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Comment by nebulous1 | Hacker News Reader

I'm torn between wanting somebody to compete with Amazon and it being Walmart

While I was caught up in the anti-Walmart meme [and I'm using "meme" dismissively] for many years, today Walmart provides jobs in my community and those jobs appear to be stable with regular shifts because I often see the same cashiers at the same times one year to the next. I'll add that Walmart also generates local sales and income tax revenue [and sometimes property tax] that helps make schools and roads and fire trucks possible.

That's not to say either Amazon or Walmart is moral. It's more that because Walmart has a greater dependency on the commons around me and I believe its interests and mine are less orthogonal.

Everyone in your town was unemployed, had irregular shifts, and didn't have a functional fire station before Walmart came to town?

I think you're missing the nuance between "Walmart should leave," and "Walmart shouldn't have come."

Of course, we can only act on the future, so maybe the nuance is meaningless at this point.

No. That was not the case.

Sure, Walmart provides jobs in your community... But they cost state and federal taxpayers in a significant way.

Walmart's business model depends on state and federal government assistance to their low-paid workers:

http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/the-high-public-cost-of-low-...

It is true that Walmart brings in local revenues through sales and property taxes, however this is more than offset by the assistance state and federal governments have to provide to low-wage Walmart workers:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/15/...

I don't disagree. I think Walmart expresses the structure of health care access in the United States. I don't think the contractor model as implemented in the consumer facing gig economy or more traditionally in Amazon's warehouses has noticeably better economic outcomes for workers.

My impression is that when journalists muckrake contract labor, healthcare access gets lumped in with employment instability and attempts at assigning responsibility to the big brand for the effects of outsourcing to the lowest bidder.

Agreed. The gig/contractor model is certainly no better for workers than Walmart, and is perhaps worse.

The anti-Walmart meme makes it easy to assign responsibility to Walmart while still assuming the status quo regarding access to the health care system and the underlying economics.

Any unskilled job is going to have a low enough pay rate that many of the employees will qualify for public assistance. This goes for Walmart, Target, and the mom and pop shops Walmart replaced. If Walmart went out of business tomorrow, these people would still be on public assistance. That's today's economy.

> Any unskilled job...

That's a moving target with software in the economic picture now.

We know about the "That isn't AI" effect. Each incremental advance coming out of AI research or just software in general is countered with a problem domain the advance doesn't address, and the advance is dismissed as not really ground-breaking. This effect is commonly seen in action with traditional games (checkers, chess, Go, etc.), but I see it with all sorts of automation.

I posit there is a converse rule: every incremental gain (which admittedly are infinitesimal steps towards AGI/strong AI) has the potential to move the goalposts of what constitutes an "unskilled job".

We often fail to recognize this because the incrementalism's effect upon jobs is not nearly as dramatic as what we today imagine the transition from horses to cars to be (when in fact it was quite incremental back then as well). There aren't as many checkout cashiers as before due to software- and infrastructure-enhanced advances (bar codes and their scanners, supply chain management, etc.*), but because checkout cashiers aren't completely gone yet we don't viscerally perceive the economic effects. What used to be a skilled job is now classified as unskilled however, so the economic impact is huge.

I contend we don't need AGI for massive automation-originated social disruption. If someone produces software that roughly approximates the reasoning abilities and kinesthesia of a 7-11th grader, then that is the majority of people in the developed world, not to speak of the developing world. That developmental range is roughly equivalent to what the mainstream media content targets in the developed world. We'll see continuous, smaller disruptions far before that point, though it is an open research question if we will get there in the near future. For example, we still don't have a general software solution to a task as "simple" as folding clothes, sheets and towels grabbed at random from a dryer.

This article[1] though on a biased (in that they have a point of view) site, has links to some state data, so it's convenient to link to it. It's also specific to medicaid benefits.

> Of the 50 companies with the most employees on Medicaid in Massachusetts, almost half are retail and restaurant chains. The list includes CVS, Home Depot, May Department Stores, Sears, Kohl’s, Walgreen, Lowe’s, and Best Buy.

> Similar data was recently released by Wisconsin, Missouri, and New Jersey. Topping all three states’ lists are many of the same retailers, including Walmart, Target, Dollar General, and Home Depot, as well as restaurant chains such as Olive Garden and Red Lobster.

It doesn't seem exactly fair to do it based on total number of employees though. What about percentage of employees? Looking at the Missouri (state health care) data, Walmart is at about double the rate as Target, it has:

    Walmart work force: 43,281  
    Walmart MHN Enrolled employees (E): 2403  
    Walmart MHN Enrolled family members (N): 3633  
    Walmart total employees (E+N): 6036  
    Walmart Percentage of Missouri Workforce Enrolled(E) or Responsible for Enrollee (N) 13.95%

    Target work force: 7,580
    Target MHN Enrolled employees (E): 282
    Target MHN Enrolled family members (N): 317
    Target total employees (E+N): 599
    Target Percentage of Missouri Workforce Enrolled(E) or Responsible for Enrollee (N) 7.9%

Actually the rest of the data[2] is interesting (kind of old; 2011), and too much to summarize here, but there are a lot of worse companies than both of those, percentage-wise. For example, Dollar General is at 42.24%.

[1] https://ilsr.org/chains-walmart-foods-free-ride-taxpayers-ex... [2] https://dss.mo.gov/mhd/general/pdf/2011-employer-match-repor...

