>Earlier this year, Walmart raised its base wage $2, to $11 an hour, and expanded its maternity and family leave benefits
Wow, raising the wage combined with this tuition assistance makes it seem like Walmart is actually trying not be known as the worst employer out there anymore - these benefits are better than some of the retail jobs I used to work a few years ago. I wonder why they suddenly care? Walmart gets its customers because they have low prices (or at least successfully trick people into thinking they have low prices), the kind of people who value that are unlikely to stop shopping at Walmart because of the negative PR around how they (used to) treat their workers.
>the kind of people who value that are unlikely to stop shopping at Walmart because of the negative PR
Walmart isn't worried about losing the people shopping at Walmart. They just need to continue to sell cheap food, clothes, and household things in order to keep them.
Walmart has always promoted from within. I bet very few people have worked part time in Walmart for 1+ year while going to college for a business degree and not been shortlisted for a promotion. The college subsidy will give them more managers with ground floor experience.
Walmart is very concerned about how to grow their customer base. You see this with the 2day online shipping, site to store, and their grocery pickup program. The increase in wage is a direct attempt to increase employee retention and attract better employees. This is about growth, not loss prevention.
> Walmart has always promoted from within. I bet very few people have worked part time in Walmart for 1+ year while going to college for a business degree and not been shortlisted for a promotion. The college subsidy will give them more managers with ground floor experience.
This was my immediate first thought, retention and loyalty.
A few months ago my mother retired from Wal-Mart after working as a manager for 30+ years, and I've heard all the "fun" stories. Just about every trope regarding lazy, slack ass workers who routinely no-call-no-show, get fired, then somehow rehired six months later is true. There are good employees, to be sure, but they're greatly outnumbered by the unmotivated, and unwilling.
I see this as a way to pull in and retain driven employees, no different than a software company sponsoring scholarships at a university and simultaneously offering internships / future employment. You'll select for the more driven, hard-charging folks and, hopefully, engender a positive opinion of your company in the eyes of the recipients.
Having come home for the holidays to find mom was scheduled on Christmas Eve on a weekday despite being the weekend manager, I'm not exactly fond of Wal-Mart's managerial practices. Those folks bank on you not saying a word when a "glitch" puts you on for the day you already had approved off.
It's not always everything, but having a manager who was once in the shit usually makes a big difference. Hopefully this program will get more folks who have worked their way up the ranks and know what works so there's better, more informed, and more compassionate management at the store level and higher.
Walmart has a long history of preferring candidates that have a history of being in the shit. Bad managers cost the store in no call no shows, short retention, and disgruntled employees. Managers that have experience in the store can train faster, have higher empathy towards those they manage, and have a deeper understanding of the day to day operation of the store.
Working for Walmart isn’t a fantastic experience, but promoting from within is a great practice they have.
> Walmart has always promoted from within. I bet very few people have worked part time in Walmart for 1+ year while going to college for a business degree and not been shortlisted for a promotion.
A close friend of mine from high school started worked at Walmart while attending University. Interestingly enough, she was a business undergrad and, as you suggest, she was shortlisted to management before even finishing her undergraduate degree. She went on to get an MBA and went corporate within Walmart and is still there today, nearly 20 years later.
> The college subsidy will give them more managers with ground floor experience.
Given the above anecdote, I wonder if their decision to subsidize college is just tied to how grossly expensive an undergraduate degree is today vs. yesteryear.
In any event, they will continue to pull managers from the "competent" pool of employees internally and get good PR at the same time.
They are afraid of Amazon, and realize customer service is going to be their competitive advantage now that they aren't, nor will be, the cheapest/most convenient destination into the future.
Not for everything but Walmart is cheaper on many things. Amazon used to be the cheapest but that is no longer the case. People just assume Amazon is the cheapest for some reason but they’re just the most convenient.
> People just assume Amazon is the cheapest for some reason
They were for a long time, especially when they didn't collect sales tax. Many people just stopped comparison shopping and haven't realized the situation's changed.
> but they’re just the most convenient.
Not necessarily. Oddly enough, Best Buy is the most convenient for me (for electronics), and it's usually not any more expensive than Amazon, at least for the stuff I buy. Amazon less convenient due to the hassle with their delivery delays and packing materials.
> Best Buy is the most convenient for me (for electronics), and it's usually not any more expensive than Amazon
They will also price match Amazon in most cases. I hear a lot of people complain about Best Buy but I’ve made a few big purchases at my local Best Buy store and their employees were super helpful and friendly. I’d much rather shop there and get the item immediately rather than wait two days, personally.
I used to have a very low opinion of Best Buy but I’ve recently found myself going there for the majority of electronics I buy...no shipping or filtering through counterfeits like on Amazon, and there’s one that’s open 24/7 within walking distance of my office in NYC. Employees are friendly and helpful if not extraordinarily knowledgeable. Hard to beat on the convenience front.
There are some things I just try to buy local... laptops and displays (TV/Monitors). In the end, if you get a bad one, it's usually apparent within a day or two, and it's far easier to deal with in a store. I think I just have bad luck with TVs and Monitors though. Despite doing research, about half the time I order either via Amazon/Delivery, I regret it (last time 42" 4K monitor was DOA).
Almost everything else, I tend to favor Amazon though. But I find myself looking locally more and more.
But does Best Buy still have a restocking fee? I found their return policies unfriendly given that they charge a premium for the physical store experience.
No restocking fees, and pretty much a no questions asked return if it's within the time window which changes depending on your reward level. I can return anything except software within 45 days of purchase and they price match Amazon.
