-Mart's fault for not paying people based on how many children they have?
  - the_lonely_road 4y ago
    I’ll add to this that a system designed to stabilize around units of “two-earners” can be expected to find a number of single earners struggling, especially if you self select your analysis to be discussing single earners from the bottom quintile. It would be a shock if that cohort did not have significant issues existing within the current system. Walmart employees, making minimum wage or close to, are expected to be a cohort from the bottom quintile before accounting for partner income.
Someone1234 4y ago
This is an article about Walmart's program that has just two spots, two (and only paid them $65K/ea with a college degree). They had "over 1000 applicants" but had two spots, then they get free(?) advertising on their internal mobility. Also, this is rather a mind bender of a paragraph: > Around 75% of Walmart managers started out as hourly workers at the company. Walmart aims to protect that pipeline by attracting more college graduates and outside hires and then fast-tracking them into managerial roles, said Ms. Jordan, who is also building new internal training programs. So most of your previous managers are internal hires, but in the future you're going to go with recent grads and outside hires instead..? Also, the title's $200K only appears in the body as: "often pays more than $200,000 a year." Often? Want to qualify that a little? Hard to read this article as anything more than a Walmart ad with little substance. There's no real store manager shortage, since they just had enough applications for this program to replace all of their current store managers per the article itself.
- donmcronald 4y ago
  > Walmart aims to protect that pipeline by attracting more college graduates and outside hires and then fast-tracking them into managerial roles So it takes a college degree to be an hourly worker at Walmart now?
  - btown 4y ago
    Specifically, they want to maintain the perception of internal mobility. So they’ll hire overqualified people, promote just those, and be able to use the logical fallacy “X% of our floor workers become managers therefore if you join you have an X% chance of a promotion every year.” Which they can dangle as a carrot when they need to. What I find surprising is that they actually admitted publicly to this strategy!
    - samhw 4y ago
      > the logical fallacy “X% of our floor workers become managers therefore if you join you have an X% chance of a promotion every year" Aside from the problem of induction, why would this be a fallacy? (I'm assuming you meant to implicitly apply the 'each year' modifier to both or neither, because otherwise it would be such a boring and obvious fallacy that I'm pretty sure that's not what you meant.)
legitster 4y ago
A good family friend is a manager of a Safeway. It's surprisingly hard work. You spend 55+ hours a week on your feet, you have to sub in for any job in the store at a moment's notice, you deal with the worst customers on an hourly basis, and you still have to know all the ins-and-outs of running an incredibly low margin business. And all for less money than a junior software dev might make.
- Havoc 4y ago
  >you have to sub in for any job in the store at a moment's notice That sounds absolutely bleak. Basically creates a strong incentive for HQ to run things hyper lean and rely on this as a backstop routinely
  - boppo1 4y ago
    I worked in a restaurant. Came in with a strong work etic and attitude. I had something to prove to myself, nevermind the money. Busser to manager in five months (not a brag really, just takes honesty and hard work). >Basically creates a strong incentive for HQ to run things hyper lean and rely on this as a backstop routinely This is EXACTLY how it works. I got paid ~35% more than anyone "below" me. I wound up learning to do jobs when we were slammed and that person didn't show up. For 6 months we were low two dishwashers, so I'd do all my manager stuff then stay till 3 cleaning dishes.
  - legitster 4y ago
    I mean, yeah. That's the deal. Managers are salary and the margins are razer thin. You used to pick up a lot of extra part timers - people who would only schedule 15-20 hours a week so that you could have extra capacity for sick days, vacations, etc. But people generally only want full time work these days so that makes it even leaner than it was.
  - StanislavPetrov 4y ago
    >Basically creates a strong incentive for HQ to run things hyper lean and rely on this as a backstop routinely That is absolutely what happens. In my youth I worked at a corporate franchise with such a structure. The manager was paid a salary, which was barely higher than the salary of the front line workers, but was responsible for covering all shifts that were not otherwise covered. To make matters much worse, corporate brass decreed that he was not allowed to pay overtime or schedule workers to work enough hours to be considered "full-time". This left the manager scrambling with no choice but to seek a drove of low-wage, part-time workers that were difficult to find, hard to retain, and prone to calling in sick and/or quitting suddenly. The end result was the manager routinely working 60+ hours a week (which sometimes actually drove his average hourly wage below that of the part-time workers), never knowing when he would have to race into work for an unknown period of time. At several points they asked me to become a manager and I flatly refused.
crmd 4y ago
Walmart’s average revenue per store is approximately $44MM and their gross profit margin is a bit less than 25%. Im not surprised they’re having a hard time finding people to be accountable for business results like that for a salary of $200k.

