if walmart paid a living wage
 

they say they'd have to raise prices to do so...check out this video, that shows what that would mean exactly:

http://www.slate.com/articles/busine...uch_would.html


so, if you spent 500 a month on groceries...1.4% would mean you'd pay...

i know the answer, but i thought i'd get people to do the math.


also, knowing that many corporations are nailing record profits, and knowing what they pay for their top management (who have seen wages increase while everyone else's has languished) don't tell me it isn't affordable.


but, boy, those banks sure make a lot of money processing ebt transactions, don't they?

If WalMart employees would have worked harder and been more responsible when they were in school, they wouldn't be forced to work at WalMart or some other menial job requiring little to no skills and would have a job that paid a living wage.

For heaven's sake the greeter at my WalMart can't get out of a chair and manages a 'welcome to WalMart' every 3rd customer. And she deserves a raise? :zz:

You want to give them more money, do it out your own pocket. Or organize such an effort.

BTW if 1.4% is such an insignificant number might I suggest the Federal Government give a 1.4% rebate, across the board on this year's personal income tax collected. What do you suppose $40 billion infused into the economy would do as opposed to taking an extra 1.4% from every WalMart shopper including seniors buying their drugs.

I'm not sure what your personal peeve is with WalMart but it's not just the Walton family and upper management that is making money. It's also their shareholders including most pension, education and diversified mutual funds. What do you suppose an arbitrary 1.4% raise in prices at the register would do to its stock price?

god save us

Silly Danzig- if Walmart paid their employees a living wage then Alice Walton might not be able to pay $70 million for an apartment!

http://pagesix.com/2014/04/03/wal-ma...719.1370441377

Where do you expect her to live? In some $60 million hovel? How dare you!

I mean, Del has already made it clear that he thinks Wal Mart workers are lazy scum and don't deserve to live, when will you get with the program? Alice Walton worked very hard to get born into such a rich family!

And having worked retail, it's not an easy job. It takes a great deal of patience and energy not to punch ******* customers in the face who automatically assume you're a lazy moron because you work retail. Retail is the worst. And it's mostly the customers. I remember one woman attempting to use coupons in my checkout line for things that not only did she not buy, but we didn't even sell. And when I said no, she marched over to the managers' office to complain about me.

yeah, retail workers don't earn their keep, but old alice has. :rolleyes: i'm not surprised that's his response-but i put him on ignore some time ago to spare myself.
i also worked in retail, and if i had to do it again, there's no way i could. i learned a lot there, everywhere i worked i learned valuable lessons.

what i've learned most tho-is people who deride walmart and fast food workers (for example) don't know what they're talking about. neither do people who think all military enlistees do so because they can't do anything else.
my son passed up an lsu scholarship for the navy, and is now a nuclear electronics technician. he'll make handsome dough when he gets out after giving his time to the navy in exchange for several years worth of education and training.

Glad he isn't going to HAVE to work at WalMart.

You and he do realize LSU has a nuclear engineering program? And a 4 year scholarship is worth about $140K. And a nuclear engineer starts out with a salary 40% greater than a nuclear electronics technician?

Forget it and no wonder you don't read my posts.

http://news.msn.com/us/median-ceo-pa...lion-in-2013-1

NEW YORK (AP) — They're the $10 million men and women.


Propelled by a soaring stock market, the median pay package for a CEO rose above eight figures for the first time last year. The head of a typical large public company earned a record $10.5 million, an increase of 8.8 percent from $9.6 million in 2012, according to an Associated Press/Equilar pay study.

Last year was the fourth straight that CEO compensation rose following a decline during the Great Recession. The median CEO pay package climbed more than 50 percent over that stretch. A chief executive now makes about 257 times the average worker's salary, up sharply from 181 times in 2009.


yeah... money's tight, can't afford raises for the employees. god, these poor companies. i hope they can hang in there! :rolleyes:

I sure hope for his sake that both he and you have that guaranteed in writing somewhere.

don't need it in writing, just know what the market is for his job.
he just got an almost six figure bonus for re-upping, demand is that high.

I obviously agree with you that the more skills and talent a person has, the more money they deserve to make. That being said, that doesn't mean that a person in a menial job should have to practically starve. I mean there is a happy medium.

I heard some fast food workers (who are making $9 an hour) are asking for $15 an hour. That is a little bit extreme. They shouldn't go from $9 to $15. But if they got $10 or $11 an hour, I think that would be a reasonable compromise.

