If Wal-Mart paid a living wage, how much would their prices increase? | Hacker News Reader

If Wal-Mart paid a living wage, how much would their prices increase?

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21 pointsjcalvinowens24 comments

I do get tired of terms like "living wage". Clearly the workers are not "dead" or "unliving". It is like the "pro-life" or "pro-choice" terms, deliberately politicizing.

If the government must give these people food stamps so they can live, then Walmart is not paying a living wage. The living wage would be "Walmart wages" + food stamps.

Government is subsidizing Walmart by allowing them to pay less than a living wage and complementing the money with US tax payers dollars.

Food stamps are a fairly broad program -- one fifth of US households receive them. Certainly not all such households would starve to death without them, it's a politically palatable cash substitute.

> Certainly not all such households would starve to death

Yeah, let's them simply "starve" then, but not to death, hey ? , I cant believe people can write things like that.

Its so deeply worked into the farm bill every time and farm rules and subsidies, its basically a political nightmare to break out and change.

If the government must give these people food stamps so they can live...

They don't. Where I live, GDP/capita adjusting for PPP is less than what you'd make earning $8.25/hour at walmart working 20 hours/week with no govt benefits of any kind. There is no mass die-off.

(Note: my numbers are adjusted for cost of living. So don't tell me that "it's cheaper here" - I'm taking that into account. Unlike the US poor, people here live in crowded apartments, take shared transport to work, and learn to survive without 24/7 water.)

You are simply wrong. The government is subsidizing poor people's consumption, not walmart.

So how would you call a wage that's enough to cover living expenses?

A career job, just like it was in the old days.

So you think working for a fast food restaurant that _does_ pay a living wage (like Dick's, in Seattle) while you work your way thorough college ought to be classified as a "Career Job"?

No, I think you should consider yourself lucky that you found a employer willing to pay that amount for a part time gig.

There was once two job tracks: part time pickup money and career. Starving out the part time work kills off a lot of opportunity since the higher the wage, the more competent an employer will require the employee to be.

I get tired of it because it is a fairly dumb concept to apply to every job. We once had jobs teenagers would get part time to get some spending money. The "living wage" proponents are trying to remove this entirely. We need to be talking about the next job, not a Wal-Mart shelf stacker. Our rush to destroy anything that isn't a college driven education is just coming back to bite us hard.

It's interesting how so many Americans are against basic income, when there's a form of basic income already: receiving food stamps while working in a full-time job. I don't see any problem with receiving benefits / basic income when working for a smaller wage, if the amount of basic income is large enough. Therefore I wouldn't try to "force" Walmart to increase wages, rather I'd vote for politicians who support basic income.

I don't think people know enough to be against it.

I'm a university student and within the last year I've talked to 20+ people about it (mostly students), and mostly people don't know what it is.

That's a good point, it's more known here in Europe. Anyway, I'd estimate that most people are against it after hearing about it.

It's NOT a full time job, that's the whole point of walmart!

Walmart only employs part time employees for most of their positions, so they do not have to pay all the extra costs of a full time employee.

They have a system where every worker only works up to the part-time hour limits.

So the answer to all these people in the videos problems is get a second job, that is what my mother had to do. Instead they are lazy and work part time, then they take handouts because they aren't making enough.

Spoken like a true scumbag apologist.

Okay, they get a second job. What happens when one of the two jobs demands that they work at that place during the same time that they're supposed to be at the other job (or doesn't allow for enough time to travel to the other)? They get fired from one. They're now back at square one.

Also, what about cases where people live somewhere where there ARE NO OTHER AVAILABLE JOBS and can't afford to leave?

> Spoken like a true scumbag apologist.

Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News.

Walmart or Mac Donald's jobs ARE subsidized jobs, period.It means everybody is paying so Walmart or MC Donald's can make more short term profit. But i'd say it's not the heart of the problem,just a symptom.

What about the many cases where people don't make enough to maintain a meager style of living but "too much" to qualify for things like food stamps?

Well, I certainly don't advocate the current form of food stamps, rather I think it should be replaced with basic income. My point was that most people use arguments like "if people can get benefits without working, then nobody would work", and Walmart employees are a counter-argument to that.

Walmart is a profit maximizing company. Spending 4 billion dollars to save the government 300 million in food stamps is not ever going to happen.

I think the point of the video was to educate customers so they would know how the company where they're shopping works. Walmart has no interest in doing that of course.

What I do not believe the living wage campaigners do a good job of justifying (and why I generally do not agree with the movement), is how much a wage is necessary from a policy standpoint.

At the moment, it comes off as completely subjective, and based on a very rough consensus of what a group believes is enough to live on.

But, they will say, providing this wage only adds pennies to the cost of some item or service you purchase. Well then, if $12/hr is "good", why not go for "great", and make the wage $30/hr and have everyone loving their job? No answer.

Although, I would welcome that level of wage for our Muni/Bart/SF government workers, who are well beyond, at the level of "ecstatic".

You (Americans) should treasure the existence of the minimum wage. One of the black spots on our otherwise rather generous social framework here in Germany is that there exists no minimum wage.

I don't know if the lack of a minimum wage has contributed to the failure of Walmart here, but they did sell all their stores because they weren't competitive.

Working at a Walmart probably pays better than many of the jobs at ultra-cheap supermarkets in Germany (Lidl, Real). I'm not saying that it pays enough, but at least you all can take some pride in the fact that a minimum wage is in place.

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