Keep in mind that Best Buy will ban you from returns if it is a frequent thing or other factors (type of items, etc). Obviously this won't affect most people but if you tend to try things and return then don't do it with Best Buy.
Almost a little bit embarrassing, but to share an anecdote -- I bought a higher-end TV late last year (>$2k) and the price difference on Amazon was $2.
I half-jokingly asked the gentleman helping me if we could price match, and how long that would take. He said that if their automated system "accepted it" then it'd be instant.
Their system did accept it pretty much immediately, and so I saved $2 for about 90 seconds 'delay' (half of which was borderline laughter/seeing if I was serious; I was only half-serious).
Made for a positive experience for me and my wife, and I now won't hesitate to consider Best Buy, via price match, in the future if I'm ordering something that they stock locally. It was also the first time I'd ever asked for a price match in the last 10+ years, if ever. :)
There's also the fact that Walmart achieves low prices by strong arming suppliers into giving them lower quality goods masquerading as the "same" model.
Buying anything that you expect to keep more than a year is a waste at Walmart, even if its cheaper.
Just curious, do you have any links to evidence on this?
Full Disclosure: I'm a WM Associate, but am speaking on my own. This type of behavior is against our Code of Ethics, and would be sent to investigation.
Obviously, Walmart doesn't say, "give me lower quality goods". Walmart says, "give me goods for lower price than last year, or we'll cancel our order", which then pushes suppliers to cut corners for Walmart orders.
> Just curious, do you have any links to evidence on this?
I THINK this is along the lines of your request. I read this when it was published (2006) and didn’t reread it when I searched for it now. Describes a culture of lowering quality to achieve sales at prices dictated by WM, as I recall. Sorry, want to be more complete but unable at this moment.
i have often heard a claim that electronics manufacturers sometimes have a "walmart" version of certain products which are made with cheaper parts but sold in almost-identical packaging to the version that they stock at other retailers. i haven't been able to find any specific examples, though, so i don't think it's true. or, at least, it isn't a common practice.
many electronics manufacturers, however, do create "black friday" versions of their products. this is well-documented. i think this practice is the origin on the claim made by the GP.
yah, walmart will pre-counterfit products for you--they get the manufacturer to build a cheaper version of a mass-appeal product and slap a different sku on it and sell it at the same price as the copied product.
Caveat: only if you need a car anyways. If you only need a car to run errands, Amazon is pretty competitive for pretty much anything except fresh groceries.
That's probably a bit of an exaggeration but I daresay that there are very few people who own a car solely to run errands today. If I need to own a car to run errands, I probably need a car for other reasons too.
What is true is that there are people who live in cities and use Zipcar, Uber, regular rentals, etc. instead of owning. If that's the case, the cost calculus changes if you need to pay in order to run errands.
I honestly don't think anyone who doesn't live in the center of a city everyone's heard of uses a service like Zipcar, but sure, if you need to rent a car to go Walmart looks less attractive. If you need to rent a car to go you also probably don't live near a Walmart, which as far as I know has abandoned the urban concept and decided to stick with their rural/suburban box store.
I'd put the number closer to 100. All states have at least one metro area with good enough transit, and most have either two larger metros or at least one good-sized college town.
I'm not sure which "couple of cities" you're thinking of, but I'm pretty sure I haven't lived in either of them. And even when I've owned a car, I've never used a car day-to-day.
I live (barely) inside the city limits of a town of 13,000 people, in a county of 37,000. My wife and I both have vehicles and we use both of them probably 80% of days - and I work remotely to boot.
"A couple of" cities was not meant to mean two, but 100 sounds like too many, and even if you live in the best-served metro areas, the service is usually limited to a small portion of it.
I agree with that. There's one US city where it's completely normal and ordinary not to own a car. There are maybe a dozen others where, if you live and work in a relatively central area of the city, you can probably get by without one without too much hardship. Go much beyond that and you may be able to get off without one but a lot of things get harder and you have to compromise on your activities.
Yes, much less than 100 cities. I live in the Phoenix area, and can't imagine how hard it would be without a car. It's so spread out that it isn't funny. I have a car mostly because I like driving, but still would have one if I didn't, just not the same kind of car.
I also feel like a certain number of those people are carless not by choice but because they cannot afford a car, and are putting up with a pretty extreme level of inconvenience.
I will tell you that South Dakota absolutely does not have that, and unless you're in the dorms of one of the schools and can bum a ride with someone who's already going, a car is required.
...in semi rural America they are still the cheapest and most convenient. We have 3, soon to be 4 Amazon fulfillment centers in the Atlanta area. We are about 20 miles outside of the closest w/ Atlanta being about 50 miles to city center. I can order paper towels and a few other weekly necessities each week and pick up on the way home from work. 1-2 years ago it was cheaper to do Amazon and Prime...now for those essentials it saves us about $2 on a $50 order vs. Amazon. We dropped Prime and just use Wal-Mart pickup now.
Bingo. Wal-mart is fudging its Huggies because it sees Amazon turning Whole Foods locations in miniature Amazon stores.
What Wal-mart currently has that Amazon doesn't is a brick-and-mortar network that works. If it can make that experience much better, it can beat Amazon in the physical space for ten years while Amazon fights the learning curve.
This. Walmart's image has been severely tarnished over the years as a result of their abusive labor practices. Now that Amazon is also acquiring that same image, it's the perfect time for Walmart to pull a PR about face.
I suppose they hope such a gesture will woo people away from Amazon and back to Walmart who cares about people, unlike Amazon.
