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Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

There is a narrative that Wal-mart pays low wages, I think its quite apt as most positions do pay quite low, I worked at Wal Mart while in college and saw it first hand. A few things to note, certain positions do pay well, store managers for one, I know for a fact that over 20 years ago certain store managers would see over $300k in yearly compensation. In addition once I got into tech after college I worked with a few walmart.com ex-employees, and these employees stated that part of their bonus was tied to a percentage of sales walmart.com made and they said the bonus pay was wildly lucrative. So Wal Mart does pay well in fact if you are in the right position. Considering keeping your shelves(and online distribution centers) stocked is the lifeblood of the company it behooves them to have a healthy circulatory system and not have drivers who do not deliver on time or get into accidents.

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Store Managers are a very different type of pay structure though. They're more like someone from Corporate vs Retail. They get paid massive bonuses based on numbers their stores hit.

I worked at a few Home Depots and IIRC the store managers were clearing 150-250 while the assistant managers I think were in the 60-80k range. Then us floor staff were 9-15, maybe 20. This was 2008ish.

I remember the biggest HD in my state or somewhere the manager was getting I think 500k-1mil+. You can infer it from the numbers the store does and their bonus percentage whatever that was.

My mom was an HR director there so corporate as well and she made somwhere in 130-200+ not sure exact.

+1 to everything you say here. The store manager track is very much a Corporate vs Retail (hourly) thing at least at the big chains.

I worked retail in high school and college in the same era as you mentioned and even 20 years ago, a store manager at a Best Buy or a Costco was clearing $250k or more, at least in the wealthier-Atlanta area where I lived (I know a lot of HD employees being from Atlanta and my knowledge of corporate and sales manager salaries at HD aligns with yours too), as you said, based in part on bonuses related to store revenue (the Best Buy stores I worked at when I was 16 - 22 were two of the top-ranked stores in the southeast region by sales, with some departments being among the top 10 in the whole company). For some of the chains, I think that has decreased as in-store sales have shifted but places like Costco notoriously pay their store managers extremely well.

Best Buy desperately wanted me to quit college and be fast-tracked into store or sales management (I would spend my summers as a manager of a department and they agreed to keep me at that elevated hourly wage even when I was part-time during the school year), trying to lure me with tales of just how much money the top of the foodchain people make, but I never took it seriously. Given the ebbs and flows of the economy (I graduated from college in 2008) and the collapse of the retail market from its early 2000s high in favor of ecommerce/Amazon, that was almost certainly the right decision -- but it was an instructive lesson for me at a young age about the very disparate differences in compensation between the hourly workers and the people at the top of those stores.

The Freakinomics book has a great chapter on how the police discovered accounting books of a NYC drug cartel, and its pay scale from the street watcher to the top lord was the same as at… McDonnalds (just the ratio, not the amounts).

20 years later, I reckon there was a lot of storytelling here advantaging the arguments of the right-wing, but I’d still be curious what are the true figures.

I thought freakonomics also showed most foot soldiers made less than minimum wage.

no the point was that they made around minimum wage, and lived with their mom.

the question the book asked, explictly, was then if they're making minimum wage, why not just get any old crappy job at McD's or as a janator? if you're making minimum, why not get a job where there is no risk of getting shot or sent to jail?

Did the book have no answer? Status (in drug dealers' circles, the gangster/thug is higher status than a fast food job), more independent lifestyle hours (no 9-5), and seeing a way to move up (a la become Scarface) that culture doesn't portray from a "dead end" McD's job.

that's correct. they speculated -- they're economists, not sociologists -- that it was about status, hours, lifestyle, and the get-rich hail-mary long-shot potential.

workin McDs or Kinkos is eating shit every day, wearing a uniform, etc. and is fundamentally emasculating when compared to gang culture.

>They get paid massive bonuses based on numbers their stores hit.

Isn't that ... good?

The demographic in every region or neighborhood is different and has different tastes, incomes and budgets, so it's your job as store manager to identify the needs of that demographic, and order merchandise and organize it on shelves, run sales, etc. in order to move as much of it as possible to maximize sales and profits. Sort of like targeted advertising but IRL and less privacy invasive.

