Walmart Anticipates a Store Manager Shortage Despite $200k-a-Year Pay | Hacker News Reader

Walmart Anticipates a Store Manager Shortage Despite $200k-a-Year Pay

wsj.com

47 pointsprostoalex53 comments

This is an article about Walmart's program that has just two spots, two (and only paid them $65K/ea with a college degree). They had "over 1000 applicants" but had two spots, then they get free(?) advertising on their internal mobility.

Also, this is rather a mind bender of a paragraph:

> Around 75% of Walmart managers started out as hourly workers at the company. Walmart aims to protect that pipeline by attracting more college graduates and outside hires and then fast-tracking them into managerial roles, said Ms. Jordan, who is also building new internal training programs.

So most of your previous managers are internal hires, but in the future you're going to go with recent grads and outside hires instead..?

Also, the title's $200K only appears in the body as: "often pays more than $200,000 a year." Often? Want to qualify that a little? Hard to read this article as anything more than a Walmart ad with little substance. There's no real store manager shortage, since they just had enough applications for this program to replace all of their current store managers per the article itself.

Sounds like they want to hire more "college grads and outside hires" and THEN fast track them for management. So idk, make them get a feel for what most of the everyday work is before moving them up. I do think it's good that managers have some idea of what their people are having to deal with regularly.

I agree. However, from my observations these types of programs are used more to attract talent than to develop it.

Yeah for sure, I mean anyone they feel like isn't going to be good management material they can just not promote until they leave.

I'm willing to bet 'managers' doesn't mean 'store managers'

Probably not, but managers make good pay. Store managers require someone who is both able to do the job (which is complex), and willing to move where the company needs a store manager. If you want to manage "a department" you can get promoted at any store, but if you want to manage the store there are only a few positions, so you move to assistant manager at whatever store needs it, then move to store manager at a different store - these may both be out of state moves.

It was 20 years after leaving McDonald's before I'm no longer sure I wouldn't have made more working at McDonald's than as a programmer. The job path all the way up was known to me. Even now I'm not sure - it depends on if I was willing keep competing for the more and more rare positions above store manager, and how I did compared to the others. I'm glad I didn't go that way - for me it the money isn't worth it.

> Walmart aims to protect that pipeline by attracting more college graduates and outside hires and then fast-tracking them into managerial roles

So it takes a college degree to be an hourly worker at Walmart now?

Specifically, they want to maintain the perception of internal mobility. So they’ll hire overqualified people, promote just those, and be able to use the logical fallacy “X% of our floor workers become managers therefore if you join you have an X% chance of a promotion every year.” Which they can dangle as a carrot when they need to. What I find surprising is that they actually admitted publicly to this strategy!

> the logical fallacy “X% of our floor workers become managers therefore if you join you have an X% chance of a promotion every year"

Aside from the problem of induction, why would this be a fallacy? (I'm assuming you meant to implicitly apply the 'each year' modifier to both or neither, because otherwise it would be such a boring and obvious fallacy that I'm pretty sure that's not what you meant.)

It omits "with degrees" after "floor workers".

Yep, a population statistic isn’t predictive for an individual if the population is heterogeneous. And in this case, designed to be heterogeneous.

Ah, right, thanks! That wasn't actually part of the statement they quoted (/posed within quotation marks), whence my confusion.

Edit: Or is the point that 20% of floor workers in total do become managers, but that's precisely (or very strongly correlatedly) the subset containing those who have degrees? If so, that makes a lot more sense. I don't really think it's fair to describe as a fallacy, though - it's a function of the philosophy of probability, which doesn't describe the world but our knowledge of it. You could make an analogous statement about roulette wheels, with perfect knowledge of their physics.

Walmart recruits at the University I graduated from. When I graduated, around 10 years ago, they were very aggressively courting new business undergrads for Walmart corporate. They revealed in my second (and last) interview that starting pay was around $25k annual. Even 10 years ago, that was a joke.

