Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home | Hacker News Reader

Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home

bloomberg.com

249 pointsbko372 comments

> Workers can opt in to earn extra money by making deliveries using their own cars. They’re assigned packages based on where they live so the route aligns with their commute home

The headline makes it sound coercive but that actually sounds like an efficient use of time and energy (less big trucks on the road, less miles driven, more money for people who want it).

I wouldn't mind dropping a few things off on my way home and earning a few extra bucks as long as it made sense financially. I'm very interested to see what incentive they have for it.

Yeah, huge difference between "deliver this on your way home or your fired" and "if you want some extra money, deliver this on your way home."

Not much difference between this and, say, LaserShip, aside from it being a small part of the overall job.

Well, where the rubber meets the road here is in whether or not there is an unspoken expectation that you need to do this, compensation or not. "Official" policy doesn't always reflect what gets implemented, and is sometimes just used as a way to legally CYA so that you can have your cake and eat it too.

That's true for literally every aspect of every job, though, so it seems like a pointless thing to say unless there's some indication they're actually abusing this.

Not sure if it's pointless to point this out. The mechanism is pretty obvious, so the right question is: what (if any) measures will WallMart undertake so that this doesn't happen?

We can create laws without an indication of previous abuse. We can regulate not just because we have indicators of abuse but because we can imagine potential abuse.

We don't give toddlers handguns because our pre-frontal cortex allows us the foresight to see that it's a bad idea -- we don't need to actually wait and see if one toddler shoots another.

Sure, but that only makes sense if there's a reason to anticipate unusual problems.

Like, if Walmart was offering employees extra money to dispose of toxic waste or collect debts from delinquent customers or something, I'd see a huge potential for abuse and wouldn't consider it to be at all a good idea. Those things need special training and the potential for problems is high.

But this is package delivery. It's a relatively unskilled, low-end job. Its abuse potential seems to be to be on the same level as the abuse potential of, say, lifting boxes, or stocking shelves, or mopping floors. "Walmart pays people to stock shelves" wouldn't get anyone up in arms, so why would this?

Because this is "off-the-clock, off-site" work. It has the potential to be extended in a way that it much harder to quantify and regulate. My, and many others', biggest concern is that the workers at Wall-Mart often need their job for subsistence; it's often not a job that they feel they can say "no" to. So if this gets extended from "Do this only if you want to make some side money," to "Doing this greatly influences if you get to keep your job," there is a problem because it's no longer within their normal hourly wage limits and it's no longer in a set physical space.

Do they want to go a different direction than than directly home -- say to go to their daughter's birthday party? Again, if it's elective, there's no problem but if it becomes coerced then Wall-Mart is directly exploiting that need to keep that job.

In fact, I don't see how this is much of a win for the workers. I only see how Wall-Mart is leveraging its indentured workforce, including passing the risk on to them, to expand its profit base. This is late-stage capitalism, pure and simple.

If the pay comes out to less than their normal wage plus costs incurred then I'll completely agree. I just don't see why we'd jump to that conclusion before the details are available. If the news was "Walmart hires 100 workers for new store" we'd assume they'd get paid enough to make it worth their while (although probably not a lot!).

> This is late stage capitalism, pure and simple.

What is late stage capitalism, and why is this representative of it?

The idea is that capitalism will lead, inexorably, to fewer big companies and fewer people who control those companies. Those fewer companies and people will have more and more power, the people at the other end of the spectrum (e.g. unskilled workers) will have less and less power, over time.

Wall-Mart has a lot of power; its workers almost none. In fact most of its workers are kept part-time so that they don't have benefits and more than half of the full-time hourly make less than $25,000/year[1]. Remember that almost 60% of Americans don't have $500 in savings. These people are often terrified of losing their job.

The notion of using workers to make deliveries is representative of late stage capitalism in that at first it sounds like Wall-Mart is letting its employees "hustle" for a bit more money, but instead it's really putting itself in the situation where it can leverage its employee's circumstances. Note that, even in this proof-of-concept stage, the risks and insurance costs are already passed to the workers[3].

