Thinking about Walmart

Coyote Blog has a nice post entitled _Observations on Walmart, Women, and Wages_. Some interesting thoughts there. For one, people complain that Walmart makes so much profit and pays so little for their employees. As Warren shows, Walmart has a return on sales of about 3.5%. Now I didn’t check this but this shows why $6.50 per hour at Walmart are good wages really. Think about a store owner making $250k in sales, giving her roughly $8000 per year with a margin of 3.5%. You couldn’t survive with those margins, they need to be higher. The idea here is that the low wages at Walmart are really going towards lower prices for consumers, not more profits.

He goes on to show the numbers that there are 40 million women more working in the US than in the 60s, showing that there are amazingly more jobs today.

I like this bit too: _I would love to see women at Walmart making more money, and some day they probably will. Even so, though, the fact that so many have found work there is a miracle unto itself. Remember that the alternative to a $6.50 job at Walmart if the left is successful in eliminating these jobs is probably not new $15.00 jobs — it is no job at all._