[HN Gopher] Walmart Anticipates a Store Manager Shortage Despite...
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Walmart Anticipates a Store Manager Shortage Despite $200k-a-Year
Pay
Author : prostoalex
Score : 41 points
Date : 2022-05-16 16:19 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| bruceb wrote:
| "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.
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| I think a company charging their employees $1 a day for a perk
| speaks more volumes about the character of the company than
| it's employees.
| CyanBird wrote:
| It is to weed out lack of commitment, which can be very
| common for people entering these low entry level jobs
|
| I don't event live in the US, but I see it as a smart move
| throwaway92394 wrote:
| How does this weed out commitment? Or in other words - if
| you don't want to stick around what is the negative of
| paying the 1$ a day? Presumably if you're only in it for
| the benefits then the benefits far outweigh 1$?
| LazyMans wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Agreed. I was considering attendance, but completion
| would be a much different (and meaningful) metric.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| 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.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| > 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.
| shepardrtc wrote:
| $30 a month is gas for a few days or food for a few days. When
| you're poor, you're more focused on survival and that amount
| can put a lot of fear and hesitation into someone.
| LazyMans wrote:
| Talent pipeline? I'm not familiar with the history of how Walmart
| provided internal growth opportunities in the past, but it does
| seem for a majority of companies these days, internal growth
| isn't focused on as much as it should. I guess Walmart is coming
| to realize it's better to invest in your own workforce than hire
| externally.
| dopamean wrote:
| I worked at walmart for a few years when I sort of lost my way
| in my mid 20s and I have to say it was an eye opening
| experience. Everyone knows a lot of the bad stuff about walmart
| so I wont dwell on that but the good stuff I saw were things I
| had no idea about and was pretty impressed with.
|
| At the time I was a college dropout with a pretty bad attitude
| but I needed a job and I wasnt afraid to work long boring hours
| and so I got a job stocking shelves at a walmart near my
| parents house. It was a mind numbing job but it actually paid
| ok at the time (12$ 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.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I worked at Staples around the same time period, 2008-2009,
| and while it was mind-numbing work, I learned a good portion
| of the skills I needed for the corporate world. Things like:
| showing up on time even when you don't want to, knowing how
| and when to escalate to management, how to communicate with
| customers, executing business processes like opening,
| closing, stocking shelves, etc. The pay was only $8/hr. but
| the experience was easily worth 10 times that. At the time I
| was in college and living with my parents with free tuition
| from the Pell Grant; a few hundred bucks every two weeks was
| actually a decent amount of money for food, gas for the car,
| whatever. I feel for people who have to make a living in that
| environment but it's not meant for that, it's meant to be a
| learning and growth environment.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| joshstrange wrote:
| https://archive.ph/IY3fL
| blakesterz wrote:
| "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.
| vecinu wrote:
| > 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.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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
| crmd wrote:
| 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.
| noja wrote:
| What is going on here? This is the company where something like
| ten percent of staff are on food stamps!
| legitster wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| Sounds like they want to hire more "college grads and outside
| hires" and THEN fast track them for management. So idk, make
| them get a feel for what most of the everyday work is before
| moving them up. I do think it's good that managers have some
| idea of what their people are having to deal with regularly.
| Guest42 wrote:
| I agree. However, from my observations these types of
| programs are used more to attract talent than to develop it.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| Yeah for sure, I mean anyone they feel like isn't going to
| be good management material they can just not promote until
| they leave.
| SteveGerencser wrote:
| The internal track isn't that uncommon. when I was at Domino's
| Pizza it was the same thing. The path to management and
| franchisee was through the hourly funnel. There is a lot to be
| said for having management that started in the trenches as
| hourly staff and had to do and learn "all the jobs" before they
| become the boss telling other people what to do.
| faangiq wrote:
| Jail time for writing such trash articles seems fair.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Easier than putting the Sacklers or Jones in jail, I bet.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is because Walmart is either not offering $200k per year,
| and/or the $200k is based on working 80 hours per week with
| variable schedules where one should expect to be interrupted
| during dinner and weekends and nights.
|
| It is always the same story with
| restaurant/hotel/airline/retail/hospital work. Complaints
| about struggling to hire while paying peanuts relative to the
| shit quality of life of those jobs.
|
| Especially for any "manager" or "supervisor" level position,
| which is just code for "you are the person responsible for
| filling in when someone calls out". And someone will call out
| because the pay for the subordinates will always be
| insufficient to attract reliable, quality line level workers.
| samhw wrote:
| Yeah, it mystifies me. One of my ex-boyfriends worked at a
| chain coffee shop. He was paid minimum wage, _as the
| manager of several branches_ , for working insane hours,
| and (as he once said to me) the person three levels above
| him was paid about PS50k (~$60k). _That_ guy was in his 50s
| - that 's how long it took to get promoted. And he was a
| smart guy: excellent programmer, wrote an emulator for some
| old games console, wrote and managed his own email servers
| and VPNs, filled in as an engineer for a few months at my
| former startup (for no pay, very kindly) when we were
| understaffed, etc. Could've easily worked as a programmer
| for 10x the pay, in other words. He was a massive coffee
| fan, and had tens of thousands worth of coffee equipment at
| his house, and I _think_ he genuinely loved it and did it
| for that reason, but someone like that must be one in a
| million for them; I never had _any fucking clue_ how they
| filled all the other positions... (I 'd be fascinated to
| hear anything anyone else knows!)
| donmcronald wrote:
| > 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?
| jjeaff wrote:
| Walmart recruits at the University I graduated from. When I
| graduated, around 10 years ago, they were very aggressively
| courting new business undergrads for Walmart corporate. They
| revealed in my second (and last) interview that starting pay
| was around $25k annual. Even 10 years ago, that was a joke.
| btown wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.)
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Modern journalist are narrative fiction writers. Articles
| should come with a disclaimer "based on a true story". You
| don't exactly know which part is true.
| bluedino wrote:
| I'm willing to bet 'managers' doesn't mean 'store managers'
| bluGill wrote:
| Probably not, but managers make good pay. Store managers
| require someone who is both able to do the job (which is
| complex), and willing to move where the company needs a store
| manager. If you want to manage "a department" you can get
| promoted at any store, but if you want to manage the store
| there are only a few positions, so you move to assistant
| manager at whatever store needs it, then move to store
| manager at a different store - these may both be out of state
| moves.
|
| It was 20 years after leaving McDonald's before I'm no longer
| sure I wouldn't have made more working at McDonald's than as
| a programmer. The job path all the way up was known to me.
| Even now I'm not sure - it depends on if I was willing keep
| competing for the more and more rare positions above store
| manager, and how I did compared to the others. I'm glad I
| didn't go that way - for me it the money isn't worth it.
| [deleted]
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