Please note that I don't think Wall-Mart as a company is particularly evil or would ever try to not pay its workers for this service -- on the contrary, they will certainly, always compensate. My concern is that that compensation will not cover the costs when all variables are factored in and that while it might start as voluntary, if it's indeed profitable, that would start to be pushed toward a work culture pressure of, "Do you want to keep your job? Deliver this at a net loss to you."

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-23/more-than... [2] http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/12/pf/americans-lack-of-savings [3] https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/walmart-begins-testing-usi...

"Note that, even in this proof-of-concept stage, the risks and insurance costs are already passed to the workers[3]."

Where is that stated in the article? I couldn't find it.

Well, we don't allow people to sell handguns to toddlers. A quick search will reveal that there are quite a few deaths every year due to people negligently allowing guns to fall into the hands of toddlers. Last time I checked there was an average of ~one fatality a week.

I'm just stating that the real question about how good this will be or not will be what happens in practice. If not enough employees are volunteering for this, then entire program could end in failure. Will there be pressure to make this work from upper management?

The opt-in nature of this from existing employees is what makes this suspect. The question is will Walmart use their current employment relationship with these people to try and coerce them into opting in. Hiring outside help from people that Walmart has no previous relationship with doesn't raise such questions.

Walmart also doesn't have a great public image, so people are more likely to go over their actions with a fine-toothed comb.

This again seems pointless to say. Of course it'll depend on how it works out in practice. That's true of every action by every company. So why are so many people complaining about this?

Would you be happier if they just forced their employees to do it? Most job descriptions include a phrase like "and any other duties as required" and as long as they paid the employees and followed the relevant regulations it would be perfectly legal to do this.

> This again seems pointless to say. Of course it'll depend on how it works out in practice. That's true of every action by every company. So why are so many people complaining about this?

Agreed.

At any job I've worked at, doing the bare minimum for awhile will probably get you fired; if you want to stand out or get a promotion, you're expected to do more than you're asked.

Well, you could always look at the actual history of Walmart's employee relations and pay policies and make a guess.

Exactly! If part of middle management's evaluation is based on how many packages their underlings deliver, middle management will start hiring (or give more hours to) people they think are more likely to signup for this and cut (or reduce hours to) people that don't do this.

Particularly since I could imagine hiring staff based on their regular commutes. "Oh, you live in the Dundas neighborhood? We don't have any other employees from there".

... later ...

"Wait, you don't want to do an after work delivery again? Dude, this is why we hired you."

When is that not true for any job ever? A lot of fear mongering before we even see how it works in practice.

"Not a team player"

Depends to what degree they're asking, or telling.

There's also the middle ground, where folks who happen to deliver things on their way home get more shifts (because otherwise, there aren't enough people to make the needed deliveries). They might be shorter shifts or split shifts, and wind up being an increase in underpaid hours.

Needing money is its own kind of coercion, especially when being a walmart employee doesnt pay much.

Doesn't this also apply to their normal duties? Are we also going to be upset about Walmart paying people to run the cash registers?

Over the last few years Walmart has been stepping up their game when it comes to paying associates. The minimum wage for Walmart is currently 10.50 and rising through next year. In some markets they do pay more for cost of living and such.

Not so fast, what if Walmart lowers overall compensation in the future, what if Walmart's compensation is already overly low. Does that change your opinion on this extra incentive program?

What if they offered overtime to workers who wanted extra money, or offered promotions to people who work particularly hard? Would you have the same dim view of these as you do of this package delivery thing?

If they were able to cut wages in the future, surely they'd do it regardless.

Serious question: would you like a job at Walmart? Do you feel attracted to the idea of working there?

I could imagine working at Trader Joe's. Downside, running a supermarket is a very tedious and unrewarding job. Upside, you don't have to take your work home with you, I like their products and business model, and the firm treats its employees really well, in terms of both pay and conditions. People I've met socially who work there love their jobs, and it's a big reason I choose to shop there. On the other hand, I would have to be truly desperate to ever consider taking a job at Walmart.

