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Comment by shiftpgdn | Hacker News Reader

Then shouldn't Costco cut all of its employees salaries by half? They are a publicly traded company as well you know...

If you want Walmart to run like Costco, Walmart has to fire over a million people to drastically bring down their head count to match the substantially fewer people that Costco employs compared to Walmart on a sales basis.

Costco sales: $99b | Costco employees: 175,000

Walmart sales: $469b | Walmart employees: 2+ million

As someone else noted, they're very different businesses. The comparison is Samsclub vs Costco.

If you want to know the job killer in retail, look no further than Amazon.com. While all the pundits are busy chewing on Walmart, at least Walmart employs a ton of people (I'm not arguing that's good or bad, it's just amusing that the pundits are universally missing the elephant running down the road).

Here's Amazon's ratios:

FY12: $61b sales | Employees: 88,000

Amazon would have perhaps 500,000 to 750,000 employees at Walmart's size. That's assuming Amazon would ever hire all those people to begin with (the KIVA purchase says they would rather not). Amazon can avoid all the labor problems, by simply not hiring so many people in the first place. Whereas to compete with Amazon, Walmart might have to fire a lot of people and shift to heavy automation. That isn't going to go well for Walmart = massive strikes, national headlines, endless political pressure.

I think the whole point is that "should" and "shouldn't" simply aren't very useful concepts when dealing with corporations, like talking about what a slime mold should or shouldn't do. Getting morally outraged at WalMart is like getting really indignant about what plantar fasciitis is up to. Individuals will respond to moral accusations, but corporations are really only effectively controlled via legislation.

> Getting morally outraged at WalMart is like getting really indignant about what plantar fasciitis is up to.

Except plantar fasciitis doesn't have a CEO, board or steering committee. Or a public reputation.

> but corporations are really only effectively controlled via legislation.

That's true, but it doesn't mean we can't publicly shame corporations when they act in bad faith. Incorporation is not some magical get-out-of-ethics-jail-free card.

This Walmart vs Costco nonsense has got to stop. They serve completely different segments of the market. I won't bother rehashing here what others have argued much better (and with data to back it up). Just go read this and stop making the comparison already:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-27/why-walmart-will-ne...

(This article was also posted on HN a couple weeks back)

Costco is the way it is, not because it's a saint, but because of the market it occupies.

It is, for all intents and purposes, a wholesaler. They sell things in bulk. That's their thing. And they don't hold your hand while doing it.

There are no friendly people walking the isles willing to direct you, just cashiers. You pay for access. They only take AmEx, etc.

Mind you, I love the place, but it is the way it is because of what it is, not because it cares.

I don't shop at Wal-Mart because of their Union busting but last time I went to Costco there were a handful of "floor" employees wandering around to be found if you needed help. Costco pays its employees well because their CEO thinks happy employees lead to better workers[1]. In fact the last big box store I shopped at which was Home Depot had less people around to help than Costco. I realize that's anecdotal but you can't write down high employee salaries as "Being just a wholesaler".

[1]http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-06/costco-ceo-c...

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