[HN Gopher] Why Walmart pays its truck drivers 6 figures
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Why Walmart pays its truck drivers 6 figures
Author : Gigamouse
Score : 141 points
Date : 2024-01-29 14:51 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.freightwaves.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.freightwaves.com)
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| "A senior vice president at Walmart told Yahoo! Finance at the
| time it was because of a "shortage" of truck drivers. (Those who
| study the trucking industry dispute that such a shortage exists,
| concluding that drivers leave the industry for jobs with better
| pay and hours.)"
|
| It turns out that good truck drivers could also be doing other
| useful work, and want to be well compensated and taken care of
| for their labor.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| > drivers leave the industry
|
| is basically the same thing as
|
| > there's a shortage
|
| If anyone wants to work on this problem with me _without_
| solving the self-driving truck / Aurora problem outright - I
| think the answer is something like remote operation, level 3-4
| autonomy for highways, and nice comfy air conditioned driver
| hubs in cities so nobody has to be away from home for days at a
| time. Boom - all the drivers come back and get paid decent
| wages to drive trucks. Ideally the per-truck subscription fee
| for the service is an add-on to the cost of doing driver
| business.
| wil421 wrote:
| How realistic are the trucking sims? Do you actually get gas
| and unload? Highway stuff and regular driving sounds good but
| backing a trailer up to Walmart video game style sounds
| frightening.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| We can do that scary bit autonomously already:
| https://www.outrider.ai/
|
| I'm not referring to "sim", I'm referring to remote
| piloting. Real time sensor and controls feedback from a
| truck that is only autonomous when it makes sense to be. We
| can pilot drones over 100s of yards in real time without a
| hitch. We just need a bit more range (few kms) via, say,
| the internet, and you can do this fairly easily. I don't
| see a _research_ problem, I see a funding problem and an
| aversion to autonomous trucking b /c people think it's
| either completely infeasible, or completely solved by
| Aurora. I'm not sure of either.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| And what does the driverless truck do when it loses its
| internet connection at 70mph on a freeway?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| The use case does not include operating remotely at 70mph
| on freeways, esp because internet connectivity is hard
| over most the USA. That bit is mostly lvl 3/4, and is
| something that is addressed well by other companies. It's
| the long tail between lvl3/4 and all the scenarios that
| remain in which a remote driver solves the problem. Esp
| in logistics yards, which are chaotic, fast paced, and
| driven by voice communication.
| ikari_pl wrote:
| OTOH we dock manned spaceships to the ISS video game style
| foxyv wrote:
| That is a much easier problem than backing a truck up to
| a loading bay. Even landing an airplane is a lot easier
| if you have an ILS. Space and the air are mostly empty. A
| warehouse loading area is cluttered with other trucks,
| debris, and cargo. Although I could totally see this
| being done remotely with VR and a ton of cameras.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Agree with you.
|
| Just to add spice the convo: Backing into a loading bay
| is quite easy, autonomously. Once you stage the truck you
| can push a button and just watch it go. See:
| https://outrider.ai (which is where I work, and we do all
| the staging _also_, but I'm actually interested in
| "everything else" as well). There's a lot of very human-
| ish problems to get to that state, that I think remote
| operators can really help with.
| bluGill wrote:
| Pretty good for the expensive ones. They are not video
| games though, and so they are not making the shortcuts
| games do to make them fun. I've driven a few (snow plow,
| excavator) and they are very hard to control - then I see
| someone who drives that machine professionally get on: they
| get a near perfect score and comment about how real it
| feels. Note that part of the sim is the controls: they take
| the cab from a real machine and replace the windshield with
| a screen (for version 1, often version 2 starts to take
| away parts, but everything you touch including the seat is
| the real thing).
|
| I've long thought that to renew your drivers license you
| should have to spend a day every few months in a simulator
| to prove you can drive safely. Do you maintain a safe
| following distance? Can you maintain the speed limit? Do
| you stop for pedestrians? Do you zipper merge correctly?
| Here is a situation where someone else screwed up and you
| will crash, can you choose the best crash? Here is an icy
| road, can you control the car? there is a lot that modern
| simulators can do but few people have used them.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| The difficult part is actually the last mile/few miles in
| trucking. Open highway driving is a significantly less
| complicated problem than navigating down side streets then
| backing into a warehouse to complete a delivery.
|
| Freight tech companies have been talking about automating
| every BUT the last mile/last few miles for years. Have a
| stable of drivers who you have on hand to take over the
| last hour of a delivery. Automate everything else.
| Yujf wrote:
| The nice thing about this is also that truckers would be
| able to go home everynight which would make the job more
| attractive
| nradov wrote:
| Remote operation on public highways is a dead end. There is
| no wireless data network with the latency and reliability
| guarantees necessary for safety. Particularly when it comes
| to tunnels, canyons, and heavy precipitation. And let's not
| have any ridiculous claims about how in case of a network
| connection failure the truck can just autonomously pull over
| and stop; that's not going to work safely for descending I-70
| in a snowstorm.
|
| There may be some limited use cases for remote operation on
| specific local routes where sufficient network access points
| can be provisioned.
| newsclues wrote:
| It's not a dead end, it's a solvable problem but the issue
| is that no one wants to pay for infrastructure.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You can't do it with autonomy, and you can't do it with
| remote piloting, but you can do it with a mix of both.
| That's my assertion. Spending 20 hours looking at Nebraska
| / Illinois farm fields is not the use case for remote
| operation - and as you say, you lack the infra for that
| anyway. And navigating traffic or interacting with
| distribution center logistics is not the case for
| autonomous operation - it's an infra nightmare to get a
| autonomous vehicle to integrate with all that radio-voice-
| comms madness. Even OTR drivers just want to get that part
| of the journey over with and get back to the hotel.
|
| Having a pod with local drivers near major hubs, for
| example, means the drivers take over when the trucks get
| close enough for it to matter. It wont' work for delivery
| to, say grocery stores (which can be local driving anyway),
| but it will work for center-to-center transport ala between
| Walmart hubs. It's the long haul OTR trucking that has high
| attrition / people shortages, because you're away from
| family for so long. That little bit can be somewhat
| autonomous, with handoff of remote operators only near
| hubs. Think air-traffic-control for trucks and hubs, except
| probably more hands on than just telling it what to do.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Like harbor pilots for ships, where someone comes out to
| join the ship to help navigate through potentially
| dangerous waters.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Even without full autonomy, truck platooning has been
| shown to be effective in places where they have been
| tested. One human driver and "autonomous" followers.
| These truck platoons could be the solution to long haul
| deliveries while individual drivers still handle the last
| mile delivery and city navigation.
|
| https://projects.research-and-
| innovation.ec.europa.eu/en/hor...
| LiquidSky wrote:
| "> drivers leave the industry
|
| is basically the same thing as
|
| > there's a shortage"
|
| No, it's not. It means the drivers are not being paid enough
| to stay, _as they explicitly say is the reason they 're
| leaving_.
|
| >If anyone wants to work on this problem with me
|
| Sure, here's the solution: pay the drivers more. Problem
| solved.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| > drivers are not being paid enough to stay
|
| therefore
|
| > drivers leave the industry
|
| therefore
|
| > there's a shortage ... at the going wage
|
| I don't see how we can argue over the problem statement. We
| can argue over the solutions, of which there are infinite,
| but at least two:
|
| 1. increase wages
|
| 2. decrease shittiness of the job via ideas like mine
|
| Or why not both? The only dichotomy here is a false one
| you've introduced.
| LiquidSky wrote:
| Because there's no problem. There's not "shortage", it's
| not that there just aren't enough people to be drivers.
| There are plenty, employers just don't want to pay enough
| to attract them.
|
| >We can argue over the solutions
|
| No, we can't, because there's no solution needed to this
| non-problem artificially created by employers unwilling
| to pay enough to attract and retain employees.
|
| Your ideas aren't needed except by the employers trying
| to perpetuate their false self-made "shortage", all to
| avoid just paying employees more.
|
| The only actual problem is uncritically accepting the
| narrative of the employers as you are doing here.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| > There's not "shortage", it's not that there just aren't
| enough people to be drivers. There are plenty, employers
| just don't want to pay enough to attract them.
|
| OK, well, let's not mince definitions. For the purposes
| of my thought process, a shortage is defined as "Number
| of people we want to do a job" minus "Number of people
| who do that job". The semantic difference between that
| and what you said is so small as to be negligible to me
| and doesn't preclude "increase wages" as a solution. I
| think that's fine for you to have a preferred solution or
| even a different preferred definition.
| LiquidSky wrote:
| No, you're just wrong. You're carrying water for the
| employers who want to squeeze their employees.
|
| Again, there is no actual problem here, just an
| artificial one created by employers unwilling to pay
| their workers and crying about it. Don't buy into it.
| medvezhenok wrote:
| It's not about employers in this case. If we think being
| a truck driver is an important job we can subsidize truck
| drivers federally, via taxes.
|
| At the end of the day, society (in the form of government
| regulation) gets to decide what is and isn't an important
| job (i.e. government subsidies), and we the people can
| certainly put our thumb on the scale.
|
| People collectively decided truck drivers were overpaid
| [relatively] in the 1970s, hence the deregulation of the
| trucking industry which led to a collapse in trucker's
| salaries. No use blaming employers here - it was decided
| by the government (representing the people of the U.S.)
| randomdata wrote:
| _> It 's not about employers in this case. _
|
| In this case it is. The discussion is about how employers
| have a dream that isn't being realized. They are
| metaphorical 10 year old-boys drooling over the idea of
| owning a Ferrari, without the capability to actually buy
| one.