Seems like a reasonable assumption. They dominate everything everywhere - they have to maintain this position overtime by keeping mindshare as economic and environmental issues continue to tilt into the red.
This is exactly the answer. They're getting a head start to enable future regulatory capture to further entrench themselves in existing markets as smaller players are unable to deal with shifts in minimum wage.
They were never known as the worst among the kind of people who would consider working there. It sure beats being treated just as badly at somewhere else where the employee discount is far less useful.
Don't know why you're getting down-voted - it's a reasonable hypothesis. Why wouldn't a corporation reinvest those tax benefits?
I think that the likely culprit is a more competitive labor market in general, but there's no reason to outright reject the idea that the demand for labor could in part be driven by said tax cuts to a non-trivial extent.
I remember reading Howard Schultz's book "Onward" about his tenure as CEO of Starbucks, and how there was a significant return in their investments in employee education / benefits / stock incentives / better service, despite pushback from Wall Street.
Idk if you'd consider the two the same scale (the market cap for Wal-Mart is probably 3x that of Starbucks if I recall) so maybe that's _some_ evidence?
Though I agree evaluating/comparing the ROI on the two is probably not the cleanest analysis in the world.
I didn't downvote but jeremyt's statement is without evidence. It's certainly plausible that the statement could be correct but there really isn't any evidence given to support it.
The news has been full of dozens (maybe hundreds by now) of large and small companies using the tax change to increase employee wages and benefits.
While there's currently no specific press release linking Wal-mart's actions with the tax change, it certainly isn't beyond the realm of possibility (and HN-class conclusion jumping).
> The news has been full of dozens (maybe hundreds by now) of large and small companies using the tax change to increase employee wages and benefits.
No, there have been dozens or hundreds of companies claiming that tax cuts were responsible for employee compensation increases. Many of those were one-time bonuses, but the tax cuts are ongoing. In some cases where the benefits were ongoing (like Walmart's hourly pay increase), you'll find that they tend to coincide with the overall trend of state minimum wage increases. This is just PR: they're getting ahead of the trend and trying to attribute it to tax cuts rather than other forces.
Also, since employee compensation was tax-deductible even before the tax cut, taxes certainly weren't stopping companies from raising wages before the tax cut.
Pretty much. Companies are using the tax cuts to signal goodwill to the market, but in reality the temporary increase in benefits is an expense coming from pre-tax income.
The tax cuts are causing increased employee benefits is a red herring.
That's not quite how it works. Publicly-traded companies don't reduce their net income using a tax cut, because their entire industry is getting the tax cut. The company's market price is tied to how their NI compares to the rest of their respective industry NI.
Stock repurchases are filed on the balance sheet, post taxes, which is why companies take the increase in net income but then use the extra cash to buy back stock. The former keeps the company competitive and the latter increases the stock price.
I guess I read different news than you. I’ve read that most of the money is going toward stock buybacks. The pressure on wages is coming from a tighter labor market. That’s what I’ve read but I don’t know enough to say one way or the other.
You are correct that there have been stock buybacks, as well. But I'm not sure it counts as "most."
First, of the companies that are doing stock buybacks, not all are doing only stock buybacks. Many are doing other things as well.
Second, there's a whole great big world out there called "local news" where you'll see these stories that aren't covered by CNN, Marketwatch, CNBC, etc...
Yes, some big companies are doing stock buybacks, but there's a lot more going on in the business world than the Fortune 500.
This follows a report by benefits consulting firm Aon Hewitt finding that 83% of large companies don’t expect the tax cut to boost salaries at all — just help pay for small bonuses companies like WalMart WMT, +1.98% and AT&T T, +0.70% gave workers, which reporters soon discovered were, themselves, skewed toward higher-paid, longer-tenured employees in many cases.
However one feels about the issue my point still stands. Th comment that started this thread gave no supporting evidence for the claim and thus deserved to be downvoted.
Also the article we are all nominally commenting on is about Walmart which is a Fortune 500 company. Is its tuition plan because of the Trump tax cuts?
"The news has been full of dozens (maybe hundreds by now) of large and small companies using the tax change to increase employee wages and benefits."
Not really. There have been a lot of stories of companies offering one time bonuses to employees, despite the tax cuts being ongoing. And historically, windfalls like that have been used mainly to benefit the higher ups in the company, instead of the workers.
Lots of one-time bonuses. I haven't seen nearly as much (any?) about across the board wage increases.
And it's not like Wal-Mart was hurting for money before. They could have raised pay before. Or they could have kept the tax cut money and paid it out to owners. So I'm not convinced. The tighter labor market makes a lot more sense.
A simple exercise: say you have a small business. Your tax rate is 35%, gross revenue is 200k, tax-deductible expenses are 100k (1 or _maybe_ two employees). We'll assume a C corporation, just for illustration purposes and that you care about the after-tax profit it generates. In practice for something this small you would probably just pay yourself a salary and be done with it...
Anyway, you have 100k taxable income, and 65k after-tax profit. If you paid your employees more, you would have less after-tax profit, because your tax rate is not 100%.
Now say the tax rate drops to 21% (this is the cut that happened) and you give your employees a 10% raise. Now you have 110k expenses, 90k taxable income, 71.1k after-tax profit.
So a tax cut in this situation does in fact allow an employer to both have more after-tax profit _and_ give raises to employees at the same time.
Now we can have a discussion about what government services the employees and the employer won't get as a result of the tax cut, of course. That needs to be accounted for too, in the grand scheme of things.
> That 21% tax rate relies on paying employees more?