What you said about people working harder in school may have some merit, but I'm sure plenty of those people worked hard but just aren't very smart. Just because someone isn't very smart, it doesn't mean they should starve. I mean they don't deserve to make a lot of money but I think there is enough wealth in this country to at least pay the bottom jobs a slightly higher wage. There is a happy medium.

In addition, the job market is so poor right now that even some people with good educations and good skills can't find a decent job. I'm sure there are some employees at Walmart who are overqualified but who can't find decent jobs anywhere else.

They shouldn't starve for sure!

But at the same time also shouldn't be offered a salary breeding

And meanwhile everyone is missing the real problem which is the gutting of the middle class. The middle class that buys a hell of a lot more cars, houses,ovens, etc. then the top and bottom combined. Who is going to buy your products Mr. CEO when your customer or their customer has no job. Those on these boards that think their job is immune are whistling by the graveyard.

Yes, so let's import millions more.

Too true.
I put the link to that article in this thread because it was the most recent thread dealing with wages, etc.

Obviously not a Walmart problem, but a wage problem...with wages stagnating everywhere but the very top.the union my husband belongs to will be in contract negotiations soon, the current contract ends this year. We are wondering what scraps will be tossed by the company.
This isn't the production union, but covers electricians, instrumentation and mechanical. Skilled workers with years of experience, who keep this place running. And they are hard to find. Won't matter, judging by past experience.

This. The amount of labor required to build a $100,000 car versus a $20,000 is minimal, compared to the amount of labor required to build 5 $20,000 cars versus one $100,000 car. The middle class will consume more than the wealthy, because there are more middle class. That's more money continuing to flow through the economy, instead of being socked away.

Call the ultra wealthy what they really are: hoarders.

true.
a million dollars in the hands of a millionaire sits in a vault.
take that million and spread it out to the rest of the country, it gets spent.

it just boggles my mind that people are perfectly ok with pay to the top skyrocketing, while the rest of us are supposed to be happy with the crumbs. that people explain away stagnating wages-while the money is still there, it just goes to the very few now.
what changed? why are the mindsets of the businesses changing? why don't they view it like henry ford, where the workers have to be able to afford the products they make?


i think another round of tax cuts to the wealthy is the answer. it's bound to work eventually.

Unfortunately I think as a country we are headed towards bloodshed. The sky has been falling for sometime.

http://www.priceactionlab.com/Blog/2...y-bull-market/

Be careful there, you'll be labeled a conspiracy theorist ;)

This has been the FED model ever since the collapse of the economy and subsequent "propping-it-back-up" with borrowed money.

You never see Obama talking about restoring the middle class, only "creating good paying jobs". It is not in the government, nor the FED's interest to create policies that restore the middle class. Quite the opposite, actually. We discussed Thomas Pikkety's book in the last thread this topic came up in, I'd really suggest anyone that has an actual interest in the fundamental cause/effect of Capitalism run amok take some time to read it. There's only like 800 years of data that points out precisely what happens next (believe it or not, we're not the first ones to be in this current state)

Of course it is sooooo much easier to blame the big ole' meanies that run Walmart because they hate 'Merica.

the rule makers don't care. The choice was made.

Technology won. We lost. The end.

Was going to order that, thanks for reminding me.

High stakes musical chairs where 95% of Americans don't even have a chance to chase the remaining chairs.

The first thing I'd recommend investigating and am personally considering is changing 401K / IRA contributions to after tax. If you think the current tax rates on investments are high relative to income, think about the full blown Marxist/Socialist state you will be retiring into when they hit you for 74%.

I don't think they hate America; they just love it less than they do their bank accounts.

We blame Big Business because Big Business IS the government. They bought it; they own it.

I don't think the current tax rates on investments are high relative to income at all. In fact, they are much too low, relative to income. Yet another way the rich stack the deck. They pay 20 percent tax for sitting around while money their great-grandad made ensures they don't have to do anything with their lives.

Lower tax rates on capital gains is merely welfare for the already wealthy.

My fault - I worded my thought improperly. The point I was trying to make is that when saving for retirement most financial advisers will recommend investing pre-tax dollars; the wisdom of course being that you will be taxed less on it in retirement (as you make a lot less money, the taxable rate will be much lower when you are not accruing an annual income).

My point was that this seems logical now, but in 15-20 years, well after the scale has been tipped (between workers paying into the income tax base vs. those not) the tax rates will have to rise exponentially to pay the massive debt + fact that 65 -70% of the people in the country will be retired, on welfare and not paying into the system, or on a government funded disability.