|
| The only "problem" is that their dream is remaining a
| dream. Which isn't actually a problem. Dreams aren't
| supposed to be realized. They are meant to be just
| dreams. Who gives a shit if a 10 year old can't own a
| Ferrari? And that is what the parent is pointing out -
| that the '10 year-old cries' of business are meaningless.
| Let them dream, but it ends there.
|
| If people of the U.S. want to give truckers more money,
| they are free to do so, but that is well beyond the topic
| at hand.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I completely understand and agree with your point. Just
| wanted to be clear. Not disagreeing at all.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Talk about rhetorical self harm. The person you're
| screaming at isn't far from you, but you refuse to
| acknowledge a premise.
|
| Notably, you ignore their autonomous driving pitch is
| supposed to increase working quality of like, like many
| instances of automation (in theory).
|
| What if someone can think drivers deserve better pay and
| ethical treatment _and_ that self driving is a long term
| solution to a grueling job?
| LiquidSky wrote:
| >but you refuse to acknowledge a premise.
|
| Why would I acknowledge a flawed premise?
|
| >like many instances of automation (in theory).
|
| That (in theory) is doing so much work here it ought to
| be paid.
|
| >What if someone can think drivers deserve better pay and
| ethical treatment and that self driving is a long term
| solution to a grueling job?
|
| What if mythical beasts like unicorns existed? That would
| be pretty cool, I guess. Sadly, we'll never know.
| tbihl wrote:
| >If anyone wants to work on this problem with me without
| solving the self-driving truck / Aurora problem outright
|
| In the US, we un-solved this problem decades ago when we
| abandoned railroads for subsidized auto development.
| gadders wrote:
| Like any other "good", there is only ever a shortage of a
| particular employee category at a particular salary rate
| (obviously there may be a lag between supply and demand).
| randomdata wrote:
| A shortage, as it pertains to other "goods", is defined as a
| situation where an external mechanism prevents price from
| rising. A common example of a shortage is where price gouging
| laws are in effect. When a shortage occurs, a non-price based
| mechanism must be used to distribute "goods" instead, such as
| first-come, first served, a lottery, needs-based selection,
| etc.
|
| Only labour gets the special shortage definition seen here.
| Seemingly because shortage was originally used with respect
| to healthcare practitioners, where true shortages are
| possible with price ceilings often imposed by government in
| order to allow equal healthcare access to all citizens
| regardless of how much they can afford to spend, and then
| misconstrued onto other fields.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Can we not simply say a shortage is when there's not enough
| of something. In this case, available drivers willing to
| work for the compensation they're willing to pay?
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Can we not simply say a shortage is when there 's not
| enough of something._
|
| More or less, but "how much is needed" is dependent on
| price. You need an infinite number of truck drivers if
| they are driving for free. And you need no truck drivers
| if they are driving for $100,000,000,000 per day.
|
| In a functioning market, price will rise until you have
| exactly the right number of truck drivers. Remember that
| the dreamers not willing to pay the price are simply not
| in the market. You don't have a shortage of Ferraris when
| 10 year old boys with Ferrari posters on their walls
| can't have the real thing.
|
| However, if something stops the price from rising - such
| the government stepping in and saying: "It is now illegal
| to pay truck drivers more than $30,000 per year" - then
| you have a disconnect. The market wants more drivers and
| are willing to pay more to get them, but are not allowed
| to pay them more. That disconnect is what the shortage
| defines.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| Yeah, but that's not why there's a "shortage" of drivers.
|
| There is absolutely no upper limit to driver pay and no
| nameless bureaucrat filling out some permissible wage
| table but only "what the market will bear".
|
| From experience I can tell you the main two culprits are
| it's kind of a shitty job and it's kind of a shitty job
| that can turn into a _really_ shitty job (or no job)
| really, really fast.
|
| No serious solutions ever treat it like the quality-of-
| life problem that it really is -- parking is a major
| problem, shippers/receivers suck up large quantities of
| unpaid time and living in a truck/being away from home
| for weeks at a time is not for everyone are probably the
| top 3 complaints I would hear. Well, and all the crazy
| shit the "4-wheelers" get up to but that's usually
| entertaining.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Yeah, but that 's not why there's a "shortage" of
| drivers._
|
| Right, because there isn't a shortage of drivers. There
| isn't even a lack of drivers. We have the right number of
| drivers - along with a whole lot of metaphorical 10 year
| olds with Ferrari posters who like to talk big with their
| friends about how they want truck drivers, but when push
| comes to shove, they really don't.
| lupire wrote:
| Since physical limitarions exist, including time, shortages
| exist.
|
| We can't simply pay more money to get a personal chef,
| doctor, and pilot for everyone, even if there was a magical
| infinite source of compensation to pay them.
| bluGill wrote:
| Buy you could have all that for yourself - if you are a
| billionaire. Everybody cannot have that, but somebody
| could. Economics is about managing limited resources. I
| end up being my own personal chef. I share my
| neurosurgeon with 100,000 people (most of whom never need
| one). Because I can share my neurosurgeon there is no
| shortage.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> We can 't simply pay more money to get a personal
| chef, doctor, and pilot for everyone, even if there was a
| magical infinite source of compensation to pay them._
|
| Remember, money is debt - an IOU, a promise to deliver
| something later. It says _" You do this for me now and I
| will give you this token (money) that you can redeem for
| what you want from me in the future."_. 'Compensation' is
| just the other side of the transaction - you offering the
| same in kind. If there was a magical infinite source of
| compensation then there would necessarily be an infinite
| ability to provide chef, medical, etc. services.
|
| In the real world, you only have so much to offer others,
| which limits how much you can receive from them. As
| before, transactions must be balanced. That is what it
| means 'to compensate'. In the real world, you have a pick
| what you want from the limited amount of value you can
| offer in kind. There is no such thing as an insatiable
| demand for chefs or doctors. People will stop considering
| those services when they become too expensive. The more
| expensive, the fewer people needed.
|
| This only becomes a problem when price is prevented from
| rising (e.g. due to government intervention) - and that
| is when you can encounter a shortage.
| gadders wrote:
| Well, no. But we also shouldn't say (EG) "There is a
| shortage of Java Developers" without also specifying at
| what salary level.
| LiquidSky wrote:
| >Only labour gets the special shortage definition seen
| here.
|
| Isn't this backwards? This is the colloquial plain-language
| use of "shortage" (though intentionally misleadingly and
| wrongly used by employers), you're talking about a
| technical economics-only definition.
| stavros wrote:
| What does "a shortage" mean in supply and demand? I don't
| understand, because it seems to mean "we want to pay less but
| then we won't find any people". Well, in that case, there's a
| shortage of Ferraris, because the ones I can find are too
| expensive.
| andy99 wrote:
| And if you were a big business, you'd hire lobbyists to
| petition the government for Ferrari subsidies and buy news
| articles talking about the Ferrari shortage, and tell all
| your friends that the only reason you don't drive a Ferrari
| is purely because of the shortage and has no relationship to
| your finances or priorities.
| randomdata wrote:
| Technically, it means that there is some external mechanism
| that prevents price from rising. Typically that means
| government intervention. Healthcare often sees the government
| set a price ceiling on services to ensure that poor citizens
| are not priced out of receiving healthcare, so a shortage of
| medical doctors is quite possible. A shortage of truck
| drivers is unlikely.
|
| Under colloquial usage, as it is being used here, the term is
| meaningless. Under that definition, everything is always in
| "shortage". It is simply used as an attention grabbing
| mechanism to express some kind of emotion towards the
| subject.
| thfuran wrote:
| >A shortage of truck drivers is unlikely.
|
| Surely a transient shortage is possible due to licensing
| requirements. You could offer ten million dollars a year,
| but there are only so many people with a current CDL and
| finite capacity exists to grant new licenses.
| randomdata wrote:
| The cool thing is that if we really did see ten million
| dollar per year offers, then most people wouldn't want to
| use the services of truckers anymore (too expensive), so
| you'd still have the right number of truckers, if not too
| many, among those currently able to drive, without the
| need for more. No need to wait on anyone else getting
| licensed.
|
| You have done well to highlight why a technical shortage
| is defined the way it is.
| thfuran wrote:
| That's begging the question.
| randomdata wrote:
| Does the question not find begging to be a tad bit
| pathetic?
| CydeWeys wrote:
| The licensing requirements for being a truck driver just
| aren't that onerous. It's way way harder to become a
| doctor, lawyer, hell, even hairdresser in many states.
| thfuran wrote:
| A shortage of doctors could definitely stick around for
| longer, but it's still external influence limiting market
| actors.
| randomdata wrote:
| A shortage of doctors is quite likely as many
| jurisdictions place price ceilings on doctor services.
|
| In fact, where I live, it is quite illegal for a doctor
| to accept _any_ amount of payment from a patient. We as a
| society believe that people, no matter how rich or poor,
| should have equal access to healthcare, so a doctor
| giving priority to a billionaire who can offer a handsome
| reward to get his common cold looked at over someone
| suffering something much worse is considered abhorrent.
| As such, we rely on a mixture of first-come, first-serve
| and needs-based priority instead of a price-based
| mechanism.
|
| Never heard of any attempts to place similar restrictions
| on truckers, though. If you want to try and charge a
| billion dollars per mile, go nuts!