I'm not sure what you're asking.
The 35 -> 21 change is the actual corporate tax rate change that happened end of last year in the US.
You don't _have_ to pay your employees more to be taxed at the 21% rate. But at the new tax rate you _can_ pay your employees more and till make more of a profit.
So in the end the whole question is where the money that would have been paid in taxes goes instead. It could be going to stock buybacks, dividends, investment in the company, raises for employees, or just sitting in the company bank account. In real life the answer is probably "all of the above" and the proportions vary.
Again, I'm not sure whether I answered your question, because I'm not sure what you're asking.
Regional governments have started discussing wage-shifting prevention — wherein Walmart workers must receive low-income benefits such as food stamps due to excessively low wages. By paying workers a wage sufficient to get them off of benefits, they make conversations around charging Walmart a penalty or removing local tax exemptions or etc. politically unviable.
You would think it a silly idea: educating people into certifications that overqualify them and likely lead to their exit to greener pastures. There is the other end of the pipe to consider: students leaving high school would see Walmart employment as a way to afford their education - providing an everlasting stream of new employees. In addition, Walmart relies on successful innovators to stock their shelves with compelling products. This is selfish positive sum reasoning[1], where doing good ironically results in more for you.
You overestimate the number of people willing and able to use this program compared to the paths to promotion. A lot of people will not take advantage, and will not complete their program. Most private colleges have their pricing structure set so that most people run out of various funding programs before they even graduate (generally at 2.5-3 years in).
So, if 10% of employees start, less than 1% will finish. I think there's probably more than enough room for 1% of their employees to move up. Also, great PR form.
Excepting a single month in 2000, the US unemployment rate is at its lowest since the late 60s and the economy is booming like crazy. Walmart requires more employees than any other company, and is simultaneously also seen as, and probably is, one of the worst possible companies to work for. They're going to suffer major retention issues and end up scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of employee quality.
I don't think it has anything to do with image. Just basic market dynamics. They need more, better, and more reliable employees. So they're offering a better value. That, or one of the Waltons has decided to get in on this sweet presidenting business and they're tossing a few bones out for 2020.
They already scrape the bottom of the barrel, as others mentioned this looks more like a way to keep those on an upward career trajectory from becoming flight risks.
Their neighborhood market stores are pretty much all self service now. Nearest one to be only has one checkout lane - the rest are self checkout. Theres drive and pickup groceries. Since they need a lot less staff they probably figure they can pay and offer a little more benefits to help improve their public image. I'd say its working too, I've been going a lot more. Their mobile pay with automatic price matching is excellent.
Worth noting the Fred Meyer nearby is also going the same direction. They just installed a ton of self checkout lanes and it seriously works well too. The store was absolutely packed this last weekend but there was hardly a wait to checkout.
It looks like an ongoing trends in that market. People started caring about people they interface with so your local (but a global) discount shop needs to jump as high as they can to cater to the compassion weak point. Bad PR is effective and this is how you fight it.
IMHO it's a step in the right direction. Corpos are soulless and people vote with money. Take your $ somewhere else and they'll try to meet the bar.
Amazon's tough love is also well-known at least from what I've read so having an upper hand over them may sway the lazy but compassionate crowd to take a ride to Walmart, not amazon.com.
I don't know about rich but they have seemed to hit it off in semi rural Georgia with "pickup" for groceries. We are in the grey zone for Amazon. Close to Atlanta...too far out for grocery delivery. ...and we need cars/trucks for commute, farm, school, etc. Not having to drive would significantly change the equation.
I wonder if they weren't pressured to do so after the tax bill passed. One of the big justifications for it is that companies would have more money to spend on their employees.
Reading this headline I was reminded of the cyberpunk dystopia where corporations own their employees. By colleges costing more than an individual can afford and corporations paying for an individual's education, you get a system whereby individuals become effectively indentured servants paying off education debt to their employer (there are already government jobs where this is basically the way it goes). Student loans are predatory but at least let you change employers in theory, but if you're indebted to a specific corporation then things are potentially even more dire (unless you have other means to buy your way out).
But on the other hand, I can't blame Walmart or any other non-education company for high tuition and I think it's good they give employees the opportunities to get a practical college education.
I don't think your dystopic vision is what's happening here. From the article:
> The Walmart employees will not be obligated to continue working for the company after they get their degrees, and must put up only $1 a day toward the cost of classes.
Is it? Wouldn’t it be better if the loans were not needed because the education would be paid by state? Doesn’t this actually cement the current situation?
No - this is a raise in the form of subsidized education, and it's hard to see how that's worse. I'm very dependent on my employer because I live off of my salary, but that doesn't make it a dystopia. If they wanted me to learn X, and paid for my training in X, I may not enjoy that as much as the cash value of the training but it's still a benefit to me. For Wal-Mart, the employee can leave whenever, they will either forfeit their incomplete program or graduate and now have a degree.
This is literally the classic CFO/CEO exchange:
CFO asks CEO: What happens if we spend money training our people and then they leave?
But what education? Are even half of those graduating in a program that is in relative demand? I think that higher education funding, if publicly funded, should be entirely based on demand and merit.
I mean, I sometimes feel that we’re already close, but instead of college costing more than people can afford it’s healthcare. Less indebted, just screwed if you get hurt or have a pre-existing condition while out of a job.
I don’t think this program is anywhere near as bad as that healthcare structure, but this is just another case of corporations taking up what could have been a responsibility of the state.
It’s better than both corporations and government leaving people in the wind though.