The number of people on disability, as Jim pointed out in a previous thread, is at an all time high. Sure, a lot of this is fraud, but alot of this has to do with 10 years of maiming our kids (physically and mentally) in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Our defense is spending is 37% of our GNP. By comparison, China is 11% and Russia is similar.

The point of all of this is that we are beyond any chance of correcting and fixing our problems. We will have no choice at this juncture but to eventually devolve into a sort of Marxist Apocalypse where we will be taxed at rates that will compare to most Socialist regimes, though we will reap none of the benefits (healthcare, retirement, etc.)

So you may be ahead paying 25-28% tax on it now as an adjunct to your income, rather than a flat 70-75% of it in 20 years.

Ah, thank you for the clarification. I don't disagree with this. Outsized defense spending (which does little other than make those with government contracts wealthy) and frankly, too low of taxes on the wealthy over the past 35 years have indeed screwed the pooch. I don't think it's paranoid at all to think it will end in violence. There's a reason kids in school don't learn much about the history of the labor movement in this nation- it's because most of it through the 1930s was written in blood. We didn't learn anything the first time around, clearly.

the defense spending is simply outrageous in this country.
when paul ryan came out with his latest 'cut welfare and add that money to defense' i had such a look on my face, some people asked me if i was ok! i was at the gym at the time they were showing it, and i guess i looked simply furious.
how many tanks we have parked out in the desert in storage right now? that f-35 program, what's the tag on that up to at this point?

And now the secretary of Veteran Affairs is out over the VA scandal, and no one is talking about the real scandal- that Congress is NOT FUNDING THE VA ADEQUATELY. How hard is this? As someone on balloon-juice put it, the next nominee's response to every question asked during his nomination hearing should be, "Where's the money, Senator?"

Billions for shiny new machines to send young men and women out to fight in, no money for those men and women when they have the audacity to come home wounded instead of dead.

treatment of vets has been pisspoor since george washingtons time. it's ridiculous. hell, they sent andrew jackson and his militia to a fight...changed their mind after they'd already been gone for weeks, andy paid out of his own pocket to get all his men back home.
spend all this money on all these toys, send people to fight for bullsh-- reasons, they come back damaged and backs are turned. it's a disgrace.

i know a lady whose husband was a disabled vietnam vet. he passed away last summer.
first thing that happened, they pay they sent stopped. reason? altho they'd been married over 20 years, they hadn't been married at least 10 years when the determination was made he deserved benefits, so they ended!

If you get the chance to see the HBO Vice episode on the amount of waste in Afghanistan, please do so.

If you happen to be on blood pressure medication, be sure to take before watching. Over 100 billion dollars to rebuild the country that has literally, in every sense of the word, has been thrown away and put in the hands of the Taliban.

http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/seg...34441254000e6e

hell, we've spent blood, sweat, tears and treasure for years in that shithole. trillions spent on a country worth millions. to what end? i have no idea at all. and now we get reassurance from obama that we will maintain a presence there after the war 'ends' at years end. what for?
and don't get me started on all the equipment left behind in iraq, because it was 'cheaper' to leave it.
stupid, just stupid.
i thought we left the mother country way back when to keep out of attempts at empire and the like all over the world.

Too bad the saber rattlers didn't want to take a page out of the Russian's history book 35 years ago.

but what continues to go on there goes so far and beyond absurd there is no words left in the English language to describe it.

When you have defense contractors scrapping hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of brand new equipment so their budgets don't get un/de-funded the following year, and the Pakistani's then buy the military equipment from the scrap yard to turn over to the Taliban in order to use against us.

Corroborated evidence that prove IED's used against our troops were made from materials in the scrap yards filled by the defense contractors.

How the hell do you find a word that could possibly give this level absurdity it's proper credence?

yeah, i really don't think there is language strong enough to convey the utter ridiculousness of the situation. it's beyond the limits of our vocabulary.

:tro::tro:

http://americanthinker.com/2014/05/w...nal_media.html

You can really tell when an author is trying to hawk a book, cant ya?


I can assure you, the media did everything but NOT ignore the Clearwater Beach episode. They practically broke into network programming to cover the SWAT team descending on the block and kept a live scroll running all night.

turns out it was a group of thugs from a neighborhood in Tampa that went to the beach and thought it might be a good idea if they all had guns with them due to an ongoing beef with each other.

Not a peep about the mobs wandering the Gold Coast in Chicago.

Glad to hear Clearwater Beach doesn't have the same pc handicap Chicago does.

BTW the hawking of the book if that what it was didn't work on me.

Too depressing!

Media is obviously covering up surfer on porta potty crime as well

How many dead and wounded?