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| In economics you can't have a shortage in a perfect market as
| you note. Of course most (all?) markets are imperfect so
| various factors can cause shortages (eg rent controls is a
| common example). For labor markets imperfect mobility can
| cause a shortage.
|
| In common use it means that something costs more than many
| people are willing to pay for it. So your Ferrari example
| would be a valid use under this meaning.
| tbihl wrote:
| >In common use it means that something costs more than many
| people are willing to pay for it.
|
| More likely it costs far _less_ than people are willing to
| pay for it. When the Colonial Piepline was shut down for
| ransomware, the shortage occurred because a reasonable
| populace correctly assessed that the local value of
| gasoline had just skyrocketed far beyond its steady state
| price, so the demand became limited only by time and social
| costs (e.g. you don 't want to be the guy whose picture is
| shown filling trash bags of gasoline) plus ways to store
| it.
| grotorea wrote:
| Maybe we can still call it a shortage if there's some
| unexpected and/or temporary reduction in supply or increase
| in demand. You could still buy oil during the 1970s oil
| crisis but it still was a shortage.
|
| Or it can mean that there's insufficient supply to meet
| demand at a "reasonable" price.
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| In most contexts, a shortage is when there is a gap in supply
| due to external factors. This results in resource allocation
| not responsively adapting to price signals.
|
| A commonly used example is milk, yogurt, cream and ice cream.
| Every year, the farmers produce milk. Some people want
| yogurt, some want milk, some want cream, &c. Say that one
| year, everyone wants yogurt for some reason. They are lining
| up to pay 200%, &c, for it. Then the allocation of resources
| adapts -- more milk is used to make yogurt. If demand for
| other products does not go down -- people still want just as
| much milk, ice cream, &c -- then their prices may go up. Over
| a reasonable time frame, the effect of this is that more land
| will be turned over to pasturage and more milk will be
| produced. Gradually the prices will come down. More people
| have more yogurt than before; more people are working on that
| and less on something else (whatever it was). The workers and
| consumers live happily ever after and resource allocation has
| adapted to price signals.
|
| One important consideration in the above example is that if
| people want more yogurt and are willing to pay more, they
| must also be willing to go without something else. They only
| have so much money (so much of their own resources to
| allocate). That is why the resource allocation has to change.
| Now that might not be milk, per se, but it is probably
| something adjacent to it, like tofu. We can see how if the
| shift is from tofu to yogurt, the reallocation of resources
| might take longer -- people can't just take the milk
| consumers don't want and turn it into yogurt, they have to
| get more milk first, which means feeding more soybeans to
| cows and less to tofu machines -- but it still happens.
|
| A simple example of a shortage is a situation where a virus
| affects a certain fruit tree, preventing it from growing (or,
| at least, preventing it from growing the desired fruit).
| Although people are willing to pay a lot for this fruit, and
| by extension are willing to consume less of other fruits or
| other foods, there is no way to turn resources over from the
| production of other goods to the production of this fruit. It
| might be that only a small number of areas are isolated
| enough to produce this fruit; they might all be turned over
| to it; but after that, there would be no elasticity in the
| supply of this fruit. Given what we know about the pricing,
| demand, ordinary cost of inputs for producing the fruit, the
| supply of this fruit before the virus, we must conclude that
| there is considerable demand which is not being met.
|
| (Something else notable about the second example is that most
| of the new, elevated price of the fruit would go into some
| form of rent. The ground on which the fruit could be produced
| would be exceedingly rare and valuable, but the material
| inputs, labor, skill, &c needed for the fruit are the same as
| before; the new high price would mostly go to the ground rent
| or financing costs.)
| nightpool wrote:
| Not everything is a perfectly elastic market. In fact,
| nothing is. For example, if I wanted to go out and hire
| 250,000 US-based computer programmers tomorrow, I would not
| be able to even if I wanted to pay them a million dollars
| each, since there are only 132,740 computer programmers
| across the entire US. So that would constitute a shortage of
| computer programmers. It would take many years to create the
| number of educational institutions, training programs, etc
| necessary to have that many programmers available to hire.
| The same could be said for many industries on a much smaller
| scale--how many people are willing to relocate to driving
| trucks in northern Canada? Probably not as many as you'd
| like, even if you had an unlimited budget. How many qualified
| airplane pilots are there in the world? Too few--we don't
| have enough training programs for them and mandatory "aging
| out" requirements have removed a lot of the pilots we already
| had. A lot of new training and education programs for pilots
| have been started in the past year, but they're going to take
| 4-5 years until the supply has increased enough that we're no
| longer in a shortage. (And although this is a heavy topic of
| debate between union leaders who say that there's no shortage
| and airlines who say that there is, I think the amount of
| investment in slow and costly supply increase programs is a
| good sign that there's at least _some_ amount of supply
| constraint /bottleneck affecting the industry. It's hard for
| there not to be when safety and training requirements make
| the supply pool so slow to respond to changes in demand).
| sokoloff wrote:
| > there are only 132,740 computer programmers across the
| entire US
|
| Source? That feels _extremely_ low, maybe even by an order
| of magnitude.
| medvezhenok wrote:
| Yeah, that's either out of date or only counts people
| that report their title as "Computer Programmer" rather
| than "Software Engineer" or one of the myriad of other
| ways to describe people who develop/maintain software.
|
| The recent estimates are closer to 4.4 million software
| engineers in the U.S. (~2.75% of the working population)
| rightbyte wrote:
| > The recent estimates are closer to 4.4 million software
| engineers in the U.S. (~2.75% of the working population)
|
| Heh, we are probably more than the secretaries we
| replaced.
|
| I honestly believe most companies are worse off using
| computers at all. At some size, you'd probably want some
| computer system for pay slips. But I am not too sure
| about that ...
| nightpool wrote:
| Ah, yeah, I was just going off a simple Google. Probably
| ended up on the wrong BLS page. I agree it does seem low,
| a search for "Software Developer" turns up on this BLS
| page with much higher stats--1.5M developers.
| mixdup wrote:
| Walmart paying drivers above the typical trucker's wage is not
| new, driving for Walmart has always been a "prestige" job in
| trucking that paid well and that drivers wanted to drive for.
| The standards are high, though, and drivers are held to account
| so the penalties for not living up to them can be severe
| softwaredoug wrote:
| This is pretty grueling work requiring you to operate heavy
| machinery, be away from your family for days, and drive mundane
| hour after hour.
|
| Why wouldn't it be highly paid?
| dewey wrote:
| > Why wouldn't it be highly paid?
|
| There's many jobs that are probably even worse and paid less.
| The only reason it's highly paid is because the competition for
| it is higher: "at the time it was because of a "shortage" of
| truck drivers."
| throwaway44773 wrote:
| The barrier to entry to driving a truck is a few months of
| training so the amount of people that can become truck
| drivers is quite large. However, the social status of driving
| a truck is quite low and there is a constant threat of
| automating the job away. Not to mention the terrible working
| conditions.
| Teever wrote:
| The barrier to entry for driving a truck is greater than
| just the time it takes to do the training.
|
| To pass the training you need to be a competent driver. It
| isn't as easy as you make it out to be and the pool of
| people who can become truck drivers is smaller than you
| think it is.
| throwaway44773 wrote:
| Having a driver's license is basically table stakes for
| having a job in the United States. There are exceptions
| if you live in dense areas with good public transit, or
| you can work from home.
| madars wrote:
| CDL != regular driver's license. Does an average driver
| know how to operate air brakes or prevent jack-knifing or
| what to do with a runaway engine? Trucking is a highly
| specialized job and requires more aptitude than ordinary
| driving.
| vel0city wrote:
| Loads of people with driver's licenses can barely operate
| a sedan. Passing a CDL exam and not constantly getting
| into accidents driving a massive truck is a completely
| different thing.
|
| Loads of drivers fret parallel parking. Imagine the
| difficulty of moving a 54' trailer perfectly straight
| into a bay at the bottom of a narrow ramp and not
| crushing anything in comparison to regular parallel
| parking.
| ecf wrote:
| Because it's a task that teenagers are expected to do safely?
|
| Driving as a profession does not require skill.
| imgabe wrote:
| Teenagers are not expected to drive 18-wheelers for 12 hours
| a day.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| My dad drove coal trucks from Cleveland to Toledo at 16 in
| the 70s so yes, some are. Was it fully legal? I doubt it.
| imgabe wrote:
| If it's illegal, then it's not something that's expected
| of them.
| kome wrote:
| > Driving as a profession does not require skill.
|
| how can say this with a straight face?
| Symbiote wrote:
| Didn't everyone play _Euro Truck Simulator_ (or whatever it
| was), when it went viral as a daft video game of the year?
|
| I got stuck going round the first corner, then got lost,
| then gave up when I had to back the trailer into the
| loading bay.
|
| https://eurotrucksimulator2.com/
| epiccoleman wrote:
| The kind of driving that teenagers are expected to do is
| wildly different from trucking. The biggest vehicle I've ever
| driven was a U-Haul and even that requires more focus and
| care than regular driving. Add another 25 feet of length, a
| trailer which can rotate independently of the vehicle, and
| tight timetables into the mix, and you're _certainly_ looking
| at more skill than the average driver needs.
| eropple wrote:
| Forget eighteen-wheelers, which are rolling geometry
| problems: ever driven a solid-axle flatbed?
|
| Come back and tell us that that doesn't "require skill".
| ecf wrote:
| I learned from a young age how to drive with a trailer, and
| I have experience with 30ft fifth-wheels.
| maxsilver wrote:
| Come back and say this, after you've gotten a CDL Class A
| ecf wrote:
| My best friend's brother in law recently paid a CDL mill to
| get a license. Took him less than a month.
|
| Miss me with the demanded respect for an industry that will
| be replaced in a couple decades.