The internal track isn't that uncommon. when I was at Domino's Pizza it was the same thing. The path to management and franchisee was through the hourly funnel. There is a lot to be said for having management that started in the trenches as hourly staff and had to do and learn "all the jobs" before they become the boss telling other people what to do.

Jail time for writing such trash articles seems fair.

It is because Walmart is either not offering $200k per year, and/or the $200k is based on working 80 hours per week with variable schedules where one should expect to be interrupted during dinner and weekends and nights.

It is always the same story with restaurant/hotel/airline/retail/hospital work. Complaints about struggling to hire while paying peanuts relative to the shit quality of life of those jobs.

Especially for any “manager” or “supervisor” level position, which is just code for “you are the person responsible for filling in when someone calls out”. And someone will call out because the pay for the subordinates will always be insufficient to attract reliable, quality line level workers.

Yeah, it mystifies me. One of my ex-boyfriends worked at a chain coffee shop. He was paid minimum wage, as the manager of several branches, for working insane hours, and (as he once said to me) the person three levels above him was paid about £50k (~$60k). That guy was in his 50s - that's how long it took to get promoted. And he was a smart guy: excellent programmer, wrote an emulator for some old games console, wrote and managed his own email servers and VPNs, filled in as an engineer for a few months at my former startup (for no pay, very kindly) when we were understaffed, etc. Could've easily worked as a programmer for 10x the pay, in other words. He was a massive coffee fan, and had tens of thousands worth of coffee equipment at his house, and I think he genuinely loved it and did it for that reason, but someone like that must be one in a million for them; I never had any fucking clue how they filled all the other positions... (I'd be fascinated to hear anything anyone else knows!)

Easier than putting the Sacklers or Jones in jail, I bet.

Modern journalist are narrative fiction writers. Articles should come with a disclaimer "based on a true story". You don't exactly know which part is true.

A good family friend is a manager of a Safeway. It's surprisingly hard work. You spend 55+ hours a week on your feet, you have to sub in for any job in the store at a moment's notice, you deal with the worst customers on an hourly basis, and you still have to know all the ins-and-outs of running an incredibly low margin business. And all for less money than a junior software dev might make.

>you have to sub in for any job in the store at a moment's notice

That sounds absolutely bleak. Basically creates a strong incentive for HQ to run things hyper lean and rely on this as a backstop routinely

I worked in a restaurant. Came in with a strong work etic and attitude. I had something to prove to myself, nevermind the money. Busser to manager in five months (not a brag really, just takes honesty and hard work).

>Basically creates a strong incentive for HQ to run things hyper lean and rely on this as a backstop routinely

This is EXACTLY how it works. I got paid ~35% more than anyone "below" me. I wound up learning to do jobs when we were slammed and that person didn't show up. For 6 months we were low two dishwashers, so I'd do all my manager stuff then stay till 3 cleaning dishes.

I mean, yeah. That's the deal. Managers are salary and the margins are razer thin.

You used to pick up a lot of extra part timers - people who would only schedule 15-20 hours a week so that you could have extra capacity for sick days, vacations, etc. But people generally only want full time work these days so that makes it even leaner than it was.

>Basically creates a strong incentive for HQ to run things hyper lean and rely on this as a backstop routinely

That is absolutely what happens. In my youth I worked at a corporate franchise with such a structure. The manager was paid a salary, which was barely higher than the salary of the front line workers, but was responsible for covering all shifts that were not otherwise covered. To make matters much worse, corporate brass decreed that he was not allowed to pay overtime or schedule workers to work enough hours to be considered "full-time". This left the manager scrambling with no choice but to seek a drove of low-wage, part-time workers that were difficult to find, hard to retain, and prone to calling in sick and/or quitting suddenly. The end result was the manager routinely working 60+ hours a week (which sometimes actually drove his average hourly wage below that of the part-time workers), never knowing when he would have to race into work for an unknown period of time. At several points they asked me to become a manager and I flatly refused.

