Sunday, December 05, 2004

Wal-Mart facts

From The New York Review of Books:

With 1.4 million employees worldwide, Wal-Mart's workforce is now larger than that of GM, Ford, GE, and IBM combined. At $258 billion in 2003, Wal-Mart's annual revenues are 2 percent of US GDP, and eight times the size of Microsoft's. In fact, when ranked by its revenues, Wal-Mart is the world's largest corporation.

...As of last spring, the average pay of a sales clerk at Wal-Mart was $8.50 an hour, or about $14,000 a year, $1,000 below the government's definition of the poverty level for a family of three.[4] Despite the implied claims of Wal-Mart's current TV advertising campaign, fewer than half— between 41 and 46 percent—of Wal-Mart employees can afford even the least-expensive health care benefits offered by the company.


Half of US productivity growth from 1995-2000 was in retail and wholesale distribution. Part of that comes from containing payroll costs, but IT and logistical efficiency are also key to Wal-Mart's success. Hopefully most of these clerks are only part-time workers and not sole breadwinners of their families. We noted before that Wal-Mart accounts for 10% of US imports from China.

1 comment:

Tonyp said...

Why don't you work at Walmart? Because they don't pay enough to live on? Why do all the people that work at Walmart work there? Because they pay them enough. If they wanted a better job they would get it. They don't. Your over paid professor. Your a idiot.

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