| bdcravens wrote:
| > ....as a profession does not require skill
|
| Some might say the same about gluing together boilerplate in
| modern development frameworks.
|
| At the end of the day, skill is only relevant for competition
| within a given industry. The pay scale for any given field is
| based on the value they provide the employers (which is why
| grown men playing children's games are paid millions of
| dollars)
| philomath_mn wrote:
| That isn't how wages are set. It's a combination of supply,
| demand, and the business value of services rendered.
|
| Trucking is a hard job which affects the supply of drivers, but
| this is offset by the fairly low barrier to entry to trucking.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> It 's a combination of supply, demand, and the business
| value of services rendered._
|
| Just supply and demand. Demand is a function of that business
| value (among other attributes).
| emptybits wrote:
| Your reasoning is somewhat sound. History has not been so
| generous. Source: son of a trucker.
|
| Also consider that minimal academic education and minimal
| specialized training is often sufficient to do the work. So the
| supply of those willing to do the work has often exceeded
| demand, so there's naturally downward pressure on pay.
| manicennui wrote:
| Working at Long John Silvers was also grueling work and I was
| always covered in grease and received minor burns from time to
| time. The job can be learned by almost anyone in a couple weeks
| though. Physical difficulty has almost nothing to do with
| compensation.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I don't mean to sound snarky, but do you actually believe
| that's how wages are often set, or are you describing an ideal?
|
| These sorts of comments confuse me because they seem to be
| making an argument by explicitly confusing _is_ from _ought_ as
| an intentional rhetorical technique.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> do you actually believe that 's how wages are often set_
|
| He'd be wrong if he thought anything else. Obviously supply
| and demand always determines price. There is no question on
| that front.
|
| The only problem with the previous comment, perhaps, is
| thinking that this particular gruelling/isolating work leads
| to fewer people being willing to drive the trucks than
| actually happens. The reality is the average trucker running
| typical routes isn't really experiencing anything all that
| gruelling/isolating in the grand scheme of things, so it is a
| more attractive career than suggested. It's not a cushy
| programming job by any stretch, but it's still quite
| comfortable compared to a lot of work out there.
|
| The general premise is valid, though. There are clear
| examples of other, albeit arguably more, gruelling/isolating
| work that can't get anyone to even consider the job without
| big dollar signs. He is just overestimating how undesirable
| trucking in particular is. For a lot of people, trucking is
| their ideal career.
|
| But, in fairness, the comment was in reply to an article that
| suggests, at least for some routes, that there is trouble
| attracting drivers. So it wasn't exactly off-base. The
| original article may be.
| bdcravens wrote:
| My father was an elementary school janitor and worked harder in
| a day than I work in a month. However, I make multiples of what
| he made (even adjusted for inflation, though jobs at the bottom
| of the pay scale haven't risen like that over the years)
|
| All that said, I think the question isn't whether the pay is
| acceptable, but why Walmart pays so much relative to other
| companies, where the drivers do pretty much the same job.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Without reading the article, I'm pretty sure it's because that's
| what they have to pay to get decent drivers.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| An article with that title is supposed to talk about how hiring
| decent drivers is more profitable than random cheap ones.
|
| This one seems to have missed the memo, and only gets there
| briefly once or twice, but the title does not in any way imply
| an information-free article.
| bluGill wrote:
| I doubt their drivers are any better than anyone else's.
| Drivers are carefully trained and there are strict laws
| around driving trucks (much stricter than cars). They may do
| a bit more training than required, but there are other
| trucking companies that do the same.
| chmod600 wrote:
| That leaves the question of why they pay 2x more, then?
|
| Maybe fewer road incidents, reducing liability? Like, maybe
| people who can provide for and spend time with their family
| have 11.3% fewer crashes?
|
| (Edit: number was made up, hypothesis purely speculative.)
| bluGill wrote:
| Because as others have mentioned, WalMart cannot afford
| logistic problems. A driver who knows they cannot find a
| better job will not bother looking for one. Thus that
| driver won't quit and have to be replaced on short
| notice. Hiring new drivers is difficult even if there
| isn't a shortage.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| I'd venture they are one of the safest[0] fleets out there
| which is a direct reflection on the quality of their
| drivers. Hell, I'd happily say their yearly average is
| better than the monthly stats from the last company I drove
| for.
|
| The biggest determining factor on a driver is their safety
| record and if you can manage to not hit anything (you're
| not aiming for) over a long enough time period it is quite
| possible to get the good jobs.
|
| [0] https://safer.fmcsa.dot.gov/query.asp?searchtype=ANY&qu
| ery_t...
| mtmail wrote:
| Comments just based on the headline are usually lower quality.
| selimnairb wrote:
| Because they are professionals who do work that can be dangerous
| to them and the general public?
| kome wrote:
| Eh, it doesn't work like this unfortunately; pay is never a
| mirror of the dangerousness, the utility, or the dirtiness of
| the job. I would say that usually it's the contrary: the more
| essential a job is, the less it is paid.
| FredPret wrote:
| It's all supply and demand.
|
| Dirty and dangerous work attracts fewer workers.
|
| High-utility work is worth more to the employer so there will
| be more job offers.
|
| When you see dirty, dangerous, high-utility work that pays
| poorly, it's because there's a ton of people who are willing
| to do it.
| Infinity315 wrote:
| No, pay corresponds with the skillset and how replaceable you
| are (moreso how replaceable). Walmart truck drivers are
| highly compensated because trucking is a lonely and
| relatively uninteresting job to do. Doing that for many hours
| requires a certain type of person and would mentally wear
| down most people.
|
| Walmart requires a consistent level of output which they hope
| can be maintained by keeping truck drivers happy with high
| pay. Other trucking companies can afford to have some drivers
| leaves and thus pay them less because they have some leniency
| for delays which Walmart cannot/will not tolerate
| bdcravens wrote:
| True, but that begs the question of why every trucking company
| doesn't pay as much as Walmart.
| hyperpape wrote:
| Already, several comments saying how being a truck driver is a
| tough job (it is!) or "that's what they have to pay to get decent
| drivers". But whether the job is hard, isn't the question, and
| the second comment is sort of vaguely accurate, but just ignores
| the interesting part. From the article:
|
| > One of the best jobs you can get in trucking is at Walmart. The
| uber-retailer says truck drivers can make up to $110,000 in their
| first year at the company. That's twice the nationwide median pay
| of a truck driver
|
| The interesting question is: why does Walmart pay so much more
| than is typical? Unfortunately, the article gives a pretty
| superficial analysis.
|
| Edit: to forestall helpful comments, I am aware that businesses
| often make an effort to do things based on a kind of
| sophisticated analysis where they compare the upside of doing the
| thing ("benefits") to the downsides ("costs"), and then do the
| thing if the upsides seem to exceed the downsides.
|
| The question is, why is it that this significantly above market
| rate is what Walmart thinks maximizes its benefits compared to
| costs?
| eschneider wrote:
| The cost of not having a reliable supply chain is much more
| than they're paying their drivers. It's just good economics to
| pay more to reduce driver turnover.
| manicennui wrote:
| Probably takes away a lot of drivers from their competitors
| too.
| savanaly wrote:
| Why is it not good economics for their competitors to do so
| as well?
| hanniabu wrote:
| Less scale, easier to fill gaps, less impact
| adventured wrote:
| Walmart has basically always been superior to its
| competitors at logistics. It has been one of their key
| competitive advantages for many decades. They have been a
| data monster heavily focused on logistics for most of their
| existence (I've been reading about their various logistics
| advantages for 30 years now).
|
| Even if doing a thing is good for a competitor, that
| obviously doesn't mean that competitor will do said logical
| thing. Companies fail all the time because they're
| incompetent in one form or another (or many forms).
| paxys wrote:
| Any reputed tech company pays entry level engineers 2-3x more
| than the industry average. There's no complicated reason behind
| it. They just want the best talent. There are plenty of $50K/yr
| programmers out there but they aren't going to write the kind
| of code you want. I imagine it's the same for truck drivers.
| lebean wrote:
| There are plenty of <$50k programmers making 6 figures, so
| I'm not sure that's it.
| DarmokJalad1701 wrote:
| > There are plenty of <$50k programmers making 6 figures
|
| Doesn't that make them not "<$50k programmers" by
| definition?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Skill wise I'm probably in the bottom quartile, but I
| make about the national median.
| mettamage wrote:
| This is not a thing in NL unless you do HFT programming. One
| of the reasons why the US pays so much seems to simply be
| that the economies of scale are there.
| badpun wrote:
| I don't think it's economies of scale.
|
| Top money in US is paid by tech companies (FAANGs and
| similar) who have virtual monopolies on their markets, and
| thus are printing money. They overpay for programmers to
| make sure they're not outcompeted on tech and retain their
| monopoly status.
|
| Second crucial factor is the VC ecosystem unlike anything
| else in the world. VC-fueled startups (even late-stage
| ones, like Uber) will also often pay way above market for
| programmers, because they believe programming talent is the
| way for the startup to dominate the competition and become
| a money-printing monopoly.
|
| Europe and rest of the world does not have anything like
| that. There's no serious software industry (aka "tech")
| there, neither large and estabilished nor VC-fueled.
| Programmers are seen as a commodity and not a source of
| competitive advantage. And, even if there are exceptions,
| they're not common enough to start bidding wars for top
| talent which in the US elevated the salaries of top ICs to
| $300k-$400k.
| filleokus wrote:
| I think it's even more complicated than that. If you
| compare salaries for physicians (doctors) or lawyers
| there will be a huge gap as well. Even though there is no
| VC-funding, economy of scale or monopolies to speak of.
|
| On the supply side of high salaries I think the economy
| of scale actually have some impact by creating a higher
| "floor". For example I would almost wager that every
| European country have their own Salesforce company (non-
| SAP web based CRM from early/mid 00's), but the e.g
| Latvian alternative never broke out to the wider EU.
| Whilst Salesforce conquered US and then the globe. This
| puts upward pressure on the virtual monopolists / VC-
| fueled companies that don't really exist outside the US.
| Imagine if almost every single B2B software company in
| the US spent their first 5 years only operating within a
| single state, and many never expanding outside.
|
| But I think the "demand side" is even more important.
| Most European countries have lower take-home salaries for
| large parts of the salary spectra, definitely the top
| quartile. The reason for that are also numerous. But we
| generally have high taxes on an individual level, high
| payroll taxes, high VAT etc. In exchange for that we have
| large welfare states with larger redistributions both
| across individuals and across time for the same
| individual (paid parental leave, pension etc).
