Wal-Mart Holds Food Drive For Its Own Employees

The War on Thanksgiving

From Think Progress:

Walmart has announced it will open its stores at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving,joining retailers like Target, Best Buy, Kmart, Macy’s, Kohl’s, J.C. Penney, and Toys R Us that are cutting their workforce’s holiday short to pursue holiday season profits. Kmart will open its doors the earliest of all the stores, opening at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day.

“Almost everybody to date has moved up, at least one hour, if not more,” Walmart Chief Marketing Officer Duncan Mac Naughton said Monday. “We thought 6 o’clock was the exact right time to win the weekend.” He explained that the 1 million workers needed to staff stores are “really excited to work that day.”

Last year, Walmart faced protests and strikes for creeping into holiday hours. The 8 p.m. start time prompted an online petition that collected more than30,000 signatures. As consolation, the retailer said it will pay workers higher holiday wages, give them one 25 percent discount on a transaction, and give them a free meal.

Wal-Mart to Cover Domestic Partners Health Care

From Reuters: 

Wal-Mart is the single biggest U.S. employer outside of the federal government. More than half of its 1.3 million U.S. employees are on its health-care plans. The company said it does not know how many workers would use either of the new benefits.

Wal-Mart's extension of health insurance to domestic partners comes after the U.S. Supreme Court in June forced the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages in states where it is legal. The Supreme Court also paved the way for same-sex marriage in California.

"Since we operate in all 50 states, we thought it was important to develop a single definition for all Wal-Mart associates in the U.S.," spokesman David Tovar said.

Employees' domestic partners can be covered if they are legal spouses, not legally separated; or a domestic partner of same or opposite gender in an ongoing, exclusive relationship similar to marriage for at least 12 months with the intention to continue sharing a household indefinitely, he said.

Retaining Profitability With a Living Wage

Rivals Beating Wal-Mart on Prices & Wages

From Think Progress: 

WinCo, a small, employee-owned grocery store chain based in Boise, Idaho, is able to beat Walmart’s prices on goods while providing its employees with good benefits. 

The company, which will soon have close to 100 stores with the latest openings in Texas, has almost 15,000 employees. Those who work at the store long enough qualify for a pension plan into which the company puts an amount equal to 20 percent of their yearly pay. More than 400 “front-line” workers — clerks, cashiers, and others who are not at the executive level — have retirement accounts that are worth at least $1 million, according to a company spokesman. 

It also provides full health benefits for those who work at least 24 hours a week, beyond the requirements in the Affordable Care Act. While the company is private and hasn’t made wage information available, Glassdoor reports that cashiers and clerks make more than $11 an hour. Thanks to these benefits and wages, the company has low turnover. An industry analyst estimated that the average hourly worker stays with the company for more than eight years...

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Other rivals are also able to offer cheap goods and good working conditions. Costco, which competes with Walmart’s Sam’s Club, pays employees $21.96 on average and nearly all of the workers who are eligible for benefits are enrolled. Its bottom line is strong, with profits up 19 percent in the first quarter of the year. It also gets much more revenue and profit per employee and generates a higher return for investors than Walmart...

The article goes on about how Wal-Mart's sales have been hurt by its failure to hire enough employees to get shelves stocked and pays them so poorly they do not provide decent customer service. Given how terribly Wal-Mart treats its workers, this is no surprise.

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