Exactly. Wal-Mart isn't going to pay for your Computer Science degree. They have a narrow window of programs and it's to get people back who will help grow their business.
The people above you will never give you the education needed to overthrow them.
> At least the companies would be risking the investment in college tuition rather than the taxpayers.
I think that contributes to the dystopia. Then companies get more power, controlling who gets educated, the content of their education, the method, etc. If it became widespread, how much influence would companies have over universities? Would research detrimental to corporations be possible?
Democracy is a great thing; it gives power to the citizens. If we cut back government, we redistribute that power to the already powerful people and institutions. (To be clear, there is a balance to be had; government is good for somethings (e.g, defense, justice, education and health care), private business is good for others (e.g., making cars and software).
Nah. Companies don't have coercive power. Governments do, even if directing that power according to the whims of democracy.
> If we cut back government, we redistribute that power to the already powerful people and institutions.
I reject the implicit assumption that there is a "conservation of power" law at work. Just look at authoritarian states vs freer countries: there is no entity in the freer countries exercising totalitarian control over the citizens. This means that the total power exerted on the individual is not conserved.
Some of these things have existed in the past. See company towns, where employees were forced to spend private currencies at shops owned by the same people they worked for.
A workers dystopia has already happened, unions and legal changes to work hours & pay got rid of it. As unions lose power (rightfully, due to colluding with the bosses) and laws are torn down to remove regulation, these conditions will return. Zuckerberg and Google both want to build "cities". For who? Their employees.
"A workers dystopia has already happened, unions and legal changes to work hours & pay got rid of it. "
They did, but over the last 50 years or so, we've seen the erosions of union power and the erosion of legal protections for workers. Don't imagine that the fight is over; it's still ongoing.
If anyone is interested in working on our team @ Guild Education, the org. that is enabling Walmart to make this happen, we have a bunch of Product & Eng roles open, and many more across departments. We're mostly JS/Ruby on the web side and Python/Scala on the data side. Careers page link here: https://www.guildeducation.com/careers
Umm...the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida is not an easy school to get into. While no where near Ivy league levels its still considered the best public school in Florida and most high school kids try their hand at getting in there before settling on UCF or USF (orlanda and tampa respectively). To a lesser degree the same is true of Miami though a lot of students there prefer FIU for the culture.
UF's business program takes a TINY portion of community college transfers each year and sadly most of them fail out of the weed out courses in the first year.
I am very skeptical of how many Walmart employees will be able to take advantage of this program. Can anyone with experience at the other schools listed in this article speak to the difficulty of getting in to them?
My understanding of colleges is that they tend to accept pretty much anyone if they aren't coming straight from high-school. The idea is that people who have lived in the Real World™ who choose to go to college understand why an education is important and will naturally work hard for their degree (because they see it as one of their last chances to escape from whatever situation lead to them applying), whereas high-schoolers only want to go because they've been told they have to in order to be successful.
Obviously this isn't true for true Ivy-league schools, but it does tend apply even to larger state schools, such as the ones in this article.
Also, many high schoolers coming in are playing with "house money" - easy credit for student loans, daddy's money, and scholarships and grants focused at high school kids.
Adults going in and paying their way are more likely to stay focused and complete.
I did tutoring while I was getting my MBA. Yep. Basically the first year quant courses: stats, micro, accounting, finance, ops. There were students I tutored whose math basically ended with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. I actually had one ask me to explain graphs (as in cartesian coordinates) to them.
You can also find a number of books written about 1st year MBA experiences on this general theme.
Latter. So college graduates but woefully weak in even basic math.
At the time, the school (which was a moderately elite one) even had a "math camp" prior to classes beginning for those who weren't comfortable with their math skills. But obviously there's not a lot you can do for students who are essentially at a grade school level.
Heh. I started out interested in biomedical engineering. The Biomedical part lasted until I took organic chemistry. I wasn't especially horrible at it but I sure didn't like it.
Tangentially related to community college and weeder classes. In my experience the older you are the more flexible the school is in transferring credits so you may not have to take those.
It's a nice gesture, but it's a perverse incentive. These retail jobs need to pay a living wage. The philosophy that these jobs are stepping stones, not destinations, is clearly false. This perspective lets Walmart justify perpetual starter wages.
It seems like you are the one who introduced the phrase “entry level” to make your point. OP simply said that these are not stepping stone jobs, but destinations with little upward mobility.
They are agreeing with the sense you are using entry level. They mean that in addition to being entry level jobs, people are staying in them for long periods of time.
Because the assumption is that "entry level" means someone who's still living with Mom & Dad; or various other situations. (Leaving jail, recent immigrant, mother returning to the workforce.)
IE, someone in an "entry level" position is someone who has partial support in their household.
Of course, there's plenty of good discussion to have about the ethics of this kind of employment. Needless to say, I prefer to spend my dollars are stores where "entry level" employees are teenagers, retirees who just want to get out of the house, and people who need an extra opportunity to make an honest life.
I love this argument that doesn't attempt to address the fact that these jobs are necessary to the economy and must exist, but jumps straight to the assertion that whoever does them just deserves to be poor.
Very few developed countries pay "living wages" for the bottom tier of employees. That is true in eg: Italy, Spain, UK, Germany, Portugal, Canada, France, Japan, South Korea, Greece, Israel.
They all subsidize low paid labor with social welfare benefits. Which is exactly what the US does as well. The US now has a more generous welfare state than Canada.
You can just about count the number of nations requiring a proper living wage on one hand out of 195.
You have got to be kidding me? All those other countries have public health service. You don't have to worry about how you're going to pay for cancer treatments in Germany if you get a brain tumor and can't work.