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's the same in all skilled professions. Pay scales are
| much steeper in the USA than Europe/UK.
| wharvle wrote:
| Comparing "up to" with median is setting off my bullshit alarm.
| lupire wrote:
| The Quota consensus is that the thesis of the OP is simply
| misinformation, as expected.
|
| https://www.quora.com/Walmart-is-offering-new-truck-
| drivers-...
| mathgradthrow wrote:
| Misinformation or advertising?
| elil17 wrote:
| Often the same thing
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Good catch. That's a bullshit comparison indeed.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Then it's always "... well including the health insurance and
| retirement package which we estimate costs us $75,000/yr." So
| actual take home wage is never near $110,000.
| andy99 wrote:
| Is it significantly above market rate when adjusted for
| experience level and overtime? They say "make up to" which is
| meaningless (maybe that's a 20 year driver hired for a
| particularly unpleasant route in a tight market). And I know
| some truck drivers can get overtime doing extra shifts which
| can make up a lot of their income. I'd like to see a real
| comparison between the experience level and kind of driving
| (long/short haul, day/night whatever other industry divisions)
| vs the median income rather than the meaningless comparison
| with the "up to" number before drawing any conclusions about
| how well they pay.
| bluGill wrote:
| I would guess that WalMart assigns drivers to a route,
| everyday they go from the warehouse to the same WalMart(s).
| Most days there is no overtime - they keep every walmart
| within a days drive of two warehouses so if one warehouse
| fails (fire...) they can shift everything - that means some
| drivers will need to go to a different warehouse and then
| they need enough slack to pay for that extra overtime without
| running out of time in a day (a day is less than 24 hours for
| drivers)
| newsclues wrote:
| Why? Because they have to to maintain their logistics network
| to continue operating and making money.
|
| They have a business that prints money so they can afford to
| pay more to continue operating.
|
| People will stop going to Walmart if they can't stock the
| shelves, or raise prices because they use other shippers that
| charge more.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I agree that both the article and the comments section gives
| very unsatisfactory answers.
|
| "They want good truckers." Sure, but not good cashiers? Why
| does Walmart want good truckers and Target doesn't?
| TylerE wrote:
| Walmart has a lot of SKUs made just for them - and that's not
| even getting into the house brands. I bet their logistics
| works quite a bit differently than the average retailer.
|
| Cashiers are easily replaced, and don't have to pass DOT drug
| tests or maintain licensure - a CDL is a big deal, and even
| minor traffic violations _including while driving a personal
| vehicle off the clock_ can impact it.
| snapetom wrote:
| Because the skillset required to being a good truck driver
| are astronomically higher than being a good cashier.
| HPsquared wrote:
| A trucker can make much bigger mistakes than a cashier.
| savanaly wrote:
| Is that not true at other companies as well?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The general standard in the industry is pretty bad. My brother-
| in-law, who has a CDL, tells me somebody wedges a tractor-
| trailer into the Tompkins Street bridge in Binghamton about
| once a month because they ignore the clearance warning signs.
|
| My understanding about Wal-Mart is that trucking for them is a
| good job because you get to sleep in your own bed. That is, the
| distribution center is close enough to the store that you can
| drive for them and live a normal life, it's not like driving
| trucks all the way across from the US.
|
| Normal trucking companies are always having workers say "take
| this job and shove it" and then struggling to get their cargo
| moved, truckers know they are in demand enough they can quit
| without notice, take a few weeks off, then start up at the next
| place.
| soared wrote:
| Wouldn't that enable Walmart to pay less, since the job
| itself is better?
| HPsquared wrote:
| It must contribute. Their pay would probably be even higher
| otherwise.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| The point is that a delayed truck is very expensive, so it
| ends up being cheaper to pay efficiency wages and have good
| working conditions so people aren't constantly quitting and
| therefore delaying your trucks.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Wal-Mart was also a pioneer in just in time delivery for
| retail. If your supply chain is reliable you don't need
| to pile merchandise as high in your stores and your
| warehouses. People will drive an hour to Wal-Mart(s) in
| the most rural locations and in that case it is a real
| bummer to be out of stock.
|
| I'd contrast that to K-Mart where I went to get 3 digits
| for my mailbox and could only get 2 of them so I didn't
| buy any.
| azemetre wrote:
| Not if high turnover means slower deliveries which likely
| effect everything downstream (or upstream).
|
| When you don't pay well, you probably miss out on the hires
| that learned all the skills, what corners to cut, what
| corners to not cut, what actual lead times are, etc when
| hiring.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Outside of Silicon Valley, not a lot of companies will pay
| you less under the auspice that the fringe benefits somehow
| "make up the difference" and Walmart is about as far from
| startup culture as you can get.
|
| Aside from that in order to drive one of these trucks, you
| require a CDL, which you have to get on your own, and
| maintain on your own, all at your own expense. The pay is
| there to attract talent from a limited pool of available
| workers and to ensure they show up to work on time and make
| deliveries on time.
|
| It would be against their own interests to try to cut
| corners and pay drivers less based upon these types of
| "benefits."
| WheatMillington wrote:
| >My understanding about Wal-Mart is that trucking for them is
| a good job because you get to sleep in your own bed.
|
| This could justify Walmart paying UNDER the median wage, but
| why is Walmart paying considerably ABOVE the median wage?
| ace2358 wrote:
| Because possibly they are aware that their shops need the
| goods for them to stay operational. They may also realise
| there are other areas of the business they can squeeze.
| They may realise that having a few missed shipments costs a
| lot more than the wages saved.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I also think part of equation is retention. You want to keep the
| drivers as them leaving might disturb deliveries. Specially if
| they are JIT. Inventory not at store does not sell.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Walmart is one of the few trucking companies IIRC that slipseats
| (shares) their sleeper cabs, which means you're continually going
| to be changing the truck you drive and live in weekly. That kinda
| sucks.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| I agree the alternative would be nice, but for years I lived
| out of a different hotel room every week (for work). I didn't
| mind it. I assume it's similar in that you pack light, and only
| bring what fits in your luggage so you can pack up and move on
| quickly at the end of the week.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| _Username checks out. Jack Reacher spotted._
| UncleEntity wrote:
| I had a gig for a while where we slip-seated the trucks and,
| yes, it did kind of suck. Mostly because nobody cared about the
| trucks and they got tore up pretty fast. Plus, you always have
| that _one person_ who does stuff like leaving trash all over
| the cab -- the chicken bones all over were my final straw on
| that one, we had words...
| slow_typist wrote:
| Malcom McLean, the founder of Sea-Land (sold to Maersk in
| 1999), who commercialised container shipping, believed strongly
| in that concept. You cannot run an efficient operation if
| drivers are allowed to have personal trucks.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > You cannot run an efficient operation if drivers are
| allowed to have personal trucks.
|
| I'd be interested in actual data. Employee
| satisfaction/retention and associated hiring costs and
| increased maintenance/higher failure rates because no one has
| "ownership" over the truck aka diffusion of responsibility
| happens are where I could see that calculation break apart.
| slow_typist wrote:
| I think part of the philosophy is the idea that ,,personal
| ownership" will conceal structural (maintenance) problems.
|
| It's similar to lowering inventory. Sure you can run into
| problems with smaller buffers, but at least you see the
| problems and have a chance to act accordingly.
| sct202 wrote:
| A lot of people aren't factoring in that truckers can work 60
| hours a week and are exempted from overtime pay and a lot of
| companies paying the big bucks in trucking are paying that much
| because they are maximizing the hours to minimize driver count
| (health insurance, benefits costs don't scale by hour).
| pavlov wrote:
| Another example of how the American healthcare system is
| working against society's best interests.
|
| You don't want all truck drivers putting in the maximum hours
| humanly possible. It's a safety hazard. But having to pay for
| health insurance makes corporations try to optimize for this at
| the expense of human lives.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > You don't want all truck drivers putting in the maximum
| hours humanly possible. It's a safety hazard. But having to
| pay for health insurance makes corporations try to optimize
| for this at the expense of human lives.
|
| ... what?
|
| First, I don't understand how paying for health insurance
| means they are trying to get the most hours out of their
| employees. I guess you could say thats somewhat true for
| literally every overhead cost including social security
| payroll taxes, training, heating buildings, etc. At best, it
| seems a little true in a very indirect way so why the laser
| focus on health insurance?
|
| Second, it its truly a safety hazard then it disincentivizes
| employers from doing it.