So yeah, everything you say is true in theory, but would you honestly want to work for Walmart in practice?

Absolutely not. I refuse to even buy things there.

But I see no reason to single out this particular detail out of this gigantic evil company. Of all the things to hate about Walmart, paying their workers to deliver packages would be pretty close to the bottom.

A clarification may be required for your question and should read

> Would you honestly want to work for a Walmart Store in practice?

I state that because the corporate level options are extremely lucrative. Walmart Tech holds many events, seminars, and speakers for associates to attend during work hours. Although, there is the annoying Walmart Chant...

In most places, they literally can't offer lower compensation without breaking minimum wage laws.

True.

Hey, you haven't been doing any home deliveries lately, is everything ok? Oh, well we have to reduce your shifts next week.

Sorry, cars broke. Can I get a paycheck advance to get the repairs done?

Actually, this is a (sort of) thing called "Associate In Critical Need" where associates (employees, but lingo) can request extra $$$ from Walmart for critical issues.

Important Caveat though, you can only do it once in a lifetime.

Environmentally friendly too as the journey is being made anyway.

> Environmentally friendly too as the journey is being made anyway.

It's a financial incentive for employees not to use transit but instead personal autos to and from work in order to be available for such deliveries, so it's actually environmentally hostile.

Wal-Marts are typically in areas where public transit isn't appealing (or even exists in the first place) if you have the ability to drive a car.

Tough titty for the employees who do rely on transit. No extra $ for them.

Well to hear it from HN readers, they're the lucky ones: they won't be exploited like their car-driving brethren.

A specious mischaracterization of the arguments on display.

Is it? The arguments boil down to:

* I bet this isn't really "optional"

* I bet they're not going to get paid enough to make it worthwhile

And none of those made the same inference as you that they were lucky as a result, which was the specious mischaracterization I referred to.

Does the extra $$ exceed the cost of owning a car in the 1st place? This might not be as true as you think..

really, what proportion of workers do you think will ditch the bus in favor of driving a car to work? Absolutely tiny, if any at all. These people live in the burbs for the most part and everyone drives everywhere.

Incentive: their hourly wages. Routes are selected to minimize extra time on commute. Up to 10 packages per person. Will get a navigational app.

Source:https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/walmart-begins-testing-usi...

So not only do I work for you, but you want me to install your custom app on my personal device, too? I can't imagine there are any privacy backdoors here at all. Definitely not when I'm required to give it location permissions for it to function. /s

I see you don't work at Walmart. People there have more burning matters, like how to put food on the table.

And you can block location requests(and the like) for the app, after work, Either with Android 6-7 or Lineage's privacy guard.

"And you can block location requests(and the like) for the app, after work, Either with Android 6-7 or Lineage's privacy guard."

I see that you also do not work at walmart.

I'm sure technological side steps will result in termination one or another way.

Or just turn off the GPS.

Disclosure: I work at Walmart Tech at the David Glass Building.

I can say with absolute assurance that it does not.

If the incentive doesn't include a mileage reimbursement, then I'd say it's not a great deal unless their routing is extremely intelligent.

I mean, if you're paying me to drive home and drop off a package at my neighbor's house, that's fine. But 10 packages are going to take quite a bit of driving around to deliver, and so you better be paying for time and equipment cost.

Agreed. I have the privilege to consider employee conditions very important. An honest "opt in" is not detrimental to that, but there's definitely potential for this to make it into the company's culture as a new job expectation. We should be looking out for that.

On the whole, if employees are offered better options than the ones they have now, isn't that progress?

Ugh. I think that this sort of attitude (which was my initial reaction too) is a big part of what's wrong with our current economy.

If you take the concept at face value, this is Walmart offering to let their employees make some extra money in exchange for a bit of extra work, once they've clocked out. What a nice company.

But realistically, this is Walmart shunting the costs of delivery onto their employees. Instead of paying their employees a living wage, or offering benefits befitting a delivery driver, they can offset all of the risk, deprecation costs, etc associated with delivering a package all for the low cost of what amounts to a tiny raise in their existing payroll.