Medical debt is still the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US. Our systems are abysmal:
"The US now has a more generous welfare state than Canada."
That is a flat out lie.
And those countries all have higher tax rates to pay for their social safety net, and they actually work toward getting people to use it. Here in the US, we're actively working to gut the safety net.
Canada’s per capita non-military expenditures are slightly lower than the US’s. They have somewhat higher taxes not because they spend more on welfare, but because they run a much smaller deficit.
It'll be interesting to see what this does to Florida's supply chain program.
I went to a school that's ranked in the top 3 for supply chain programs. And despite not being in the supply chain program myself, I stumbled into a 6 month internship with a company consistently ranked in the top 2-3 for supply chain.
Walmart is the type of company that invents supply chain management methods which eventually get taught in schools. In a similar fashion to how Google invents solutions and releases whitepapers around those concepts that spawn entire ecosystems of concepts and systems.
One thing Walmart is notorious for is how they onboard new suppliers. They effectively dictate the margins they'll let you have on a product. If you tell them that isn't possible, their SCM division will look over your internal processes with the fervor of a forensic accountant, and tell you exactly what you need to do to shape up your operations and get to the level they demand. If you're a fledgling company that scored a Walmart contract, it can be incredibly helpful in rapidly evolving your SCM/Logistics. And once you can service Walmart, you can service any company.
Although I'm not sure if that's offered for all suppliers or just their smaller suppliers that are at risk of not being able to keep up with Walmart's volume. And it's not really optional, but rather a form of risk management as well as price control. If they think you won't be able to deliver, they won't award you the contract and risk empty shelf space.
I'm curious if they'll take a similar approach to these SCM programs. None of the universities listed have ranked supply chain programs, but with Walmart directing their associates to the programs, I doubt they'll stand by and not demand changes to suite their needs. And with their expertise, they could easily catapult these programs to top ranked ones.
$365/yr tuition at 3 public colleges, presumably on some bulk discount rate negotiated with suppliers.
At that rate, everyone attending public college should apply for a job at Walmart.
> With the new program, they will be able to obtain an associate's or bachelor's degree in either business or supply chain management (with more degree options expected to be added over time).
So it's effectively outsourced training for Walmart jobs, not a launchpad to any other skilled career.
If anything, it would have the opposite effect. Walmart is not offering a subsidy for any college program. They are offering it for two programs. This gives Walmart a lot of negotiating power to keep their price down. Further, unlike a typical 18 year old, Walmart will be a very high information consumer, and so much more likely to switch providers if their current ones start to charge higher rates.
I don't think this will have any impact on the price of tuition. The number of employees who will take advantage of these offerings isn't enough to make any impact for colleges.
"Full- and part-time Walmart workers can use the subsidy to take courses at the University of Florida; Brandman University in Irvine, Calif.; and Bellevue University in Bellevue, Neb."
I don't know what those schools cost, but these don't appear to be nationally or even regionally ranked universities... meaning you are probably better off going to a community college and then a state college - both of which are "the expensive part is your time" even when your time can be bought for walmart floor wages.
Walmart, I think, would probably be doing better by their employees if they offered a more traditional tuition reimbursement plan, or setup deals with more local community colleges.
(that's also not a lot of schools... I'm wondering if this is for an online or mostly online program?)
Brandman appears to be linked with Chapman University and is focused on adult education. Bellevue University appears to be independent of any university and is also focused on adult education.
So my guess is UF was chosen in part because it has a long running "distance and continuing education" department?
Interesting. I Looked up the other two schools, but not the University of Florida, which was unfair of me, as I am personally a little suspicious of the unranked private schools
> Walmart, I think, would probably be doing better by their employees if they offered a more traditional tuition reimbursement plan
By cutting deals with a few institutions and offering mostly online programming, Walmart can keep prices way down. I suspect they do it this way because the equivalent value of the tuition reimbursement would be way too low for any of their low-level employees to actually afford the education.
in California, community college tuition is on the order of a grand a year, full time (in state) - less if you are only going part time, which you probably would be, if you're working enough hours to get the walmart reimbursement.
At those rates, the expensive part is the time off work, even when you are only making $11/hr. (I mean, employer reimbursement is still a nice gesture, every little bit counts.)
I find it... unlikely that the private universities are cheaper than the community colleges.
Now, your last two years, at a state school, in California are closer to six or seven grand a year, full time, so half that for your half-time plan, and that's a much bigger bite, but I still kinda wonder what kind of private school could do cheaper, though we're getting more realistic.
In California, at least, if you go to any of our very good public schools, you will almost certainly be paying more just to keep yourself alive than you will be paying in tuition
(which isn't to say I don't think we should subsidize them more; I'm just saying that most of the cost of going to california public schools is... living in California.)
But this is for college tuition, not community college tuition, and California is very much the outlier. Also, this focuses on particular areas of need for Walmart:
> Walmart will pay only for degrees in business and supply-chain management because those areas of study “will be relevant across the industry and for future work opportunities,” according to spokeswoman Erica Jones.
They also cover books and supplies, which I imagine would be way more expensive without a single standardized curriculum across all of their employees.
I think community college in California is the best chance working adults have of getting into prestigious schools. My understanding is that you have a significantly better chance of getting into an undergrad program at Berkeley from community college than even the better California state colleges.
Really, the options for working adults are mostly geared towards the remedial. Community college is one of the few options available to someone like me to get back on the prestigious school track.
