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If they distributed that evenly to every single employee it would only work out to $2k/person. Not nothing, but not life changing.

gbear605 2y ago
It was $2k/person per quarter, when most of those employees are making around $30k per year (average of $31k per one source I found). That’s a 30% raise on near-poverty salaries - that’s definitely life changing!
- pembrook 2y ago
  You're basing that off of one of their highest profit quarters ever. 3X the average profit last year. Also, once you remove the profit incentive and kill the dividend (which goes into the world's pension funds via the public market), investors will no longer invest in the company. Being a capital starved business with insanely high COGS is a recipe for collapse the minute you have a downturn. And you'll probably say, "good! then the mom-and-pop stores will come back!" But the mom-and-pop stores, while aesthetically more pleasing to the elite, are in fact a far less efficient way to distribute food product so that would actually dramatically raise prices for consumers and decrease salaries & quality of life in many rural areas. Turns out things are the way they are for a reason, and there's no grand conspiracy keeping people down.
autoexec 2y ago
Not only would it be life changing for most of their employees, but consider how much the executives are making (https://www1.salary.com/WALMART-INC-Executive-Salaries.html https://www1.salary.com/WALMART-INC-Executive-Salaries.html) How much do you think Suresh Kumar's life would change if he made 10 million next year instead of 14.5 million? Do you think he would have to stop buying the groceries he usually does, or that he would have to cancel a vacation? It wouldn't change his life at all. Same for the rest of the people in that list. Every one of them could take just a little less and increase pay for the people who actually do the majority of the work necessary for the company to function and be profitable and it would make no impact on the day to day lives of those executives. Absolutely nothing life changing.
- StackRanker3000 2y ago
  How much do you think the lives of Walmart’s employees would change if Suresh Kumar would forego those 4.5 million and distribute it among them instead? When you have 2.1 million people working under you, you don’t need to skim much from each of their individual output to make a lot of money.
  - autoexec 2y ago
    > How much do you think the lives of Walmart’s employees would change if Suresh Kumar would forego those 4.5 million and distribute it among them instead? Him alone? Not much, but take a tiny bit from everyone making >1M and increase the pay of only those employees who don't already make a living wage and I'm guessing it would make a huge difference to the lives of those employees while still making no difference to the lives of the people who'd be taking a bit less. As a bonus, putting that money into the hands of the people who would spend it, and most likely spend it on paying off debt and local goods/services, would help the economy and a lot of other people too.

gbear605 2y ago

It was $2k/person per quarter, when most of those employees are making around $30k per year (average of $31k per one source I found). That’s a 30% raise on near-poverty salaries - that’s definitely life changing!

pembrook 2y ago
You're basing that off of one of their highest profit quarters ever. 3X the average profit last year. Also, once you remove the profit incentive and kill the dividend (which goes into the world's pension funds via the public market), investors will no longer invest in the company. Being a capital starved business with insanely high COGS is a recipe for collapse the minute you have a downturn. And you'll probably say, "good! then the mom-and-pop stores will come back!" But the mom-and-pop stores, while aesthetically more pleasing to the elite, are in fact a far less efficient way to distribute food product so that would actually dramatically raise prices for consumers and decrease salaries & quality of life in many rural areas. Turns out things are the way they are for a reason, and there's no grand conspiracy keeping people down.

autoexec 2y ago

Not only would it be life changing for most of their employees, but consider how much the executives are making (https://www1.salary.com/WALMART-INC-Executive-Salaries.html https://www1.salary.com/WALMART-INC-Executive-Salaries.html) How much do you think Suresh Kumar's life would change if he made 10 million next year instead of 14.5 million? Do you think he would have to stop buying the groceries he usually does, or that he would have to cancel a vacation? It wouldn't change his life at all. Same for the rest of the people in that list. Every one of them could take just a little less and increase pay for the people who actually do the majority of the work necessary for the company to function and be profitable and it would make no impact on the day to day lives of those executives. Absolutely nothing life changing.

StackRanker3000 2y ago
How much do you think the lives of Walmart’s employees would change if Suresh Kumar would forego those 4.5 million and distribute it among them instead? When you have 2.1 million people working under you, you don’t need to skim much from each of their individual output to make a lot of money.
- autoexec 2y ago
  > How much do you think the lives of Walmart’s employees would change if Suresh Kumar would forego those 4.5 million and distribute it among them instead? Him alone? Not much, but take a tiny bit from everyone making >1M and increase the pay of only those employees who don't already make a living wage and I'm guessing it would make a huge difference to the lives of those employees while still making no difference to the lives of the people who'd be taking a bit less. As a bonus, putting that money into the hands of the people who would spend it, and most likely spend it on paying off debt and local goods/services, would help the economy and a lot of other people too.