Walmart chooses what they pay their associates, and what hours they get. So it's not really appropriate for them to start becoming arbiters of opportunities to make extra money "outside of work." This is shady as all hell.

Wouldn't this result in increased risk of delivery failure, package damage, or even non-professional delivery-driver injury? If anything, this is low-end, but yes, it sounds cheap.

I think it'd be a good practice to examine competitive offerings for delivery per area, e.g., offerings such as Postmates and similar. If there's someone willing to pay them more, then I feel that the employee may have enough options for fair treatment. However, if Walmart is the only game in town, then I agree with a lot of your apprehensions.

In other words, knowing what we already know about Wal Mart, while this might be good news for share holders, this isn't likely to be good news for employees.

Yes, exactly. I could imagine an after-shift delivery taking up to an hour to complete. (I'm factoring-in "find the place" time and retracing their steps after delivery) They will probably only be paid a per Diem for the delivery - and it won't be near their hourly wage nor gas/wear & tear costs.

It's a nice thought on the outside...but ultimately, deliveries are best done by actually specialized outfits.

I can also imagine a manager changing everyones' schedules around the deliveries. That could seriously impact people.

> and it won't be near their hourly wage nor gas/wear & tear costs.

Well then, I suppose the people involved will just have to do the math and see if it makes sense to them. The horror.

Sadly for a lot of people, the short term win of being able to use the extra couple dollars to feed the family causes them to act 'irrationally' and ignore the longer term consequences.

> Sadly for a lot of people, the short term win of being able to use the extra couple dollars to feed the family causes them to act 'irrationally' and ignore the longer term consequences

Sort of like driving for Lyft or Uber?

The wear on vehicles alone adds up quickly into large maintenance bills... yet many people still drive for them on an amateur level, making long term profits questionable (buying new tires after 1-2 years instead of 3-4, for example).

Im in the 'wait and see' camp.. but you can say a program is voluntary, while in truth it's required to keep your job.

Just label all the people who refuse as not being team players. Dock them on their performance reviews for it. "Johnny over there wouldn't take a short detour on his way home, so we had to send someone out to deliver a package. If he's not willing to help out, maybe he should go work some place else."

There.. a required voluntary program. This is the natural language/playbook for every manager out there.

Many of the workers involved have hours that change on the whim of their supervisors. Employees who aren't team players don't get hours.

Do you have any evidence at all that this will be the case here?

I was speaking generally... but I think its going to be pretty difficult to avoid in an organization like Walmart, with its low-margin and strong emphasis on efficiency and controlling costs, to look at a sheet that says an employee is 2 minutes from a delivery point, but instead we had to send a truck 30 minutes out to deliver a package... it's going to be hard for that manager not to take that as a willingness to help.

Once you have a sheet with times and delivery points for each employee.. it becomes a measure of the employees willingness to assist. If other employees are willing to drive 10 minutes, and you're not willing to drive 2 minutes, it raises the question of why.

And that question is definitely going to be asked if the alternative (30 minutes for regular delivery) results in an additional cost to the company.

But as I said, we'll have to wait and see.

When the alternative is starving, taking a worse deal is just what you have to do. And Walmart controls the workers hours, so that's a huge mess.

This can become abusive in a hurry. Suppose the net after gas is that delivering packages pays $5/hr. Walmart knows how many deliveries their workers take, how many they need, and what hours get scheduled. More packages need going out? Cut hours for folks not delivering, schedule the folks delivering for more days with short shifts or split shifts.

It's sad reading people cheering their own exploitation. But I'd expect nothing less from HN.

You think the average HN employee works shifts at Wal-mart? No, it's people here cheering other's exploitation (in the name of the mythical "freedom").

You're both assuming that this must necessarily be exploitative. It might actually be a good program for Walmart workers.

Any situation where you do not receive the full value of your labor is exploitation, of course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour#Surplus...

Again, you're saying this without even knowing what the pay structure is.

Is this sarcasm? "Of course" makes it sound like it is, because it's certainly not obvious, but you know, Poe's law, and you linked to it.

