How Did Walmart Get Cleaner Stores and Higher Sales? It Paid Its People More
Neil Irwin
Saturday, 15 Oct 2016 | 2:39 PM ET The New York Times
cnbc.com
A couple of years ago, Walmart, which once built its entire branding around a big yellow smiley face, was creating more than its share of frowns.
Shoppers were fed up. They complained of dirty bathrooms, empty shelves, endless checkout lines and impossible-to-find employees. Only 16 percent of stores were meeting the company's customer service goals.
The dissatisfaction showed up where it counts. Sales at stores open at least a year fell for five straight quarters; the company's revenue fell for the first time in Walmart's 45-year run as a public company in 2015 (currency fluctuations were a big factor, too).
To fix it, executives came up with what, for Walmart, counted as a revolutionary idea. This is, after all, a company famous for squeezing pennies so successfully that labor groups accuse it of depressing wages across the American economy. As an efficient, multinational selling machine, the company had a reputation for treating employee pay as a cost to be minimized.
But in early 2015, Walmart announced it would actually pay its workers more.
That set in motion the biggest test imaginable of a basic argument that has consumed ivory-tower economists, union-hall organizers and corporate executives for years on end: What if paying workers more, training them better and offering better opportunities for advancement can actually make a company more profitable, rather than less?
It is an idea that flies in the face of the prevailing ethos on Wall Streetand in many executive suites the last few decades. But there is sound economic theory behind the idea. "Efficiency wages" is the term that economists — who excel at giving complex names to obvious ideas — use for the notion that employers who pay workers more than the going rate will get more loyal, harder-working, more productive employees in return.
Walmart's experiment holds some surprising lessons for the American economy as a whole. Productivity gains have been slow for years; could fatter paychecks reverse that? Demand for goods and services has remained stubbornly low ever since the 2008 economic crisis. If companies paid people more, would it bring out more shoppers — benefiting workers and shareholders alike?
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