Paying based on this seems like the only way to incentivize this performance.

In university before co-op, many years ago, I worked for home depot part time. the line employee profit share was really bad. the management profit share was better. They understaffed my department for long periods of time to make their numbers look better. They were making $15k/day in profit on my department but they wouldn't schedule a second employee so that there was someone there to help people when person #1 was on the saw, on the forklift, or covering lunch for the next department over too.

I quit mid june after I realized they weren't hiring/scheduling more staff for the summer even though every day was very busy, constantly running between helping customers and taking care of other things.

There are a lot of ways to make profit and show good metrics that aren't good for line employees.

>There are a lot of ways to make profit and show good metrics that aren't good for line employees.

Sure, but this is in line with every major (European) tech company I ever worked at. Pay employees peanuts and pay senior mangers amazing, therefore you were incentivized not to do well as an IC, but to put up with bullshit and fight your way to climb the corporate ladder to management, and then exploit the other poor schmucks who come below you with the same perverse incentive structure.

Yes this leads to a huge turnover, unhappy workers, and to a lot of arguments, back-stabbings and fights. But their stocks were always rock solid and managers were always wealthy so I guess they saw that culture as a net win. It seems to be the M.O. with ever major company everywhere, I think it's called the "GE model".

Paying ICs at the bottom great wages and incentivizing them with stock, is mostly unique to US/SV and new-age software start-ups from the Google/Facebook era, but rare everywhere else.

Ye it is strange that such anti-intuitive management style pays off. I have no clue why.

I got this feeling that what's most important for a Big Bad Company is to be able to get well of with management of other Big Bad Companies to be able to land contracts.

> I have no clue why.

Because it's cheaper to compensate one manager 10x average (and get the best candidate) than pay more to hire an entire team of more skilled ICs.

FAANG gets away with it because they amortize their engineering costs over an extremely customer base. Which also multiplies the value in output quality difference.

Most companies are not building EC2 or BigTable.

And so... it makes more sense to hire minimal cost engineers, then corral them with a single high-cost manager.

> Because it's cheaper to compensate one manager 10x average (and get the best candidate) than pay more to hire an entire team of more skilled ICs.

I don't think you get better managers by paying them more though, over some threshold. You'd probably just get more "competetive" managers in the meta game of becoming a manager. Like engineers at Google are not some elite just becouse they are paid more. Only athletics actually can be evaluated in an accurate enough manner I believe.

I'm also suspicious it actually transfers to engineering orgs, especially with managers who don't have architect senses (or intuition).

But it's likely a direct transfer from sales or retail orgs, where it's very much measurable and true.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

>Ye it is strange that such anti-intuitive management style pays off. I have no clue why.

It works because it prays and exploits several flaws in our society and in human psychology like greed, wealth inequality, conformity of the masses to cultural norms, fear of missing out/of being left out, and the crabs in the bucket mentality, which leads to a rat race to the bottom form which it's difficult to check yourself out as an individual if the majority does it and is heavily vested in it.

This isn't something big bad corporations have created, it s just something that has existed for hundreds of years, they're just exploiting. The same mechanism and behaviors were in place during the communist rule in my home country 35+ years ago, when people were fighting to climb up the party ranks, because that's what gave you the best QoL. Now it's climbing the corporate ranks.

Aren't stronger labor union protections supposed to lead to higher wages? How is it that European tech workers can't bargain for higher wages?

>Aren't stronger labor union protections supposed to lead to higher wages?

Only for those at the lower end, usually at the expense of growth and opportunities for those at the higher end, but since those are fewer in number their votes are less important.

>How is it that European tech workers can't bargain for higher wages?

Because investors there don't have as much money, and those who do don't risk it starting tech companies. And also because Europe is not a single country with one law and one language, but 27+ with different laws and different languages, means scaling a business beyond the original country is difficult and expensive.

It's the US who's the exception in tech success, not EU for failing to match it.

> How is it that European tech workers can't bargain for higher wages?