If it's not, I'm curious why this theory holds so much sway for some people, given its glaring flaws. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what it's saying, but just because an engineer can add $1M in marginal revenue to Google's bottom line absolutely does not mean they deserve $1M in salary, because they can only do that using the construct that was created by the other engineers at Google in order to make that much money for Google. If they couldn't make that $1M on their own without the rest of Google's help - the existing brand, infrastructure, and ideas when they join - they're not being "exploited", especially if they're also shareholders. And the longer you spend there, the larger a shareholder you become (unless you choose to sell your share to someone else, which many do).

And to say that the value of a product can be based on how much labor it took to make is completely insane - mud piles can take tons of labor to make, but they're usually also completely useless. The amount of effort expended did not imbue those mud piles with any sort of value to anyone.

This isn't to say that I think the current ownership structures of companies is ideal and can't be improved upon, I don't think that. But I find what you linked to be filled with such flawed reasoning that I'm curious what people see in it. Or maybe it requires operating under different axioms.

And your assumption that employee is even allowed a cost/benefit option is based on... ?

All of this hypothetical except for the fact that Wal-Mart is known for a) ruthless schedule management like keeping workers locked in warehouses b) a known price-cutter both on vendors and employees to the point their employees often qualify for state aid for under-employed / under-paid (i.e., welfare benefits).

Given that, it'd be surprising if an non-exploitative option will be available for the workers who will be doing these deliveries.

But of course, we'll see.

> And your assumption that employee is even allowed a cost/benefit option is based on... ?

I'm not assuming anything, I'm giving Walmart the benefit of the doubt. As you said, "we'll see", no need to shit on them providing their employees with an additional revenue stream before the program is even implemented.

Giving Wal-Mart the benefit of the doubt flies in the face of historical facts/data. Feel free to argue otherwise.

Let's keep it civil.

Are you operating on old assumptions? The average hourly wage is $13.38 for full-time workers and $10.58 per hour for part-timers [1]. Not bad for unskilled labor.

1: http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/20/news/companies/walmart-pay-r...

Walmart has not earned that benefit of the doubt. Given that it is Walmart, the default is to assume that it will be exploitative until proven otherwise.

I've only heard good things about Costco. I wouldn't give Costco the benefit of the doubt. Every company (except nonprofits) exists to accrue profit. There's no other factor. They do not have any interest in mind than profit. I definitely assume the worst from Walmart.

And when it doesn't, the manager will see their bonuses going away and the workers will be labeled non-team-players, their performance reviews will be harsher and some slackers will have to go to make room for dedicated people.

Labor unions, when they work, are a beautiful thing.

Which also doesn't help if it ends up being coercive like "well this is optional, but we'll prefer people who do it" effectively meaning people who don't do it will just get passed over for promotions / raises etc.

> I could imagine an after-shift delivery taking up to an hour to complete.

The article says the app finds possible deliveries that are on the employee's route home, so no extra out of the way driving is to be done... only a 30 second stop to get out and carry the package up to the front door. Seems very efficient to me.

> I can also imagine a manager changing everyones' schedules around the deliveries. That could seriously impact people.

Again, from the article, the program is 100% volunteer.

> but ultimately, deliveries are best done by actually specialized outfits

Which are incapable of same day deliveries usually (there's a few exceptions, but they usually cost a figurative arm and leg). Typically local courier services are used (such as with Amazon's same day deliveries, but note that Amazon subsidizes that service and the customer doesn't pay the actual cost typically), but they are making a special trip to pickup the package and a special trip to deliver the package, which means it costs more to WalMart, which means WalMart passes that cost onto the customer.

Seems like this program can be a big win-win for everyone involved. We'll have to wait and see how the trial run goes.

> The article says the app finds possible deliveries that are on the employee's route home, so no extra out of the way driving is to be done... only a 30 second stop to get out and carry the package up to the front door. Seems very efficient to me.