It would be interesting to break out average age of employee as well. In my experience, Target trends towards younger employees.

Walmart recently (this year) changed their pay structure so that nobody will make less than $11/hour, which is good for jobs that don't even require high school or the ability to speak English, so data from 2011 is outdated.

But being paid $11/hour still means that at the workers with dependent children will still be on Medicai and other public programs.

Very few unskilled jobs pay enough that a single mom is not going to qualify for benefits, so these stats probably reflect more than anything who the company hires or retains. If they hire lots of single moms, they will be lots of employees collecting benefits. If they hire more men, older people or younger people, they will not.

I never understood this meme. How would the state save money if those people sat at home instead of working at Walmart? How is it Walmart's fault that the minimum wage is so low and the regulations are written in such a way as to incentivize part-time labour over full-time labour?

Hate the game, not the player.

Walmart gets a lot of heat but they actually do lobby for a higher minimum wage (which they believe will hurt their less-efficient competitors more than it does Walmart). And really, most retail and food-service companies are no better.

With that said, it's certainly possible to run a retail store without totally screwing your employees. Costco is extremely profitable despite providing very high wages and good benefits, far better than Walmart's warehouse-club subsidiary Sams Club. At the end of the day Walmart is still making a choice to screw over their employees just because they can get away with it, regardless of if everyone else is doing it. Tu quoque is not a good defense.

Costco is primarily B2B. This allows it to have membership fees and to combine bulk purchase with retail.

Here's the page for "pork": http://www.costco.com/pork.html The least expensive item [in my browser] is ten pounds of bacon $6.50 per pound. A cash flow that allows allocating $19 to toilet paper is necessary to shop at Costco: http://www.costco.com/toilet-paper.html

The $100 shopping cart doesn't contain the diversity to cover fairly basic human needs, even ignoring the membership fee [I see $55 today].

Walmart are in profit aren't they? They don't need to lobby for a wage increase they can just give their employees one (as you intimated).

If they're lobbying for higher minimum wage when they don't already pay a higher wage themselves then it seems their motives are malicious. It's not something that reflects well on them anyhow.

Grocery stores are some of the lowest margin businesses in the US (on the order of 3%). Payroll is a pretty large expense, so it's not as if Walmart can just willy-nilly double salaries because the Waltons are extremely wealthy. If you were to wave a magic wand and redistribute the Waltons' gains to US employees, it would be something like $2000/year.

Walmart has a notoriously bad rap, but they are pretty progressive for a big evil company. Amazon seems to get a bit more slack even though I have read that working there is a horrible experience.

To second this, I've had three or four conversations with Amazon warehouse employees and all told me it was a terrible experience. One worked at a major distribution point in Pennsylvania and explained that in addition to being compelled to essentially run back and forth constantly to pick items, they refused to provide air conditioning in the middle of summer.

Which is kind of dumb. I'm guessing someone in Amazon ran the numbers and found that worker health, happiness, and heat exhaustion is still cheaper than air conditioning.

AC is a bit of an high expectation for such large warehouses.

But when working at static points(as with the kiva robots), there's no reason why they won't provide fans, at least.

The first place I encountered a working chip reader, even.

Also Instacart and Google Express and Peapod.

Yes. This is somewhat newsworthy as it's another example of Uber/Lyft's interest in becoming more broadly-based logistics companies. However, grocery delivery already exists. It's just remained something of a niche.

My speculation is that the reason is some combination of "I want to look at the produce," "I don't want to pay $10 for delivery," "I'm just not organized enough to sit down at my computer and input my order," and "I've always just gone to the grocery store."

Personally, I find Walmart to be a mediocre grocery store that I only go to because it's convenient. Given the other options that already exist for me, I would have pretty much zero interest in getting delivery from Walmart. I'd be using Peapod if I wanted it.

My issues with Instacart is that not every shopper knows how to shop for produce.

I order avocados from instacart: They're all black on the inside when I cut into them.

I order specialty chips or cheeses? They're marked as "Item out of stock," but when I run to the same grocery store that they shopped at after my delivery it's right there in plain sight to me.

I order deli meat from Instacart? They ignore my comments about how I would like it to be sliced and deliver it to me shredded.

Outside of that? I love instacart -- as long as they're packaged goods (pick and ship) and they're not hot deli items or cold/frozen items (I've had drivers put yogurt in the same bag as a lot of frozen veggies and peas and stuff that shouldn't have been frozen was frozen.)

When I shop for groceries about half of my bill is produce. I also need groceries every week to keep produce in the house.

I don't trust anyone to pick out produce. So I have to go buy it. So it's not worth it to me to buy groceries online because I would only be buying non-produce.

I do however buy some things on Amazon that otherwise we might buy in the grocery store, like diapers.

I number of years back, I was on crutches with a broken foot and tried out Peapod for grocery delivery. It was "OK" but they were often out of things and items like produce were definitely hit or miss. At the time it was useful because I could drive and make my way through the store on crutches but couldn't easily do a full grocery shopping. Once I was back on my feet I stopped using them because, if I was going to the store anyway, having some of my groceries delivered wasn't much of a win.

(I'm willing to believe that Instacart + Whole Foods, for example, is a better overall experience--for a premium. But it's not available where I live.)

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