The leverage a company has and the leverage a union has both come from the same place: A lack of alternatives. But then that's the problem.

If you have a competitive industry, the union can't demand much because the company's margins will be slim and they won't be able to give the union much without raising prices, losing customers to competitors and going out of business. This is actually fine because in that case workers still get the money in the form of lower consumer prices, but then it's not the union which is getting you the benefit.

Conversely, if the industry isn't competitive then the company will be a huge conglomerate with a lot of leverage against workers/consumers. They'll be big enough to exert political influence in the government and also big enough for the company's union to become infested with politics. In particular, the union knows where its leverage comes from, and it's workers with skills in high demand, so any union that doesn't keep them happy and keep them from moving to another company/industry is going to have to contend with a pissed off conglomerate with a lot of political influence. So the money goes to the people with high demand skills (or political connections) and the rank and file still get the scraps, but now it's even worse because lack of competition and high levels of organizational inefficiency means high prices when they go to buy things.

I haven’t seen any managers that worked themselves up from the bottom, in eu. A manager starts with an economic background and step in from the side. That coupled with free university means that programmers is not something that you look up too.

Maybe that was fine? It's possible the customers were prepared to wait and would buy regardless, in which case why have extra staff to cover short gaps? It sounds like your personal complaint is that you had to spend your whole time at work working instead of standing around?

nah customers complained all the time. You'd be helping a customer and have 2 other customer waiting, and other things to do including tidying up, cutting the saw, operating the forklift to bring down more product, etc. It was 8 hours of constantly being run around and having customers be frustrated because they were waiting for your help, and couldn't find anyone else, because there was no one else. Sometimes they'd go all the way to the other end of the store to find someone and they'd bring the electrical or plumbing guy over to ask questions about concrete and he'd just tell them to talk to me.

It sounds like you have never worked busy retail, more than anything else. You wouldn't accept your own job being that level of busy dealing with unserved and frustrated customers at that pace.

No doubt it was frustrating, but you said the managers' decisions were driven by numbers. So would they have ended up better or worse off with more staff? Surely they'd have more sales, and if that more than made up for the cost of another worker, they would have hired one. So why didn't they? Maybe it was a mistake and they actually weren't optimizing the profit for the department enough?

> Isn't that ... good?

For whom?

For everyone?

FWIW I've seen managers burn down stores by pushing their employees to far in chase of those numbers.

Perhaps it can work situationally, but I've not seen it anywhere I or any of my friends have worked.

Managers burning out people chasing KPIs and promotions of their own careers, isn't anything new or exclusive to Walmart. I've seen it in every tech company I've ever worked at.

Then why on earth did you suggest it was good for everyone?

Slipped my mind.

If the manager burns the store down, wouldn't his KPI plummet and he get the boot eventually?

eventually... the delay between manager doing stupid action chasing KPI and store burning down may be large enough that the average manager is likely to burn the store down.

If your goal is long-term success, those incentives might be misaligned.

What do you mean by "everyone?" Do you include the floor workers who are paid so little that they need food stamps? How are they benefitting?

Would they be better off if the managers were worse paid?

I can't help but notice that you shifted the goalpost subtly from "better for everyone" to "not worse for everyone" there.

If the pie was shared more fairly, then yes they would be better off and I daresay that their incentives would be better aligned with getting those numbers up. And yes, that would mean managers not pulling down millions.

> while the assistant managers I think were in the 60-80k range.

Don't know how it was at Home Depot, and my experience at Walmart was ~20 years ago, but asst managers were in-building 10-12 hours/day, usually there 6 days a week for various reasons, and at that time were only making $50k salary to start. Unless there were other bonuses I was unaware of, it was absolutely not worth it.

I wasn't making a living wage as an hourly associate, but they were super strict about me working beyond 40 hours, and when they "requested" beyond that (it was rare but never truly optional if I wanted to keep climbing) I was well compensated because they were terrified of lawsuits by that point. Small blessings.