Talent pipeline? I'm not familiar with the history of how Walmart provided internal growth opportunities in the past, but it does seem for a majority of companies these days, internal growth isn't focused on as much as it should. I guess Walmart is coming to realize it's better to invest in your own workforce than hire externally.

This was one of the things I've heard many senior people at Target talk about. They constantly have a pipeline of people they're pushing into leadership roles. If you come in and show some promise managing projects and people, they essentially start grooming you immediately and focus on pushing you up in the leadership ranks.

AFAIK they've never had any issues with having enough people in their org either on the retail or corporate side who want to be in leadership roles.

I really feel like this is the correct way to operate. Create real career paths for people, get employees to buy into what they're doing. It results in happier employees, happier customers, and ultimately everybody wins if the entire company isn't turning over constantly. Costco can drive much more productivity from each person because they work to retain these people. Turnover is bad for morale, and training a new person takes time and money.

Relative worked at Target retail at a very junior role ... the group responsible for restocking. It was a very unusual management structure at the local store; just a nebulous "team" with no real point person like at a grocery store which has specific managers, assistant managers, and department managers. It seemed a little loose at times (and abusable from a staff perspective), but I could also see it was flexible and the store did very well.

I worked at walmart for a few years when I sort of lost my way in my mid 20s and I have to say it was an eye opening experience. Everyone knows a lot of the bad stuff about walmart so I wont dwell on that but the good stuff I saw were things I had no idea about and was pretty impressed with.

At the time I was a college dropout with a pretty bad attitude but I needed a job and I wasnt afraid to work long boring hours and so I got a job stocking shelves at a walmart near my parents house. It was a mind numbing job but it actually paid ok at the time (12$ hour, I was in orlando, this was 2008ish).

After simply showing up on time and doing my job properly for just a few months I was told that if I wanted I could take on more responsibilities. I met with our store manager who showed me stats about how walmart really likes to promote from within and that if I stuck with it I could get to be an assistant manager in a store in just a few years. The store manager telling me this had a GED and had worked at walmart for 15 years. He told me his salary was "close to 200k." I couldn't believe it.

In my few years working at that store I saw several people get promoted from shelf stocker to department supervisor to assistant manager. One of those people is a store manager at a store in Georgia now. I left my job at walmart with a pretty evolved opinion of the place. For a long time I told people who were directionless and worried about what their future would look like to seriously consider working at walmart and to make it clear to their bosses they wanted to move up.

There were other benefits back then that were pretty solid. I worked with a couple of women who got a lot of their tuition reimbursed. Both of whom are nurses now. I really did feel like if you could put up with some of the BS you get working at walmart you could actually get something good out of the experience for yourself.

Anyway this was a long rambley way of saying that at least in 2008-2010 when I worked at walmart they really valued promoting from within.

Oh final note: there were lots of programs like the tuition reimbursement one tha I was told about when I was hired but assumed there was some catch or some way that it wouldn't work out. The HR manager at my store told me once that some of these things just required you do sign up and that she was shocked how low the participation rates were.

I worked at Staples around the same time period, 2008-2009, and while it was mind-numbing work, I learned a good portion of the skills I needed for the corporate world. Things like: showing up on time even when you don't want to, knowing how and when to escalate to management, how to communicate with customers, executing business processes like opening, closing, stocking shelves, etc. The pay was only $8/hr. but the experience was easily worth 10 times that. At the time I was in college and living with my parents with free tuition from the Pell Grant; a few hundred bucks every two weeks was actually a decent amount of money for food, gas for the car, whatever. I feel for people who have to make a living in that environment but it's not meant for that, it's meant to be a learning and growth environment.

"In addition to increasing wages, Walmart last year dropped the dollar-per-day fee employees paid to participate in the company’s subsidized university degree program, a move that boosted participation by 44%, said Ms. Morris."

Participation might have increased but I wonder if completion rates decreased.

If you can't pay $365 a year for college, even on Walmart wages, might not actually be that driven to complete courses/degree.