47 points by prostoalex 4y ago

https://archive.ph/IY3fL https://archive.ph/IY3fL

"In addition to increasing wages, Walmart last year dropped the dollar-per-day fee employees paid to participate in the company’s subsidized university degree program, a move that boosted participation by 44%, said Ms. Morris." Participation might have increased but I wonder if completion rates decreased. If you can't pay $365 a year for college, even on Walmart wages, might not actually be that driven to complete courses/degree.

LazyMans 4y ago
Even at $1 a day, there is still a barrier associated with participaing. Having to log in, find out how to change the setting/talk to someone. Fewer barriers are better, I bet the net graduation rates increased, even if the completion to participation ratio dropped some. I agree that if you can't be bothered to figure out how to contribute the $1 a day, then you're probably not all that driven.
sumthinprofound 4y ago
In 2020, the average wage of an hourly worker in a Walmart store was $14.76. Over a year, that $1 a day comes out to a month's car payment, or child care. I believe you can be driven to complete college courses and still not be able to afford it given the average pay at Walmart.
- gruez 4y ago
  The parent poster's point remains. Regardless of how much of an impact $1/day (or $30/month) can have, if your financial/living situation is such that amount makes a difference, you probably don't have the free time/mental energy to finish college courses in your spare time.
  - sumthinprofound 4y ago
    from the article > Walmart last year dropped the dollar-per-day fee employees paid to participate in the company’s subsidized university degree program, a move that boosted participation by 44% Apparently it had a significant difference.
    - MichaelBurge 4y ago
      The OP comment that you are attempting to disagree with says "Participation might have increased but I wonder if completion rates decreased." and you are citing participation using the exact same quote he did as if it was new information.
    - gruez 4y ago
      Right, but the GP was talking about completion rates. People might have been enticed into attending those programs (it's free, after all), but actually following it through is whole different matter.
      - sumthinprofound 4y ago
        Agreed. I was considering attendance, but completion would be a much different (and meaningful) metric.
JaimeThompson 4y ago
Or you have high rent, another mouth to feed, sick parents to take care of, or any of hundreds of other things that could make every last dollar important.
shepardrtc 4y ago
$30 a month is gas for a few days or food for a few days. When you're poor, you're more focused on survival and that amount can put a lot of fear and hesitation into someone.
chickenpotpie 4y ago
I think a company charging their employees $1 a day for a perk speaks more volumes about the character of the company than it's employees.
- CyanBird 4y ago
  It is to weed out lack of commitment, which can be very common for people entering these low entry level jobs I don't event live in the US, but I see it as a smart move
  - throwaway92394 4y ago
    How does this weed out commitment? Or in other words - if you don't want to stick around what is the negative of paying the 1$ a day? Presumably if you're only in it for the benefits then the benefits far outweigh 1$?
ShamelessC 4y ago
> If you can't pay $365 a year for college, even on Walmart wages, might not actually be that driven to complete courses/degree. Some people _can_ pay that much money and blow off the whole thing. The notion that disposable income is a useful metric to measure one's "drive" is one of the most managerial, tone-deaf, over-privileged, peak-hacker-news comments I have ever seen. Please reconsider your position on this. Or at least, please - don't become a manager.