Yeah, asst managers lived a brutal life walking back and forth through the stores on walkie talkies all day long. I have a feeling its a lot of peoples first salaried jobs, they move up from front line to asst mgr so willing to take more abuse to not make $15/hr anymore. I was there at many points. I did that leaving HD, 12.50 to 40k in ops.

I can picture the faces of all of my managers, ASMs. I can't picture the face of either of my store managers. I'm not sure I actually ever saw them. They definitely weren't in the store often.

I loved my first store and HATED my second store. If you're full-time at HD you have no control of your hours at all. They'd schedule me to close 11pm-12am then open at 5am the next day at the second store. I just quit one day. I constantly got sick from getting no sleep.

If you're part-time there you have 100% control of your hours. Tons of people in college who worked 2-4 hours a day. It was miserable watching them come and go.

Radio shack store managers easily hit 60 (Strip Malls) to over 100k a year (Shopping malls) in the late 1970s, again thanks to performance bonuses so this is nothing new. Same long hours as retail, with way more reason to get out of bed each day. (60k in 1978 would be 280k in 2023 thanks to inflation)

You are 100% spot on. Shrink was a huge factor for bonus payout(huge pay lever for mgmt in stores) as if you lived in a area that had high theft you never hit your bonus(shrink is the delta of actual vs. recorded inventory). That and the bonus also factored in sales volume, but shrink was a giant component of it. I remember when a few employees from a rural store came to help out they mentioned they had never not gotten a bonus, whereas my store - a urban store never received a bonus due to excessive shrink. But what I was getting at is there are positions that pay well if you hit your numbers, as a sales associate/dept. manager your pay was capped to really low numbers no matter what happened.

Home Depot stock has been very lucrative. Take a look at the historical values.

Home Depot is the best performing stock in the S&P500 going back to 1981

Literally, I Googled for:

    best performing stock in the S&P500 going back to 1981

The best I could find:

    Home Depot (HD) had the highest return in 1981 by a US stock in the S&P 500 (GSPC), returning 66.9%. [1]

I think you are mistaken: That was the best single year return in 1981.

It is not easy to find a single stock with the highest return since 1981. The best I could find was 20 years: Monster (energy drinks) [2]

Other research shows the highest single year return on a stock ever was Qualcomm: +2620% in 1999 [3]

[1] https://www.statmuse.com/money/ask/best-performing-stocks-in...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/08/sp-500-stock-has-the-highest...

[3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/top-sp-500-stocks-by-annual...

Home depot has returned over a million percent since 1981.

Compare that to Apple who is up about 150,000% since IPO and less since their S&P inclusion.

I worked at Lowe's circa 2013 and this was my experience as well. One thing to note is that if you're ambitious and not incompetent, you can get pretty far career wise in retail. That was the impression I got anyways.

I worked retail in the early 90s at a huge chain of appliance/electronic stores. The managers were paid very well.

If you survived the politics of being moved from store to store, never knowing your schedule, and blatant, miserable sexual harassment ("hey let's go out for drinks and discuss how I might let you sell large appliances instead of small electronics"...oh wait..."you didn't go to my apartment...we have this opening an hour away that you have to take with no advancement opportunity".

Okay, assuming the sexual harassment is gone/obsoleted by solid company policy, there's the "chasm" from peon to management that you can only aspire to if you never make a mistake or make them quietly. Or never leave the job to get a degree. Or get lucky somehow.

Those positions at management level above peon required a lot of sweat equity and risk on the part of the worker bee. If it doesn't pan out, well, that's what...3-15 years of your real actual life flushed down the toilet.

I'm with GenX. Screw that noise.

Thank you to share your experience. While I am not experienced in this area, I feel too many other posts are overlooking the _path_ to store manager. It is a brutal grind, and getting to the top is so much luck.

I'm the op that worked at HD, I got out at like 20, but I have an ex who's climbing the ladder at Abercrombie (or whoever owns it) for the last 5-6 years and it seem so miserable.

