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The general standard in the industry is pretty bad. My brother-in-law, who has a CDL, tells me somebody wedges a tractor-trailer into the Tompkins Street bridge in Binghamton about once a month because they ignore the clearance warning signs.

My understanding about Wal-Mart is that trucking for them is a good job because you get to sleep in your own bed. That is, the distribution center is close enough to the store that you can drive for them and live a normal life, it's not like driving trucks all the way across from the US.

Normal trucking companies are always having workers say "take this job and shove it" and then struggling to get their cargo moved, truckers know they are in demand enough they can quit without notice, take a few weeks off, then start up at the next place.

Wouldn’t that enable Walmart to pay less, since the job itself is better?

It must contribute. Their pay would probably be even higher otherwise.

The point is that a delayed truck is very expensive, so it ends up being cheaper to pay efficiency wages and have good working conditions so people aren't constantly quitting and therefore delaying your trucks.

Wal-Mart was also a pioneer in just in time delivery for retail. If your supply chain is reliable you don't need to pile merchandise as high in your stores and your warehouses. People will drive an hour to Wal-Mart(s) in the most rural locations and in that case it is a real bummer to be out of stock.

I'd contrast that to K-Mart where I went to get 3 digits for my mailbox and could only get 2 of them so I didn't buy any.

Not if high turnover means slower deliveries which likely effect everything downstream (or upstream).

When you don't pay well, you probably miss out on the hires that learned all the skills, what corners to cut, what corners to not cut, what actual lead times are, etc when hiring.

Outside of Silicon Valley, not a lot of companies will pay you less under the auspice that the fringe benefits somehow "make up the difference" and Walmart is about as far from startup culture as you can get.

Aside from that in order to drive one of these trucks, you require a CDL, which you have to get on your own, and maintain on your own, all at your own expense. The pay is there to attract talent from a limited pool of available workers and to ensure they show up to work on time and make deliveries on time.

It would be against their own interests to try to cut corners and pay drivers less based upon these types of "benefits."

>My understanding about Wal-Mart is that trucking for them is a good job because you get to sleep in your own bed.

This could justify Walmart paying UNDER the median wage, but why is Walmart paying considerably ABOVE the median wage?

Because possibly they are aware that their shops need the goods for them to stay operational. They may also realise there are other areas of the business they can squeeze. They may realise that having a few missed shipments costs a lot more than the wages saved.

The cost of not having a reliable supply chain is much more than they're paying their drivers. It's just good economics to pay more to reduce driver turnover.

Probably takes away a lot of drivers from their competitors too.

Why is it not good economics for their competitors to do so as well?

Less scale, easier to fill gaps, less impact

Walmart has basically always been superior to its competitors at logistics. It has been one of their key competitive advantages for many decades. They have been a data monster heavily focused on logistics for most of their existence (I've been reading about their various logistics advantages for 30 years now).

Even if doing a thing is good for a competitor, that obviously doesn't mean that competitor will do said logical thing. Companies fail all the time because they're incompetent in one form or another (or many forms).

Comparing “up to” with median is setting off my bullshit alarm.

The Quota consensus is that the thesis of the OP is simply misinformation, as expected.

https://www.quora.com/Walmart-is-offering-new-truck-drivers-...

Misinformation or advertising?

Often the same thing

Good catch. That's a bullshit comparison indeed.

Then it's always "... well including the health insurance and retirement package which we estimate costs us $75,000/yr." So actual take home wage is never near $110,000.

Any reputed tech company pays entry level engineers 2-3x more than the industry average. There's no complicated reason behind it. They just want the best talent. There are plenty of $50K/yr programmers out there but they aren't going to write the kind of code you want. I imagine it's the same for truck drivers.

There are plenty of <$50k programmers making 6 figures, so I'm not sure that's it.

> There are plenty of <$50k programmers making 6 figures

Doesn't that make them not "<$50k programmers" by definition?

Skill wise I'm probably in the bottom quartile, but I make about the national median.

