Having worked for walmart I fully expect many walmarts to have a goal for buy in to this program and employees to be pressured to make deliveries without compensation.
They are the worst company I have ever worked for, just bad people.
Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home
271–280 of 398 posts
Re: Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, where the rubber meets the road here is in whether or not there is an unspoken expectation that you need to do this, compensation or not. "Official" policy doesn't always reflect what gets implemented, and is sometimes just used as a way to legally CYA so that you can have your cake and eat it too.
That's true for literally every aspect of every job, though, so it seems like a pointless thing to say unless there's some indication they're actually abusing this.
Well, you could always look at the actual history of Walmart's employee relations and pay policies and make a guess.
Re: Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Per the TechCrunch article, workers need to submit proof-of-insurance to participate. The wear-and-tear is going on employee vehicles rather than company vehicles, the additional distance they travel will increase their personal insurance rates, and as with rideshare they will need to pay additional riders on their policies. (If they don't have the riders their policies will be canceled as soon as they make a claim!)…
>These additional costs make the deal worse for employees and better for Walmart in ways which are hard for the workers to understand. That's pretty patronizing. I wouldn't assume people are stupid just because they work for Walmart. This could be a great deal for people who need extra money. If I'm driving down a street anyway, it's not much of an imposition to drop off a package and not much wear and tear on the ca…
It's not patronizing, I don't think I'm stupid and I had no idea of the insurance implications.
Re: Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's true for literally every aspect of every job, though, so it seems like a pointless thing to say unless there's some indication they're actually abusing this.
We can create laws without an indication of previous abuse. We can regulate not just because we have indicators of abuse but because we can imagine potential abuse. We don't give toddlers handguns because our pre-frontal cortex allows us the foresight to see that it's a bad idea -- we don't need to actually wait and see if one toddler shoots another.
Well, we don't allow people to sell handguns to toddlers. A quick search will reveal that there are quite a few deaths every year due to people negligently allowing guns to fall into the hands of toddlers. Last time I checked there was an average of ~one fatality a week.
Re: Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, way to take something that would be a win-win for Walmart, its employees and consumers and turn it into some dark scheme. >Instead of paying their employees a living wage Walmart (and any other employer) doesn't arbitrarily pick wages. They pay the market rate which is no more than the employee's marginal productivity. This is why Walmart was offering entry level employees $17+/hour in North Dakota during the he…
The market rate is unrelated to marginal productivity, unless you think North Dakota Walmart employees are twice as productive as Walmart employees elsewhere. Walmart is, in many markets, a big enough employer in the low skills employment marketplace to be a price setter not a price taker.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. To state the same thing differently: They pay the market rate which is less than or equal to the employee's marginal productivity, or, an employer is not going to pay someone more than their marginal productivity.
> unless you think North Dakota Walmart employees are twice as productive as Walmart employees elsewhere.
No, not at all. Walmart was merely paying the market rate. It's important to recognize that at some point with fewer workers the per-employee marginal productivity increases--a kind of inverse way of talking about diminishing returns. You can be sure that the Walmart in North Dakota paying $17+/hour was not hiring nearly as many workers as a Walmart paying people $8/hour.
EDIT: I want to add one more thing. Not only would the $17/hour Walmart not be hiring as many people as the $8/hour Walmart, but they're also going to have a lower over-all productivity rate unless the $17/hour workers had their labor complemented by additional technology. The cost of purchasing the additional technology is price prohibitive until labor costs rise.
Re: Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Per the TechCrunch article, workers need to submit proof-of-insurance to participate. The wear-and-tear is going on employee vehicles rather than company vehicles, the additional distance they travel will increase their personal insurance rates, and as with rideshare they will need to pay additional riders on their policies. (If they don't have the riders their policies will be canceled as soon as they make a claim!)…
>These additional costs make the deal worse for employees and better for Walmart in ways which are hard for the workers to understand. That's pretty patronizing. I wouldn't assume people are stupid just because they work for Walmart. This could be a great deal for people who need extra money. If I'm driving down a street anyway, it's not much of an imposition to drop off a package and not much wear and tear on the ca…
Reinforcement from an unlikely quarter!
The Big Ugly for anyone working in retail the past 20 years is that stores have done almost nothing to improve workers' productivity. Price scanners were a 1990s innovation and there hasn't been much to follow. So it's very hard for workers to make an economic case that they should be getting paid more. (There's a human-decency case, but that doesn't always prevail.)
In fact, average retail wages were 62% of the national average pay in 2000, and they're 55% now. More numbers are here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2017/05/23/the-loo.... What was a bad job then has become a worse job now.
Wal-Mart's new initiative isn't entirely beautiful, but it represents the first effort in a long time to say: "Hey, we discovered something about you that's more valuable than we realized. Your commute home is a potential asset to us, and to date we've paid you zero for it. We've now got a mechanism to pay you something for it, as long as you're willing to do Task X for Payment Y."
It's a lot easier for wages to go up -- in any field -- when workers create more value. We can argue about whether Wal-Mart has defined Task X and Payment Y properly, but at least this is a fresh idea in a field that's been devoid of them for a long time.
Re: Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
How long do you honestly believe an employer can sustain a business providing wages insufficient to purchase food to provide the calories necessary to complete the work?
Is walmart not proof that the answer to your question is quite a long time?
No, and this is exactly the point I was trying to drive home when I made my original post about over 80% of the all humans living on less than $10/day. When the OP asked if "anyone can live on $40/day" what they really meant was, "Can people live a lifestyle reasonably close to mine on $40/day." The answer to that is obviously not. The question is being asked by someone who is almost certainly in the top 1% of incomes across the globe (which is about $34k/yr). But the real answer is that a person can live incredibly well by global standards on $40/day.
Re: Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home
#278Sam Walton, in the early days of WalMart, got a pilot's license so he could fly between store locations (vs a much slower commute by car). He noticed while flying that he could see traffic patterns and scout out new store locations for his expanding business. I think Sam would be proud that the same out-of-the-box, resourceful thinking is still happening today.
Re: Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
How long do you honestly believe an employer can sustain a business providing wages insufficient to purchase food to provide the calories necessary to complete the work?
That depends on how big the available labor force with no better offers is, and what the rate is at which people from outside that group move into it; potentially indefinitely, under the right (or very wrong, depending on your perspective) conditions.
I'd be interested in any examples you have.
Re: Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if you have a family?
Food goes up a little bit, and your room is more crowded. Everything else is the same. Go look at the size of a log cabin, they were about the size of a single bedroom today and large families lived in them.
> [if you have a family] Food goes up a little bit, and your room is more crowded. Everything else is the same.
The amount of money and extra time that we spent on just one baby was astounding - clothes, doctor visits, food. Many more trips to the store/pharmacy/doctor, etc, than normal.
The USDA's child cost estimator [0] says that raising a child in the midwest costs about an extra $12000 a year, on average. Not all of that breakdown may apply, but even if you were to ONLY look at food costs, an extra $1500/year in food (when you're only making the hypothetical $800/month discussed in the GP) is not "a little".