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| > First, I don't understand how paying for health insurance
| means they are trying to get the most hours out of their
| employees
|
| I'm not OP, but my take: the health insurance cost of
| hiring a driver is fixed, regardless of how many hours per
| week they drive. Therefore, the more hours they drive, the
| more the employer's "bang for their buck".
|
| > Second, it its truly a safety hazard then it
| disincentivizes employers from doing it.
|
| Health and safety regulations are written in blood, and
| exist precisely because employers need to be forced by law
| to maintain safe working conditions for their employees.
| scholarofgolb wrote:
| > employers need to be forced by law to maintain safe
| working conditions for their employees.
|
| Probably less true in trucking, where the leading cause
| of worker injury is road accidents. If, say, a roofer
| falls off a roof, the only damage is to the worker, but
| if a trucker crashes badly enough to get injured, the
| truck and cargo are likely damaged as well. Truckers and
| their employees should be more naturally aligned on
| safety issues.
| sarchertech wrote:
| For employers who are big enough maybe. A big percentage
| of freight though is handled by small employers and owner
| operators.
|
| If a particular unsafe practice produces an extra $1
| million dollar accident every 200k hours of driving time,
| a small one man operation isn't likely to see that happen
| over the course of a career. And even if they do, they
| may not have enough data to notice the correlation.
|
| A company with 1000 drivers will likely deal with it once
| per month.
| mcguire wrote:
| But keep in mind, even the least-safe driver will get 99%
| of the loads to their destination. Dealing with accidents
| is a cost-of-doing-business issue for large companies.
| mcguire wrote:
| This is one of those situations where a theory reasoned
| from first principles fails to match reality.
|
| Back in the 20th C., drivers frequently took amphetamines
| in order to spend more time driving. Forged log books are
| a significant incentive for the development of electronic
| logs. I've seen many stories of drivers told to break
| hours-of-service regulations by dispatchers.
|
| And the hours of service regs are insane
| (https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-
| service/summary-... - keep in mind "on duty" != "driving"
| but waiting for loads and such, which the driver is not
| paid for) largely to maximize the number of hours driven.
| beaeglebeached wrote:
| Why isn't it illegal to force someone to log/elog overage
| hours? Isn't that a fifth amendment violation as you're
| forcing them to incriminate themselves? Seems elog should
| be challenged.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Same reason you can go to jail for not reporting your
| illegal income.
| happyopossum wrote:
| By that logic any law requiring disclosure of any kind
| would be a fifth amendment violation.
|
| You are not required to participate in trucking, nor is
| it a right to do so. Choosing that career (and it's
| associated licensing) comes with responsibilities...
| IntelMiner wrote:
| > Second, it its truly a safety hazard then it
| disincentivizes employers from doing it.
|
| When have employers ever cared about safety except when
| mandated by law? These things were all legally codified
| because people got hurt or died, not because companies
| wanted to be "nice"
| idlewords wrote:
| Truck drivers don't put in the maximum hours possible; their
| maximum allowed driving time is heavily regulated by law and
| increasingly enforced by remote monitoring.
| pkulak wrote:
| Maximum hours possible is the maximum allowed driving time.
| MisterTea wrote:
| The ELD (electronic logging device) reports this data to
| the trucking company. It is up to them to enforce driving
| time. However, law enforcement can request these logs
| during a stop or inspection and the ELD must display this
| on screen or a print out. https://eld.fmcsa.dot.gov/
| missedthecue wrote:
| It's pretty hard to cheat. Much to the irritation of
| truckers.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The opposite could not be further from the truth.
|
| Trucker forums are full of ways to cheat the devices like
| simply pulling a fuse or replacing it with one that's
| been burned out, and police can't / won't check
| electronic logbooks because it's too much of a hassle for
| them.
|
| The companies installing the electronic logbook devices
| are the same people who have incentive to cheat the
| system. So do you think anyone notices, complains, or
| gets disciplined when "the fuse keeps burning"?
| jopsen wrote:
| Do truck drivers count the hours they spend waiting to be
| loaded or unloaded?
|
| Sure they have breaks, but is it really spare time of
| you're stuck in a truck in the middle of nowhere waiting
| for time to pass so you can drive again?
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| You mean like how hospitals were told to stop overworking
| their residents by the goverment, and told the residents to
| fake their timecards?
|
| The industry shifted to electronic logbooks and while there
| was initial resistance, truckers quickly learned they could
| just pull fuses, or cover GPS antennas...and that police
| officers would look at paper logbooks but didn't have the
| equipment or interest to pull electronic logs.
|
| Truckers in the US do whatever they please, and the rest of
| us pay the price when they crash and kill others or dump
| toxic crap everywhere.
| m463 wrote:
| On the other hand, there is a maximum number of hours a driver
| can drive by law, and it has to be logged.
|
| I think it is 11 hours per day, with a minimum rest time of 10
| consecutive hours.
| bena wrote:
| Because WalMart knows it is primarily a logistics company. They
| know that if they get the goods to stores efficiently, everything
| else will follow.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| also they have union that knows that.
| mixdup wrote:
| Walmart drivers are not unionized
| silenced_trope wrote:
| This makes sense.
|
| If they're paid higher than average, then how could a union
| fight to get them higher wages when they aren't doing it
| for the unionized competitors that have lower?
|
| And also per another comment here, they require an
| unblemished driving record. So if the worst concern of
| unions came true, that they can make it hard to fire bad
| performers and require hiring "their guys", then drivers
| with blemished records can make it in and stick around.
| That means the good drivers currently employed may see
| their value drop comparatively and likewise their ability
| to demand better pay.
|
| As it stands it seems like the current drivers then have
| the benefit of being considered best in industry and may
| prefer to gate-keep and not unionize as a result in order
| to protect themselves.
|
| I wonder if other companies that want to fight unionization
| should do similar: hire top performers and pay them well :)
| asimpleusecase wrote:
| Here is the money quote that makes the most sense to me: "They
| wanted to pay them good money because it was the absolute core of
| their, of their business -- to get this stuff from the
| distribution center to the store at precisely the right time with
| no screw-ups," Lichtenstein said. "That was crucial."
|
| I am sure that WalMart demands full compliance with all
| regulations and is very exacting in pick up and delivery times.
| Likely drives are doing the same routes all the time. A lot of
| drivers would find that boring.
| lupire wrote:
| Do drivers care about route variety? I don't think it's like
| flying where you can get a little mini vacation on your route.
| bluGill wrote:
| Most drivers are running a fixed route. You (or often you
| company) has contracts to make regular deliveries. Most
| companies that ship something ship the same thing every day
| to the same customers.
|
| that said, there are a lot of deliveries that are not the
| same thing to the same place. while they are a minority
| overall, there are still a lot. If you work for a big
| national shipping company (WalMart is not this even though
| they are national) you can ask for a delivery to anywhere -
| they always have a single delivery to some random location.
| Though if you want to go to rural states - many other drivers
| grew up on a farm and truck driver is one of the few well
| paying jobs they can get without a degree on so there is a
| lot of others wanting that. (If you want to go to a big city
| there are plenty of delivers and less drivers with reason to
| want them)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Many drivers like driving a familar route because they know
| what to expect. They know where the low bridges are, they
| know which roads are designated truck routes, where there are
| difficult turns, they know which exits have fuel/good
| food/shopping/parking or are a safe place to stop to get out
| and take a walk, etc.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| My uncle was a truck driver.
|
| Driving a new route (in his work) was generally not
| considered "exciting" - but taxing.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Isn't 6 figures the new 'living wage' in many areas?
| replwoacause wrote:
| Yes
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Only in the wealthiest cities and neighborhoods, which is a
| very small share of the total. There's almost 20,000 cities in
| the USA and only about six of them have an average living wage
| above $100K.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| And debt is at its highest ratio in modern history, along
| with all cost of living metrics. Most of those sub-$100k zips
| are dying.
| mcguire wrote:
| Median household income in the US is $75,000. (https://www.cens
| us.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-27...)
| elzbardico wrote:
| All things considered, Wallmart is a pretty decent company, at
| least for workers, and even more if you compare with Jeff Bezo's
| slave driving operation.
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| No, it most definitely is not. Walmart (one 'l') is
| consistently in one of the top employers with employees on
| SNAP. So, if you live and work in the US, you're subsidizing
| Walmart's employees.
| efields wrote:
| Maybe that's because they employ so many people, law of large
| numbers etc.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| The idea is that multi hundred billion dollar corporations
| shouldn't be employing a single person who needs SNAP.
| Fernicia wrote:
| Online discourse proving once again the worst thing a
| company can do for PR is employ poor people.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| SNAP is based on income, so anyone that's _properly_
| employed should be making too much money to qualify.
|
| So is this purely a communication problem, or is there a
| real a wage/hours problem?
|
| If they're offering enough hours and the employee is
| choosing to be far under full time, then we should phrase
| things more specifically than "employed".
|
| But if anyone that wants to be full time, or is full
| time, doesn't meet the income threshold, that sounds like
| Walmart taking advantage of insufficient worker
| protection.
| Fernicia wrote:
| SNAP eligibility is based on household net income. A
| father of 2, with an unemployed spouse, and medical bills
| could be earning vastly more than someone single and
| debt-free, while still qualifying for SNAP when the
| latter does not.
|
| It's silly to put the oneness onto their employers when
| circumstances can vary so wildly.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Thank you for adding context to your stance after your
| initial remark.
| Aunche wrote:
| If Walmart laid off all their employees and replaced them
| with half as many employees that were paid twice as much,
| you'd be subsidizing even more people's living expenses.
| Yet somehow Walmart would be a more ethical company
| because no of their their own employees would be on SNAP?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Paying half as many people twice as much is way better
| _in general_ , we don't even need to mention SNAP.