Even at $1 a day, there is still a barrier associated with participaing. Having to log in, find out how to change the setting/talk to someone. Fewer barriers are better, I bet the net graduation rates increased, even if the completion to participation ratio dropped some.

I agree that if you can't be bothered to figure out how to contribute the $1 a day, then you're probably not all that driven.

In 2020, the average wage of an hourly worker in a Walmart store was $14.76. Over a year, that $1 a day comes out to a month's car payment, or child care. I believe you can be driven to complete college courses and still not be able to afford it given the average pay at Walmart.

The parent poster's point remains. Regardless of how much of an impact $1/day (or $30/month) can have, if your financial/living situation is such that amount makes a difference, you probably don't have the free time/mental energy to finish college courses in your spare time.

from the article > Walmart last year dropped the dollar-per-day fee employees paid to participate in the company’s subsidized university degree program, a move that boosted participation by 44%

Apparently it had a significant difference.

The OP comment that you are attempting to disagree with says "Participation might have increased but I wonder if completion rates decreased." and you are citing participation using the exact same quote he did as if it was new information.

Right, but the GP was talking about completion rates. People might have been enticed into attending those programs (it's free, after all), but actually following it through is whole different matter.

Agreed. I was considering attendance, but completion would be a much different (and meaningful) metric.

Or you have high rent, another mouth to feed, sick parents to take care of, or any of hundreds of other things that could make every last dollar important.

$30 a month is gas for a few days or food for a few days. When you're poor, you're more focused on survival and that amount can put a lot of fear and hesitation into someone.

I think a company charging their employees $1 a day for a perk speaks more volumes about the character of the company than it's employees.

It is to weed out lack of commitment, which can be very common for people entering these low entry level jobs

I don't event live in the US, but I see it as a smart move

How does this weed out commitment? Or in other words - if you don't want to stick around what is the negative of paying the 1$ a day? Presumably if you're only in it for the benefits then the benefits far outweigh 1$?

> If you can't pay $365 a year for college, even on Walmart wages, might not actually be that driven to complete courses/degree.

Some people _can_ pay that much money and blow off the whole thing.

The notion that disposable income is a useful metric to measure one's "drive" is one of the most managerial, tone-deaf, over-privileged, peak-hacker-news comments I have ever seen.

Please reconsider your position on this. Or at least, please - don't become a manager.

https://archive.ph/IY3fL

What is going on here? This is the company where something like ten percent of staff are on food stamps!

This is a pretty petty attitude. The point of these social programs is that they are tied to household need - not employment. What's the point of welfare programs if they should only be tied to unemployment?

Moreso, EBT eligibility is usually determined by household size. So I guess it's Wal-Mart's fault for not paying people based on how many children they have?

I’ll add to this that a system designed to stabilize around units of “two-earners” can be expected to find a number of single earners struggling, especially if you self select your analysis to be discussing single earners from the bottom quintile. It would be a shock if that cohort did not have significant issues existing within the current system.

Walmart employees, making minimum wage or close to, are expected to be a cohort from the bottom quintile before accounting for partner income.

"To keep up with an onslaught of sales early in the Covid-19 pandemic and worker absences, Walmart hired around half a million people over six weeks between March and May of 2020, said Donna Morris, Walmart’s head of human resources, who started the job in February 2020 after decades at technology companies."

WOW. That number is mind boggling.

That really is. I've been studying WW1 recently and those are the kind of numbers you see associated with the largest offensives in the war. To consider the scale at which Wal-Mart operates that it grabbed up almost .01% of the nation for hiring. That really is crazy to consider.

0.01%? I'm pretty sure you're too low by at least a factor of 10. More so if you consider only those in the labor pool.

> Donna Morris

That name surprised me, I forgot she left Adobe years ago.

I have no idea how these people keep getting compensated so well for a job that is barely technically demanding.

Walmart’s average revenue per store is approximately $44MM and their gross profit margin is a bit less than 25%. Im not surprised they’re having a hard time finding people to be accountable for business results like that for a salary of $200k.

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