LazyMans 4y ago

Talent pipeline? I'm not familiar with the history of how Walmart provided internal growth opportunities in the past, but it does seem for a majority of companies these days, internal growth isn't focused on as much as it should. I guess Walmart is coming to realize it's better to invest in your own workforce than hire externally.

at-fates-hands 4y ago
This was one of the things I've heard many senior people at Target talk about. They constantly have a pipeline of people they're pushing into leadership roles. If you come in and show some promise managing projects and people, they essentially start grooming you immediately and focus on pushing you up in the leadership ranks. AFAIK they've never had any issues with having enough people in their org either on the retail or corporate side who want to be in leadership roles.
- LazyMans 4y ago
  I really feel like this is the correct way to operate. Create real career paths for people, get employees to buy into what they're doing. It results in happier employees, happier customers, and ultimately everybody wins if the entire company isn't turning over constantly. Costco can drive much more productivity from each person because they work to retain these people. Turnover is bad for morale, and training a new person takes time and money.
- ilamont 4y ago
  Relative worked at Target retail at a very junior role ... the group responsible for restocking. It was a very unusual management structure at the local store; just a nebulous "team" with no real point person like at a grocery store which has specific managers, assistant managers, and department managers. It seemed a little loose at times (and abusable from a staff perspective), but I could also see it was flexible and the store did very well.
dopamean 4y ago
I worked at walmart for a few years when I sort of lost my way in my mid 20s and I have to say it was an eye opening experience. Everyone knows a lot of the bad stuff about walmart so I wont dwell on that but the good stuff I saw were things I had no idea about and was pretty impressed with. At the time I was a college dropout with a pretty bad attitude but I needed a job and I wasnt afraid to work long boring hours and so I got a job stocking shelves at a walmart near my parents house. It was a mind numbing job but it actually paid ok at the time (12$ hour, I was in orlando, this was 2008ish). After simply showing up on time and doing my job properly for just a few months I was told that if I wanted I could take on more responsibilities. I met with our store manager who showed me stats about how walmart really likes to promote from within and that if I stuck with it I could get to be an assistant manager in a store in just a few years. The store manager telling me this had a GED and had worked at walmart for 15 years. He told me his salary was "close to 200k." I couldn't believe it. In my few years working at that store I saw several people get promoted from shelf stocker to department supervisor to assistant manager. One of those people is a store manager at a store in Georgia now. I left my job at walmart with a pretty evolved opinion of the place. For a long time I told people who were directionless and worried about what their future would look like to seriously consider working at walmart and to make it clear to their bosses they wanted to move up. There were other benefits back then that were pretty solid. I worked with a couple of women who got a lot of their tuition reimbursed. Both of whom are nurses now. I really did feel like if you could put up with some of the BS you get working at walmart you could actually get something good out of the experience for yourself. Anyway this was a long rambley way of saying that at least in 2008-2010 when I worked at walmart they really valued promoting from within. Oh final note: there were lots of programs like the tuition reimbursement one tha I was told about when I was hired but assumed there was some catch or some way that it wouldn't work out. The HR manager at my store told me once that some of these things just required you do sign up and that she was shocked how low the participation rates were.

blakesterz 4y ago

"To keep up with an onslaught of sales early in the Covid-19 pandemic and worker absences, Walmart hired around half a million people over six weeks between March and May of 2020, said Donna Morris, Walmart’s head of human resources, who started the job in February 2020 after decades at technology companies." WOW. That number is mind boggling.

buscoquadnary 4y ago
That really is. I've been studying WW1 recently and those are the kind of numbers you see associated with the largest offensives in the war. To consider the scale at which Wal-Mart operates that it grabbed up almost .01% of the nation for hiring. That really is crazy to consider.
- recursive 4y ago
  0.01%? I'm pretty sure you're too low by at least a factor of 10. More so if you consider only those in the labor pool.
vecinu 4y ago
> Donna Morris That name surprised me, I forgot she left Adobe years ago. I have no idea how these people keep getting compensated so well for a job that is barely technically demanding.

noja 4y ago

What is going on here? This is the company where something like ten percent of staff are on food stamps!

legitster 4y ago
This is a pretty petty attitude. The point of these social programs is that they are tied to household need - not employment. What's the point of welfare programs if they should only be tied to unemployment? Moreso, EBT eligibility is usually determined by household size. So I guess it's Wal-Mart's fault for not paying people based on how many children they have?
- the_lonely_road 4y ago
  I’ll add to this that a system designed to stabilize around units of “two-earners” can be expected to find a number of single earners struggling, especially if you self select your analysis to be discussing single earners from the bottom quintile. It would be a shock if that cohort did not have significant issues existing within the current system. Walmart employees, making minimum wage or close to, are expected to be a cohort from the bottom quintile before accounting for partner income.

