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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Are Walmart "associates" particularly well off as a result?

Walmart was a very different company under Sam Walton. Sam tried to visit every store once a year. When he got there he would throw the managers out and talk with the employees to find whether or not the managers were doing their jobs. He also believed in empowering the employees. Employees were responsible for particular sections of the store and had access to sales and inventory data and made decisions about how the section was run. In short Mr. Walton felt that the line employees were the most important people in the organization and treated them accordingly.

This of course did not survive after he passed and Walmart employees are not well off today. The quote about Unions above does seem to fit his philosophy but rings hollow with the changes that occurred after his death.

Computerization of stock control and sales made trusting and empowering the employees much less necessary.

I suspect his attitude would not have lasted even if he had survived.

One of the largest german drugstore chains still operates by that principle and they're successful with it. Computerized sales will not pick up on certain things - for example stuff that is not available in the store but people ask for.

As a contrary to that, many stores have a phone app that lets you look up items in a given store location. I've been using that exclusively for the last few years instead of trying to find someone to help me. I'm sure that these apps can and do report on searches that turn up out of stock items or unknown items.

Of course I do miss the service level I used to be able to get; for example I could walk into a box store and find an employee in the plumbing aisle, describe my problem, and they would not only show me where the item I needed is located, but would also give me tips on installation or even talk me out of the purchase if my problem didn't actually need a replacement part (but and adjustment instead).

When I go to Walmart and try to find the thing on the shelves that the website says is there but is not, I will wrangle an employee for help. Typically they just say that the website isn't always right and leave it at that. As far as I can tell they don't then do anything to correct the website.

It's super anecdotal but my dad has done home improvement work for decades and has found Home Depot to be completely incompetent with stocking their stores these last few years. Many of the employees who have been around say its all due to centralized inventory management (computerized and non-local). The impression is that up until a few years ago, a store could order what they needed based on local demand and not be restricted to only what the algorithm decides.

> Computerization of stock control and sales made trusting and empowering the employees much less necessary.

It also makes distrusting them less necessary because you can know that they've done their jobs because everything is scanned and tracked. You don't have to use stupid proxies for productivity ("if you have time to lean you have time to clean") because you can actually measure inputs and outputs with more detail.

Sam was not anything to be admired. He ripped off his employees pay and when he finally lost the legal battle he threatened any employee that cashed the check.

I think it's important to remember that Sam Walton died in 1992, and the Walmart of today has very little in common with the Wal-Mart of 1992.

Better off than what? Than if they had a union?

Maybe we can look at example like the US auto industry to get an answer there? The answer being "if you were an early member of the union, yeah, a later member, not so much".

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