| Aunche wrote:
| So if you don't have the skills to be worth twice the
| compensation, you don't deserve a job at all and it's the
| taxpayer's responsibility to pay for your expenses?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| What a weird thing to read into my comment. No, I do not
| think that. Skills didn't even come up. And this isn't
| the only employer that exists, nor is there a fixed
| supply of job money in the world.
|
| Also, paying half as many people twice the wage is in
| aggregate roughly the same as cutting typical work hours
| to 20 per week while maintaining the same pay per week.
| Where's the downside for the employees?
|
| And in particular for the SNAP aspect, the whole point of
| this discussion is that the current wages were _not
| getting those people out of the SNAP income range_ , so
| the taxpayer cost is the same even if Walmart fires all
| of them and replaces them with nothing.
| Aunche wrote:
| > And this isn't the only employer that exists
|
| If Walmart is bad for employing people who rely on SNAP,
| then wouldn't it be the same be true for any other
| business that does the same?
|
| > Also, paying half as many people twice the wage is in
| aggregate roughly the same as cutting typical work hours
| to 20 per week while maintaining the same pay per week.
|
| My point is that it's not roughly the same at all. In one
| option everyone is still employed, and in the other half
| the people don't have a job. Obviously, if something
| magically doubles everyone's productivity, that would be
| a good thing, but you have to apply that on both sides of
| the comparison.
|
| > taxpayer cost is the same even if Walmart fires all of
| them and replaces them with nothing.
|
| Walmart minimum wage is $14 now. Walmart workers who are
| single and childless or married to a working couple who
| otherwise wouldn't be eligible for SNAP would become
| eligible if they lose their jobs.
| billy99k wrote:
| I've always hated this argument because it puts the blame
| solely on the employer, when the employee can also be to
| blame for their own circumstances.
|
| According to this logic, if I'm $300,000 in college debt,
| it's my employers fault if I can't make ends meet (even
| if I'm getting paid well).
| missedthecue wrote:
| This is a bad way to measure things because SNAP benefit
| qualifications are measured by annual income and number
| of children.
|
| Walmart could pay shelf-stockers $50/hr, but if they have
| 6 kids and work 20 hours a week, they would actually
| qualify for food stamps. Does that mean they're underpaid
| at $50/hr?
| Fernicia wrote:
| Lots of circumstances that could mean a fairly paid person is
| eligible for SNAP. Especially if you are counting part time
| employees.
| pphysch wrote:
| The Walton family has consistently been the wealthiest in the
| world over the past few decades (currently ~$250B networth). If
| there was still just 1 Walton, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos would
| never have held the #1 spot. Greedy as they are, the Waltons
| have always been greedier.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Because Walmart is what happens when we value productivity over
| dignity.
|
| The most important things in life are our time, our
| relationships, our health, our self-determination, basically all
| subjective and individual experience. Western ethos substitutes
| those intrinsic values with external "objective" measures rooted
| in necessity, fear, dogma, etc that evolved over eons of
| suffering and exploitation under various forms of colonialism
| where the winners wrote the history.
|
| The ramification of these mismatched attentions/intentions is
| that we live in a world obsessed with optimizing efficiency,
| creating a strong work ethic, taking on ever-more responsibility
| and monopolizing nearly the entirety of our time over a career.
| Instead of innovating, automating and empowering the workforce to
| share in the risks and rewards so that someday work is not
| equated with basic survival.
|
| I believe that the most important thing we can do is disrupt the
| status quo. In this case, that means thinking outside the box to
| whatever level is needed to equalize pay between a custodian, a
| retail clerk, a truck driver and a CEO. The framing of ideas and
| barriers to entry which prevent that leveling are the root cause
| of wealth inequality and represent the primary source of
| injustice in our lives.
|
| If someone happened to win the internet lottery or buy Bitcoin at
| $10 like I didn't, and is wondering where to invest, stop looking
| to foreign markets or whatever is over the horizon, and ask what
| your parents and loved ones sacrificed to get you where you are
| today. Then ruthlessly work to remove the obstacles they faced
| for future generations. Anything less is not "real work" IMHO,
| it's just an ever-growing shrine to your ego.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| How do we get to a world where every still has there basic
| needs met but we value the things that bring us dignity over
| productivity?
| notShabu wrote:
| I wonder if this has the effect of increasing "market rate" so
| that only big companies with economies of scale can be
| competitive
| caycep wrote:
| One playbook in how to survive against Amazon?
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Fordism
| renewiltord wrote:
| Answer: They don't
|
| https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Walmart-Truck-Driver-Salari...
|
| Looks like top reported are at $75k.
| subsubzero wrote:
| There is a narrative that Wal-mart pays low wages, I think its
| quite apt as most positions do pay quite low, I worked at Wal
| Mart while in college and saw it first hand. A few things to
| note, certain positions do pay well, store managers for one, I
| know for a fact that over 20 years ago certain store managers
| would see over $300k in yearly compensation. In addition once I
| got into tech after college I worked with a few walmart.com ex-
| employees, and these employees stated that part of their bonus
| was tied to a percentage of sales walmart.com made and they said
| the bonus pay was wildly lucrative. So Wal Mart does pay well in
| fact if you are in the right position. Considering keeping your
| shelves(and online distribution centers) stocked is the lifeblood
| of the company it behooves them to have a healthy circulatory
| system and not have drivers who do not deliver on time or get
| into accidents.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _So Wal Mart does pay well in fact if you are in the right
| position._
|
| This feels like a globally true statement, regardless of the
| employer, no?
| resolutebat wrote:
| Most companies don't have 14,000 of these "right" positions.
| jonlucc wrote:
| Most companies don't have 2.1M employees.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| 14,000 out of their total number of employees is such a
| drop in the bucket though. If you can get hired as a Wal-
| Mart trucker, from what I understand, you're the best of
| the best. Also, consider there are like 3.5 million truck
| drivers in the US - only a tiny percentage of those can get
| jobs at places that pay as well as Wal-Mart. And Wal-Mart
| has 1.6 million US employees alone, so you're talking less
| than 1% of total jobs when you say 14,000.
| packetlost wrote:
| Walmart is somewhat notorious in the OTR trucking industry for
| having high wages, but very high barrier to entry. You need a
| near perfect driving record among other things.
|
| OTR trucking overall pays pretty well, but it's an extremely
| physically and emotionally taxing job that doesn't really get
| the credit it deserves. How would you feel if you were "home"
| for a weekend every 2 weeks and living in 20sqft the rest of
| the time?
| WalterBright wrote:
| > You need a near perfect driving record among other things.
|
| Absolutely. If a driver is at fault in an accident, Walmart
| will get sued for $zillions.
|
| I once knew a middle aged man laying tile. I asked him why
| was he laying tile for crap wages. He said he lost his
| trucking license because he had a DUI (not while trucking).
| Doing construction was the only job he could get. He was
| quite bitter about it.
| packetlost wrote:
| Pretty sure a DUI bars you from holding a CDL of any kind,
| not specifically a trucking license. I don't see a problem
| with that at all.
| beaeglebeached wrote:
| I built my own house because almost every step was more
| expensive hourly labor than me writing software for an hour
| instead.
|
| Even the lower rate such as concrete laborers wanted 100+
| an hour.
|
| I suspect the low pay of many of these trades is just a
| symptom of housing and construction being the number one
| money laundering industry and thus tradesman are always
| saying they're making nothing while simultaneously asking
| 100+ an hour cash and working full weeks.
|
| Id bet the BLS income reports are off by like 50+%.
| bernawil wrote:
| I think you mean tax dodging instead of money laundering
| there. Though, if they are really succesful dodging
| taxes, they might need to do some money laundering later,
| too.
| jzb wrote:
| In college I had a friend whose father was an OTR trucker.
| Absolutely destroyed his back. He had back problems when I
| first met the family and a few years later he was on medical
| leave and unable to work, and he was _maybe_ in his late 50s.
|
| He wasn't driving for Walmart of making that kind of money
| then, so I hope he was able to move into a different career
| that didn't do further damage.
|
| It's not a job I'd want to do. Ergonomics aside, I find
| driving to be very unpleasant in large doses. Having to put
| up with traffic, shitty drivers, weather, and everything else
| 8-12 hours per day is not my idea of a great time.
| packetlost wrote:
| My mother was an OTR trucker during most of my teenage
| years, including driving for Walmart under contract (so not
| paid amazingly well, but regularly interacted with the
| Walmart employees at the DC in Tomah, WI). It's not always
| back breaking work, but access to (healthy) food is a major
| issue. For Walmart specifically, there's not much physical
| effort involved besides lowering the trailer landing gear,
| which is almost always done with a manual crank. The
| Walmart backroom staff handle unloading and the DC staff
| handle loading, which would be very very taxing to do
| constantly.
| fuzztester wrote:
| why is access to healthy food an issue? because truckers,
| being on the road, have to eat in poor quality
| restaurants, such as diners, maybe?
| swozey wrote:
| Store Managers are a very different type of pay structure
| though. They're more like someone from Corporate vs Retail.
| They get paid massive bonuses based on numbers their stores
| hit.
|
| I worked at a few Home Depots and IIRC the store managers were
| clearing 150-250 while the assistant managers I think were in
| the 60-80k range. Then us floor staff were 9-15, maybe 20. This
| was 2008ish.
|
| I remember the biggest HD in my state or somewhere the manager
| was getting I think 500k-1mil+. You can infer it from the
| numbers the store does and their bonus percentage whatever that
| was.
|
| My mom was an HR director there so corporate as well and she
| made somwhere in 130-200+ not sure exact.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> They get paid massive bonuses based on numbers their
| stores hit._
|
| Isn't that ... _good_?