She's moving every 1-3 years because they transfer her to a new store, and because she's running the higher profit stores they send her to trash stores to try and fix them. She has no practically no vacation, has to fill in staff shortages, works every weekend. I think she's around 30-40k. So she's doing all this to eventually (6 years in now) break into the corporate world, where she'll then have to move 1000 miles away to I think Georgia.

To... probably make 60k.

I'm really curious where she'll be in 5-10 years, she's managed so many stores I feel like she'd go regional manager route or something. OR training would keep her at corporate instead.

Do you think she’s meeting the bar of ambitious and not incompetent? If so then why isn’t she reaping the rewards?

Are the people working under her unambitious and incompetent?

I think corporate sees themselves on another planet from the peasants running the stores and to allow someone outside of the caste system of.. gasp, having a bachelors degrees/mbas in mass communication to work at HQ vs having worked in stores for the last 6 years bringing the company earnings is .. like a sympathy promotion if it ever happens.

I don't think she'll ever wind up at corporate.

Yea sorry for the questions, just bothered by other claims in the thread that hard work pays off within a caste system

Walmart is somewhat notorious in the OTR trucking industry for having high wages, but very high barrier to entry. You need a near perfect driving record among other things.

OTR trucking overall pays pretty well, but it's an extremely physically and emotionally taxing job that doesn't really get the credit it deserves. How would you feel if you were "home" for a weekend every 2 weeks and living in 20sqft the rest of the time?

In college I had a friend whose father was an OTR trucker. Absolutely destroyed his back. He had back problems when I first met the family and a few years later he was on medical leave and unable to work, and he was maybe in his late 50s.

He wasn't driving for Walmart of making that kind of money then, so I hope he was able to move into a different career that didn't do further damage.

It's not a job I'd want to do. Ergonomics aside, I find driving to be very unpleasant in large doses. Having to put up with traffic, shitty drivers, weather, and everything else 8-12 hours per day is not my idea of a great time.

My mother was an OTR trucker during most of my teenage years, including driving for Walmart under contract (so not paid amazingly well, but regularly interacted with the Walmart employees at the DC in Tomah, WI). It's not always back breaking work, but access to (healthy) food is a major issue. For Walmart specifically, there's not much physical effort involved besides lowering the trailer landing gear, which is almost always done with a manual crank. The Walmart backroom staff handle unloading and the DC staff handle loading, which would be very very taxing to do constantly.

why is access to healthy food an issue? because truckers, being on the road, have to eat in poor quality restaurants, such as diners, maybe?

In a truck you can't just... drive anywhere. There are designated legal routes that you can't deviate from under most circumstances. The vast majority of food you have access to as a trucker is gas station/truck stop food and fast food attached to truck stops. You have limited cooking options in a truck, maybe a small waffle iron, rice cooker, or microwave. Most won't have room or power for something like a refrigerator (some might, it depends) so keeping non-dry food isn't really an option.

First, your work day is almost completely sedentary. Second, you are not near friends, gyms, fields, or other systems which promote healthy activity outside of work. While diet is important for all of us, it is especially important in this circumstance.

"Healthy foods" are going to be largely inaccessible through long sparsely-populated stretches of the country. Even where they are available - in markets, fruit stands, etc. pulling your huge truck off the road to park is expensive (in terms of time) and difficult (in terms of space). Truck stops have the infrastructure for your truck. But their food selection is mostly junk.

They generally don't have access to a kitchen or a large refrigerator, so meals tend to either be from a restaurant (where most restaurants, good and bad, are arguably not healthy unless you severely portion-limit) or something that can be reheated in a microwave or portable air fryer. In combination, this results in a not quite healthy diet.

thanks to all for the good answers.

What is it in particular about truck driving that is so bad for your back? I hear this so often.

Please don't reply "sitting down all day". I have been doing that for more than 20 years in a comfortable office (mostly Hermann Miller Aeron), and my back is fine.

My guess: The vibrations of the truck are awful for your bones.

Do you ever get up? Maybe turn your head from side to side, or stretch your legs out under your desk? Or go to the bathroom whenever you want?

Driving freezes your body into one position for hours on end. Doing it in a car for a few hours on a road trip makes my neck hurt. Doing it every day would be deleterious very quickly.