This is not a thing in NL unless you do HFT programming. One of the reasons why the US pays so much seems to simply be that the economies of scale are there.

I don't think it's economies of scale.

Top money in US is paid by tech companies (FAANGs and similar) who have virtual monopolies on their markets, and thus are printing money. They overpay for programmers to make sure they're not outcompeted on tech and retain their monopoly status.

Second crucial factor is the VC ecosystem unlike anything else in the world. VC-fueled startups (even late-stage ones, like Uber) will also often pay way above market for programmers, because they believe programming talent is the way for the startup to dominate the competition and become a money-printing monopoly.

Europe and rest of the world does not have anything like that. There's no serious software industry (aka "tech") there, neither large and estabilished nor VC-fueled. Programmers are seen as a commodity and not a source of competitive advantage. And, even if there are exceptions, they're not common enough to start bidding wars for top talent which in the US elevated the salaries of top ICs to $300k-$400k.

I think it's even more complicated than that. If you compare salaries for physicians (doctors) or lawyers there will be a huge gap as well. Even though there is no VC-funding, economy of scale or monopolies to speak of.

On the supply side of high salaries I think the economy of scale actually have some impact by creating a higher "floor". For example I would almost wager that every European country have their own Salesforce company (non-SAP web based CRM from early/mid 00's), but the e.g Latvian alternative never broke out to the wider EU. Whilst Salesforce conquered US and then the globe. This puts upward pressure on the virtual monopolists / VC-fueled companies that don't really exist outside the US. Imagine if almost every single B2B software company in the US spent their first 5 years only operating within a single state, and many never expanding outside.

But I think the "demand side" is even more important. Most European countries have lower take-home salaries for large parts of the salary spectra, definitely the top quartile. The reason for that are also numerous. But we generally have high taxes on an individual level, high payroll taxes, high VAT etc. In exchange for that we have large welfare states with larger redistributions both across individuals and across time for the same individual (paid parental leave, pension etc).

It's the same in all skilled professions. Pay scales are much steeper in the USA than Europe/UK.

I agree that both the article and the comments section gives very unsatisfactory answers.

“They want good truckers.” Sure, but not good cashiers? Why does Walmart want good truckers and Target doesn’t?

Walmart has a lot of SKUs made just for them - and that's not even getting into the house brands. I bet their logistics works quite a bit differently than the average retailer.

Cashiers are easily replaced, and don't have to pass DOT drug tests or maintain licensure - a CDL is a big deal, and even minor traffic violations including while driving a personal vehicle off the clock can impact it.

You can actually see something similar in the pharmacy market. Pharmacy techs are both very in demand and ironically also often leaving the profession, because many are just tired of the every increasing workloads (perennially short staffed...) and deteriorating conditions.

Because the skillset required to being a good truck driver are astronomically higher than being a good cashier.

A trucker can make much bigger mistakes than a cashier.

Is that not true at other companies as well?

Is it significantly above market rate when adjusted for experience level and overtime? They say "make up to" which is meaningless (maybe that's a 20 year driver hired for a particularly unpleasant route in a tight market). And I know some truck drivers can get overtime doing extra shifts which can make up a lot of their income. I'd like to see a real comparison between the experience level and kind of driving (long/short haul, day/night whatever other industry divisions) vs the median income rather than the meaningless comparison with the "up to" number before drawing any conclusions about how well they pay.

I would guess that WalMart assigns drivers to a route, everyday they go from the warehouse to the same WalMart(s). Most days there is no overtime - they keep every walmart within a days drive of two warehouses so if one warehouse fails (fire...) they can shift everything - that means some drivers will need to go to a different warehouse and then they need enough slack to pay for that extra overtime without running out of time in a day (a day is less than 24 hours for drivers)

Why? Because they have to to maintain their logistics network to continue operating and making money.

They have a business that prints money so they can afford to pay more to continue operating.

People will stop going to Walmart if they can’t stock the shelves, or raise prices because they use other shippers that charge more.