|
| The demographic in every region or neighborhood is different
| and has different tastes, incomes and budgets, so it's your
| job as store manager to identify the needs of that
| demographic, and order merchandise and organize it on
| shelves, run sales, etc. in order to move as much of it as
| possible to maximize sales and profits. Sort of like targeted
| advertising but IRL and less privacy invasive.
|
| Paying based on this seems like the only way to incentivize
| this performance.
| LegitShady wrote:
| In university before co-op, many years ago, I worked for
| home depot part time. the line employee profit share was
| really bad. the management profit share was better. They
| understaffed my department for long periods of time to make
| their numbers look better. They were making $15k/day in
| profit on my department but they wouldn't schedule a second
| employee so that there was someone there to help people
| when person #1 was on the saw, on the forklift, or covering
| lunch for the next department over too.
|
| I quit mid june after I realized they weren't
| hiring/scheduling more staff for the summer even though
| every day was very busy, constantly running between helping
| customers and taking care of other things.
|
| There are a lot of ways to make profit and show good
| metrics that aren't good for line employees.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> There are a lot of ways to make profit and show good
| metrics that aren't good for line employees._
|
| Sure, but this is in line with every major (European)
| tech company I ever worked at. Pay employees peanuts and
| pay senior mangers amazing, therefore you were
| incentivized not to do well as an IC, but to put up with
| bullshit and fight your way to climb the corporate ladder
| to management, and then exploit the other poor schmucks
| who come below you with the same perverse incentive
| structure.
|
| Yes this leads to a huge turnover, unhappy workers, and
| to a lot of arguments, back-stabbings and fights. But
| their stocks were always rock solid and managers were
| always wealthy so I guess they saw that culture as a net
| win. It seems to be the M.O. with ever major company
| everywhere, I think it's called the "GE model".
|
| Paying ICs at the bottom great wages and incentivizing
| them with stock, is mostly unique to US/SV and new-age
| software start-ups from the Google/Facebook era, but rare
| everywhere else.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ye it is strange that such anti-intuitive management
| style pays off. I have no clue why.
|
| I got this feeling that what's most important for a Big
| Bad Company is to be able to get well of with management
| of other Big Bad Companies to be able to land contracts.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Ye it is strange that such anti-intuitive management
| style pays off. I have no clue why. _
|
| It works because it exploits several flaws in our society
| and in human psychology like greed, wealth inequality,
| conformity of the masses to cultural norms, fear of
| missing out/of being left out, and the crabs in the
| bucket mentality, which leads to a rat race to the bottom
| form which it's difficult to check yourself out as an
| individual if the majority does it.
|
| This isn't something big bad corporations have created,
| it s just something that has existed for hundreds of
| years, they're just exploiting. The same mechanism and
| behaviors were in place during the communist rule in my
| home country 35+ years ago, when people were fighting to
| climb up the party ranks, because that's what gave you
| the best QoL. Now it's climbing the corporate ranks.
| tpm wrote:
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
| principle-...
| klyrs wrote:
| > Isn't that ... _good_?
|
| For whom?
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| +1 to everything you say here. The store manager track is
| very much a Corporate vs Retail (hourly) thing at least at
| the big chains.
|
| I worked retail in high school and college in the same era as
| you mentioned and even 20 years ago, a store manager at a
| Best Buy or a Costco was clearing $250k or more, at least in
| the wealthier-Atlanta area where I lived (I know a lot of HD
| employees being from Atlanta and my knowledge of corporate
| and sales manager salaries at HD aligns with yours too), as
| you said, based in part on bonuses related to store revenue
| (the Best Buy stores I worked at when I was 16 - 22 were two
| of the top-ranked stores in the southeast region by sales,
| with some departments being among the top 10 in the whole
| company). For some of the chains, I think that has decreased
| as in-store sales have shifted but places like Costco
| notoriously pay their store managers extremely well.
|
| Best Buy desperately wanted me to quit college and be fast-
| tracked into store or sales management (I would spend my
| summers as a manager of a department and they agreed to keep
| me at that elevated hourly wage even when I was part-time
| during the school year), trying to lure me with tales of just
| how much money the top of the foodchain people make, but I
| never took it seriously. Given the ebbs and flows of the
| economy (I graduated from college in 2008) and the collapse
| of the retail market from its early 2000s high in favor of
| ecommerce/Amazon, that was almost certainly the right
| decision -- but it was an instructive lesson for me at a
| young age about the very disparate differences in
| compensation between the hourly workers and the people at the
| top of those stores.
| eastbound wrote:
| The Freakinomics book has a great chapter on how the police
| discovered accounting books of a NYC drug cartel, and its
| pay scale from the street watcher to the top lord was the
| same as at... McDonnalds (just the ratio, not the amounts).
|
| 20 years later, I reckon there was a lot of storytelling
| here advantaging the arguments of the right-wing, but I'd
| still be curious what are the true figures.
| subsubzero wrote:
| You are 100% spot on. Shrink was a huge factor for bonus
| payout(huge pay lever for mgmt in stores) as if you lived in
| a area that had high theft you never hit your bonus(shrink is
| the delta of actual vs. recorded inventory). That and the
| bonus also factored in sales volume, but shrink was a giant
| component of it. I remember when a few employees from a rural
| store came to help out they mentioned they had never not
| gotten a bonus, whereas my store - a urban store never
| received a bonus due to excessive shrink. But what I was
| getting at is there are positions that pay well if you hit
| your numbers, as a sales associate/dept. manager your pay was
| capped to really low numbers no matter what happened.
| m463 wrote:
| Home Depot stock has been very lucrative. Take a look at the
| historical values.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Home Depot is the best performing stock in the S&P500 going
| back to 1981
| raydev wrote:
| > while the assistant managers I think were in the 60-80k
| range.
|
| Don't know how it was at Home Depot, and my experience at
| Walmart was ~20 years ago, but asst managers were in-building
| 10-12 hours/day, usually there 6 days a week for various
| reasons, and at that time were only making $50k salary to
| start. Unless there were other bonuses I was unaware of, it
| was absolutely not worth it.
|
| I wasn't making a living wage as an hourly associate, but
| they were super strict about me working beyond 40 hours, and
| when they "requested" beyond that (it was rare but never
| truly optional if I wanted to keep climbing) I was well
| compensated because they were terrified of lawsuits by that
| point. Small blessings.
| swozey wrote:
| Yeah, asst managers lived a brutal life walking back and
| forth through the stores on walkie talkies all day long. I
| have a feeling its a lot of peoples first salaried jobs,
| they move up from front line to asst mgr so willing to take
| more abuse to not make $15/hr anymore. I was there at many
| points. I did that leaving HD, 12.50 to 40k in ops.
|
| I can picture the faces of all of my managers, ASMs. I
| can't picture the face of either of my store managers. I'm
| not sure I actually ever saw them. They definitely weren't
| in the store often.
|
| I loved my first store and HATED my second store. If you're
| full-time at HD you have no control of your hours at all.
| They'd schedule me to close 11pm-12am then open at 5am the
| next day at the second store. I just quit one day. I
| constantly got sick from getting no sleep.
|
| If you're part-time there you have 100% control of your
| hours. Tons of people in college who worked 2-4 hours a
| day. It was miserable watching them come and go.
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| I worked at Lowe's circa 2013 and this was my experience as
| well. One thing to note is that if you're ambitious and not
| incompetent, you can get pretty far career wise in retail.
| That was the impression I got anyways.
| swozey wrote:
| I'm the op that worked at HD, I got out at like 20, but I
| have an ex who's climbing the ladder at Abercrombie (or
| whoever owns it) for the last 5-6 years and it seem so
| miserable.
|
| She's moving every 1-3 years because they transfer her to a
| new store, and because she's running the higher profit
| stores they send her to trash stores to try and fix them.
| She has no practically no vacation, has to fill in staff
| shortages, works every weekend. I think she's around
| 30-40k. So she's doing all this to eventually (6 years in
| now) break into the corporate world, where she'll then have
| to move 1000 miles away to I think Georgia.
|
| To... probably make 60k.
|
| I'm really curious where she'll be in 5-10 years, she's
| managed so many stores I feel like she'd go regional
| manager route or something. OR training would keep her at
| corporate instead.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I worked in tech somewhere behind walmart.com and the
| pay/bonuses were standard silicon valley, non FAANG. More or
| less median.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Retail is always a flat pyramid. GMs get paid. The guy who ran
| the CompUSA that I worked in in college cleared $250k in the
| mid 90s.
|
| Even a CVS will pay the GM well if they hit targets. And if
| they miss the targets, they get purged and there's a thousand
| people to replace them.
| shmatt wrote:
| Walmart Global Tech is above average tech pay, just a step or 2
| behind FAANG. One downside is annual stock grants instead of 4
| year, so there is a lot less upside
| JeremyNT wrote:
| Here was a recent and (somewhat) related post about the trucking
| industry and training for a CDL in Texas [0]. A very interesting
| read about both the macro environment and the particulars of
| several people looking to enter this career.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046904
| voidmain0001 wrote:
| Are the drivers expected to deliver 110% all day and everyday? We
| all know long haul truck drivers pee in empty Gatorade bottles to
| avoid using a restroom. Do Walmart drivers also defecate in
| diapers to avoid stopping so they can continue to be in the top
| tier of drivers?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| How does Amazon pay its truck drivers? They seem like the closest
| comparison, with their own distribution system. Amazon's
| reputation is treating employees poorly, but maybe truck drivers
| are valued.
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