I mean I guess, technically neither am I but I use f# on the side, and my jaw has been continuously dropped for the past 3-4 years at how well they're handling NET as an open platform.
I use azure for my personal website and I'm impressed with azure too. I'm not really using the fancy parts of it, so maybe I'm wrong, but it has been very easy to use thus far.
On top of windows coming to ARM64, UWP eventually, and Linux sub system features, I'd say they're well on their way to abandoning the 3X MS we used to love to hate.
There have been major adjustments in the past two years to account for schedules. Many WM/Sam's Clubs in college towns will be more than willing to work around schedules.
Shifting some compensation to tuition will likely benefit Walmart in two ways: 1) attract a younger workforce who is less likely to incur health insurance expense, a strategy they’ve discussed since 2005 [1] and 2) recruit a more educated employee base who can make college-educated, middle-income customers feel comfortable shopping at Walmart.
I know a software engineer who was in Silicon Valley and moved to Bentonville. He makes $100K in Bentonville vs. the $120K he'd make in Walmart, Sunnyvale. He pays half the rent he would in Sunnyvale, can buy a big house for $250K once he gets his downpayment, his wife can go to college subsidized by Walmart and then gets preferential treatment in getting a job at Walmart. There's no way he says he'll ever consider moving back to Silicon Valley.
> The tuition subsidy will apply only to associate and bachelor’s degrees in two programs that are somewhat related to retail work, but the areas of study could be expanded to other areas in the future, Walmart officials said.
Hmmm... sounds _very_ restricted. This feels like either a PR stunt, or they're catering to programs that only allow Walmart employees to grow within Walmart and not branch out elsewhere.
Agreed. It's a good look on Walmart's end, but it really doesn't do anything other than reinforce the idea that college tuition prices are fine as they are.
If enough companies begin offering this as a perk college tuition prices will just keep inflating.
Corporations are already one of the only realistic ways to attain affordable healthcare. It seems sensible that higher education joins the basket of corporate perks.
It's nice that WalMart has done things like this and subsidizing medication costs but I think the thing we US citizens need to ask is, "What happens when we farm these incentive decisions out to corporations instead of deciding on them via government?"
>retailer said it would pay tuition for its workers ... to earn degrees in either supply chain management or business.
If we let companies decide what education will be subsidized and what will not, we are going to get a very homogenous (and I would imagine unhealthy) set of citizens. Even if the faith that capitalism will more efficiently distribute money than government would holds true, it's not necessarily a better outcome.
This is something that bothers me every time I read about a wealthy person/biz doing something for the working poor.
It's not that I don't appreciate the actions, it's that I'm uncomfortable with the idea that oligarchy means working people are beholden to an unaccountable group of affluents. It's like we're outsourcing the government's responsibility for collective welfare.
Governments in the US have never taken up the responsibility of ensuring that everyone can get a post secondary education.
There's historically been substantial investment in universities and colleges, but that was always about increasing the number of people with those educations (economic development in other words) and never about universal higher education.
Nowadays there's lots of people pursuing professional education and the support available to each individual has been declining (this may still cost lots more than higher levels of support that existed when fewer people sought degrees).
On the flip side, I think those that have been more fortunate (as in acquiring obscene wealth) have a duty of noblesse oblige to the society and people that helped them get there.
The fact that so many shop at Walmart is what keeps the Walton family wealthy. Why would it be wrong to expect them to pay that back in some way? Nobody is saying they should go broke doing it, but they owe their success not only to their business acumen and good decisions but to the people that continue to shop there in the face of alternatives.
We have a lot of people graduating with useless degrees like History & Literature. These useless degrees often land people in a state of debt with no job. If a corporation(s) decides what degree you should get, there is a higher likelihood that at the end of your degree, you'll actually get a job.
I have a B.A. in History (Pre-industrial Europe and Far East, and post-WWII American Foreign Policy) degree from UC Davis, and I ended up full-stack programming for the last 12 years.
I use those History skills daily from writing documentation, synthesizing concepts into a coherent work, and figuring out the intent of the original coder.
I think it is remarkably superficial to call these degrees useless. Yes- initiating a career with them is more non-trivial than a stem degree but if you look ahead and make a concrete plan you can do great things with a History degree (especially if you go to a highly regarded school).
> if you look ahead and make a concrete plan you can do great things with a History degree (especially if you go to a highly regarded school)
I realize that history-related careers are not something I am well-versed in. Can you elaborate on this point? What kind of career is best prepared for by taking a History degree? (We'll assume that any kind of professorship role in history is a no-go, given how bad the adjunct professor path is.) I might imagine someone using History as a stepping-stone to a Law degree, but cannot think of much else. Museum curator?
I am having a hard time thinking of things that would provide a labor pool large enough to have a reasonable chance of making a career of. It's very likely that I'm not thinking deeply enough about it, so I'd appreciate your insight.
There are a few skills that an undergrad history degree will do for you. Off the top of my head, critical thinking, organization of disparate concepts and events into a coherent whole, and writing well.
One of the best programmers i worked with had a philosophy degree. He could distill a bunch of random subjective information down to something reasonable to implement.
It's really an education vs training sort of issue.
I think it'd be very fun to work for the state department or at a think tank as a subject matter expert-say in internal Brazilian politics or something wonky. A lot of fun government jobs. Some of those probably require a doctoral degree. Alternatively I agree a bachelors is a good foundation for a law degree.
Or I think one could work for a place like Stratfor or the other private intelligence/business intelligence firms that are less well known.
I also think it'd be a darn hoot to be a working historian (maybe in academia maybe not) of the kind who writes history books. Really just being a historian in general though.