I work at a computer at a desk, but the ability to stand up at will just to use the toilet makes a big difference. Can’t do that driving a truck.

> You need a near perfect driving record among other things.

Absolutely. If a driver is at fault in an accident, Walmart will get sued for $zillions.

I once knew a middle aged man laying tile. I asked him why was he laying tile for crap wages. He said he lost his trucking license because he had a DUI (not while trucking). Doing construction was the only job he could get. He was quite bitter about it.

Pretty sure a DUI bars you from holding a CDL of any kind, not specifically a trucking license. I don't see a problem with that at all.

Wow, if true, that is harsh. If you made a mistake at 18 or 19 years old, then you are condemned for life to never hold a CDL (commercial driving license). That doesn't see fair.

I'm assuming that's if you get the DUI while you have a trucking license.

In WI, you lose it for a year on first offense. Second offense is life.

Source: https://wisconsindot.gov/Documents/dmv/shared/cdl-disq.pdf

I built my own house because almost every step was more expensive hourly labor than me writing software for an hour instead.

Even the lower rate such as concrete laborers wanted 100+ an hour.

I suspect the low pay of many of these trades is just a symptom of housing and construction being the number one money laundering industry and thus tradesman are always saying they're making nothing while simultaneously asking 100+ an hour cash and working full weeks.

Id bet the BLS income reports are off by like 50+%.

I think you mean tax dodging instead of money laundering there. Though, if they are really succesful dodging taxes, they might need to do some money laundering later, too.

It's a bit of both.

It's not too hard to get cash-only "customers" to buy services you don't have to actually perform.

It's also pretty easy to write two invoices, feign a mixup, and skim some off the top of a payment.

Where is your house? Those rates are not typical nationwide but I know a general contractor who is involved in construction on the islands near Bellingham and the rates there are like what you describe.

I agree that in my experience a lot of contractors would rather deal with cash and it isn’t exactly a secret why. I got a significant all cash discount on a new roof.

And the isolation. Sociable people claim they just look at people and can't get words to come out after being in a truck for six months.

Retail is always a flat pyramid. GMs get paid. The guy who ran the CompUSA that I worked in in college cleared $250k in the mid 90s.

Even a CVS will pay the GM well if they hit targets. And if they miss the targets, they get purged and there's a thousand people to replace them.

> So Wal Mart does pay well in fact if you are in the right position.

This feels like a globally true statement, regardless of the employer, no?

Most companies don't have 14,000 of these "right" positions.

14,000 out of their total number of employees is such a drop in the bucket though. If you can get hired as a Wal-Mart trucker, from what I understand, you're the best of the best. Also, consider there are like 3.5 million truck drivers in the US - only a tiny percentage of those can get jobs at places that pay as well as Wal-Mart. And Wal-Mart has 1.6 million US employees alone, so you're talking less than 1% of total jobs when you say 14,000.

Most companies don't have 2.1M employees.

yes. or of the industry. it's called supply and demand. econ 101.

Store managers are also generally expected to devote their entire lives to the job, and are imminently replaceable. What generosity Walmart may offer is off the backs of the lowest earning workers who frequently require taxpayer assistance to survive, and thus store manager’s bonuses are subsidized by the local communities Walmart most likely harmed by setting up shop to begin with. None of this is as simple as n=$$$ so Brand X is morally justified. It’s all symptoms of larger societal issues.

Walmart Global Tech is above average tech pay, just a step or 2 behind FAANG. One downside is annual stock grants instead of 4 year, so there is a lot less upside

A friend went to Harvard to join Waffle House (corporate). These are obviously lucrative ventures that yield reliable returns, such as voting blocs to hold over your (not-so) local congresspersons' heads during election seasons.

I feel like that is true of all companies.

The people with limited responsibilities who are easily replacable get paid nothing. Jobs that are hard to hire competent people for get paid $$$$. Supply and demand in action.

I worked in tech somewhere behind walmart.com and the pay/bonuses were standard silicon valley, non FAANG. More or less median.

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