Someone1234 4y ago

This is an article about Walmart's program that has just two spots, two (and only paid them $65K/ea with a college degree). They had "over 1000 applicants" but had two spots, then they get free(?) advertising on their internal mobility. Also, this is rather a mind bender of a paragraph: > Around 75% of Walmart managers started out as hourly workers at the company. Walmart aims to protect that pipeline by attracting more college graduates and outside hires and then fast-tracking them into managerial roles, said Ms. Jordan, who is also building new internal training programs. So most of your previous managers are internal hires, but in the future you're going to go with recent grads and outside hires instead..? Also, the title's $200K only appears in the body as: "often pays more than $200,000 a year." Often? Want to qualify that a little? Hard to read this article as anything more than a Walmart ad with little substance. There's no real store manager shortage, since they just had enough applications for this program to replace all of their current store managers per the article itself.

donmcronald 4y ago
> Walmart aims to protect that pipeline by attracting more college graduates and outside hires and then fast-tracking them into managerial roles So it takes a college degree to be an hourly worker at Walmart now?
- btown 4y ago
  Specifically, they want to maintain the perception of internal mobility. So they’ll hire overqualified people, promote just those, and be able to use the logical fallacy “X% of our floor workers become managers therefore if you join you have an X% chance of a promotion every year.” Which they can dangle as a carrot when they need to. What I find surprising is that they actually admitted publicly to this strategy!
  - samhw 4y ago
    > the logical fallacy “X% of our floor workers become managers therefore if you join you have an X% chance of a promotion every year" Aside from the problem of induction, why would this be a fallacy? (I'm assuming you meant to implicitly apply the 'each year' modifier to both or neither, because otherwise it would be such a boring and obvious fallacy that I'm pretty sure that's not what you meant.)

legitster 4y ago

A good family friend is a manager of a Safeway. It's surprisingly hard work. You spend 55+ hours a week on your feet, you have to sub in for any job in the store at a moment's notice, you deal with the worst customers on an hourly basis, and you still have to know all the ins-and-outs of running an incredibly low margin business. And all for less money than a junior software dev might make.

Havoc 4y ago
>you have to sub in for any job in the store at a moment's notice That sounds absolutely bleak. Basically creates a strong incentive for HQ to run things hyper lean and rely on this as a backstop routinely
- boppo1 4y ago
  I worked in a restaurant. Came in with a strong work etic and attitude. I had something to prove to myself, nevermind the money. Busser to manager in five months (not a brag really, just takes honesty and hard work). >Basically creates a strong incentive for HQ to run things hyper lean and rely on this as a backstop routinely This is EXACTLY how it works. I got paid ~35% more than anyone "below" me. I wound up learning to do jobs when we were slammed and that person didn't show up. For 6 months we were low two dishwashers, so I'd do all my manager stuff then stay till 3 cleaning dishes.
- legitster 4y ago
  I mean, yeah. That's the deal. Managers are salary and the margins are razer thin. You used to pick up a lot of extra part timers - people who would only schedule 15-20 hours a week so that you could have extra capacity for sick days, vacations, etc. But people generally only want full time work these days so that makes it even leaner than it was.
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  >Basically creates a strong incentive for HQ to run things hyper lean and rely on this as a backstop routinely That is absolutely what happens. In my youth I worked at a corporate franchise with such a structure. The manager was paid a salary, which was barely higher than the salary of the front line workers, but was responsible for covering all shifts that were not otherwise covered. To make matters much worse, corporate brass decreed that he was not allowed to pay overtime or schedule workers to work enough hours to be considered "full-time". This left the manager scrambling with no choice but to seek a drove of low-wage, part-time workers that were difficult to find, hard to retain, and prone to calling in sick and/or quitting suddenly. The end result was the manager routinely working 60+ hours a week (which sometimes actually drove his average hourly wage below that of the part-time workers), never knowing when he would have to race into work for an unknown period of time. At several points they asked me to become a manager and I flatly refused.

crmd 4y ago

Walmart’s average revenue per store is approximately $44MM and their gross profit margin is a bit less than 25%. Im not surprised they’re having a hard time finding people to be accountable for business results like that for a salary of $200k.