> I am having a hard time thinking of things that would provide a labor pool large enough to have a reasonable chance of making a career of.
Everything I mentioned was a very high variance choice no doubt. Of course you are correct. It is probably not a good choice for the vast masses of people. I would not make a choice like this unless I was at a high brow college.
welp: I am stem person though but I sometimes wistfully ponder a different path.
edit: of course history seems to prepare one well for politics
Even in tech, plenty of corporate teams such as sales, marketing, HR recruiting, etc. are populated with people who had social sciences or liberal arts degrees. Not all of them majored in business. So long as their program taught them how to read, write, and speak publicly, it's better than no degree.
Wow, that's quite the Devil's Advocacy. The idea that arts & humanities are dead ends seems to be in direct opposition with most advanced cultures.
>there is a higher likelihood that at the end of your degree, you'll actually get a job.
With that company. When your healthcare and your education are controlled by a single corporation, how are you any better off than some miner in the 19th century buying his equipment from the company store?
As apposed to now? Where you have 40 history PHDs all going for a single professor slot... and at the same time have tons of positions go vacant for months because there are no qualified candidates?
It may not be perfect, but it might be better than what we have now... Although, I'm not saying it will be... I'll reserve judgement until the data arrives.
Which is a reasonable assumption to make, since we already know that - in the real world - there are opportunities to move from company to company for a wide variety of reasons.
I totally agree. Also, Tom Hanks & Tina Fey both studied Drama... and both have contributed enormously to the world.
However, for every employed actor, there are probably 9 other starving drama students who will never make it. It's hard to encourage kids to take Drama with those odds unless the kid is super passionate about it... especially when it costs $60k to do so.
If we let companies decide what education will be subsidized and what will not, we are going to get a very homogenous
That sounds almost completely backwards to me. If companies are subsidizing education, it would seem that you're going to get a mix of subsidized educations that matches reality. Wal-Mart will subsidize people studying supply chain management, Tesla might subsidize people studying mechanical engineering or materials science, Google would probably subsidize people studying computer science, or mathematics, etc.
And never mind that plenty of companies, in my experience, offer education reimbursement where they define "business related" in a VERY broad fashion. I've had large corporate employers where they'd reimburse you for anything except hyper-niche stuff like "Medieval Basket Weaving" or something.
OTOH, letting the State decide what gets subsidized feels like regressing back to outdated ideas like Plato's "philosopher-kings" and a society where society decides your occupation for you, with you getting little or no voice in the matter.
And what happens when the State decides this stuff, and a bunch of evangelical Christian types gain control and suddenly the options narrow to "Christian Studies", "Creationism for Dummies", etc? Thanks, but no thanks.
>"What happens when we farm these incentive decisions out to corporations instead of deciding on them via government?"
The government(s) already incentives and subsidizes higher education in a number of ways.
>If we let companies decide what education will be subsidized and what will not, we are going to get a very homogenous (and I would imagine unhealthy) set of citizens.
This is an odd comment and a little unnecessarily alarmist... tuition reimbursement is not an uncommon perk for full time employees at mid-sized to large companies. Of course, since they are footing the bill, they want to get something out of it too, so you have to study something that's related to your job. So if you're working in sales you can't get reimbursement your engineering degree but you can get your marketing degree. I think this is pretty fair and doesn't lead to "homogeneous and unhealthy citizens", not everyone does the same job. Looks like Walmart is offering education for Walmart employees that could benefit from an education. If cashiers could benefit from a degree I'm sure they'd offer that too.
(You also have to get good grades to qualify for reimbursement - usually B or over.)
Of course, "related to your job" is often interpreted very broadly.
Like you said, some companies don't have restrictions for tuition reimbursement, I was just speaking from personal experience at the companies I've personally worked for all have had the "related to your job" restriction in place.
Right now we have extremely expensive college tuition for degrees with very low utility. We have people stuck in jobs where they can't even hope to pay for their tuition. If corporations subsidize jobs for people then not only do they have a better educated workforce but it is likely to result in people getting a better job.
This is for their employees, not all people. Also, they are not doing this to be nice to their employees, they need to maintain their management pipeline. They are using this to grow the management ranks internally. I work for an engineering company that has good college benefits, but they only pay for STEM and Business degrees. Those are the only degrees that benefit the business.
Sure, I'm not arguing against them doing it at all, I'm concerned at the effect if it becomes commonplace across companies. It absolutely makes sense given the state of education/ higher education in the US, but that suggests maybe we should be fixing these issues in an overall way.
How generous of the company that made $10b in net profit last year and receives $6b+ of taxpayer funded subsidies every year to spend $400m to offer their workers the unheard of ability to pursue 2 degrees from 3 colleges!
Interesting. So the Starbucks program seems to pay for any undergraduate degree at ASU. The Amazon program seems more focused on trades and vocational training...
The Walmart program pays for an undergraduate business degree (kinda useless) or a degree in supply chain management (likely to be useless in the coming years).
> The giant retailer said it would pay tuition for its workers to enroll in college courses, online or on campus, to earn degrees in either supply chain management or business.
Wow, raising the wage combined with this tuition assistance makes it seem like Walmart is actually trying not be known as the worst employer out there anymore - these benefits are better than some of the retail jobs I used to work a few years ago. I wonder why they suddenly care? Walmart gets its customers because they have low prices (or at least successfully trick people into thinking they have low prices), the kind of people who value that are unlikely to stop shopping at Walmart because of the negative PR around how they (used to) treat their workers.