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Comment by logn | Hacker News Reader

You're right. Sorry my numbers were wrong. Anyhow their average pay is actually closer to $10/hr anyway making the total cost more like 10 billion dollars. Their dividend payout ratio is around 30%. A payout ratio of 60% would still be okay with most investors, though I'm sure it would hurt the investment opportunity. But when we recognize that we have a growing income disparity this would be the price we pay to fix that.

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In 2011-12, Walmart paid $5B in dividend and bought back $6.2B of stock. They also spent around $13B on capital expenditure -- new stores, equipment, warehouses and so on, all of which would be employing new people.

People latch onto Walmart because of the amazing numbers involved. Hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue! Thousands and thousands of stores! Millions of employees!

But the thing is, retail is a really tough business to turn a buck on. After this massive machine has sprint through a year, the result is ... about a 3% profit on revenue.

Compare that with Google: On ~$50B revenue Google walks out with ~$10B of net income. For eight times less revenue Google is still managing to make more than half as much profit as Walmart.

Where are the picket lines outside Google HQ?

Where are the Googlers qualifying for SNAP?

This cuts both ways: if Google had a use for less skilled employees (I'm not saying they do, but anyone looking for customer service on her Nexus order might), they might still decide not to hire such employees specifically to avoid the regulations (and protests, apparently) involved with that.

Wal-Mart has to hire these workers, but we can be sure if they had any reason to hire fewer of them they would.

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