Dude, you're engaging in fantasy. Walmart is going to want to use this for more people than just those who live on busy commuter roads that happen to be used by a Walmart employee. "On the employee's route home" is probably going to mean a detour below some limit that Walmart decides. Also, it only takes 30 seconds to deliver a package if it's small and you know exactly what house it's meant for, both of which are unlikely to be true in the real world. It regularly takes more than 30 seconds just to hunt for an unfamiliar house number.

> is probably going to mean a detour below some limit that Walmart decides

Did you miss the part where this is a voluntary program? If the employee doesn't like the route, they don't have to take it.

> Dude, you're engaging in fantasy

I suppose it's fantasy simply because you hate Walmart (I presume). If this was, say, Amazon... I wager most would take a different opinion. "Look at how ingenuitive Amazon is! They'll deliver packages even faster and cheaper, and pay employees more while they're at it!"

You have no idea what the compensation is, but immediately assume it's big bad Walmart beating up on poor employees. Many just immediately assume this is some new devilish ploy to exploit workers... that's absurd, especially given how few facts we have about this program so far.

The facts, so far, state this is a 100% volunteer program... will only suggest package deliveries along the employees current (and specified by the employee) route home... and the employee will be compensated for that delivery above their normal wage... and Walmart will pass the savings to the customer, and offer faster delivery.

How is this not a win based on what we know so far? It's pure conjecture and bias that leads to the default assumption this is some absurdly evil, exploitative scheme...

> Did you miss the part where this is a voluntary program? If the employee doesn't like the route, they don't have to take it.

There are all kinds of comments in other threads talking about how "voluntary" it may end up being in practice.

> I suppose it's fantasy simply because you hate Walmart (I presume)....

You presume quite a bit, and your presumptions border on fantasy.

> The facts, so far, state this is a 100% volunteer program...

> and the employee will be compensated for that delivery above their normal wage...

Correction: the company PR so far, this is all based on a Walmart blog post. Anyway, let's play quote the OP:

>>> Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is testing a program...

>>> Wal-Mart didn’t specify how the employees will be compensated.

You're right that it's all-volunteer now, but it's reasonable to question how much that will remain true in the future, especially since it's still being developed. It could even turn out to be de-jure voluntary but de-facto mandatory. Walmart could also shower money on its employees for this work, but history suggests otherwise.

Any evidence to support your claims?

> Any evidence to support your claims?

Evidence that it would typically take more than 30 seconds to drop off a package to an unfamiliar house, even on a route you know? Or that Walmart is motivated to ship to people who aren't directly on its employee's commutes, and it likely will use this to do so if it goes forward with this idea?

My evidence is common sense. If you'd like a time-motion study, or a recording from Walmart's boardroom conversations, you're out of luck. Anyway, the stronger claims are those I was disputing, which don't pass the smell test.

> They will probably only be paid a per Diem for the delivery

This is a big assumption we'll have to find out. It's important to state that delivery competitors UberEats, Roadie, etc are also per diem. (and come with fewer benefits than a walmart employee would already have)

Walmart has less than 3% profit margin. It'd go bankrupt if it paid its employees $15/hour.

If walmart can't support a decent wage - then they should go bankrupt and let middle class persons own and run small businesses: hardware stores, grocery stores, clothing stores, ice cream stores, etc. Owning a business near a walmart means competing with floods of cheap off loaded goods from china -- operated by persons using government subsidies.

It's more like the other way around. Small businesses are much more sensitive to increases in wages than big efficient companies like walmart. That's why Walmart has supported increases in the minimum wage in the past, because they know it hurts their competitors more than them. They just increase their prices and put the increased costs onto consumers and keep the same profit.

But even if it wasn't this way, so what? Walmart isn't making their employees worse off. They are giving them low skill jobs that the economy is desperately short on. Companies like Apple hire orders of magnitude less low skill employees relative to their profit than Walmart.

No one is protesting Apple over that. If we just taxed companies like that bit more, and distributed the money amongst the poor, it would be vastly more effective than making walmart pay a few percent more. In a few years Walmart will automate most of their jobs anyways. As many industries already have. Increasing the minimum wage doesn't solve that.

If you compare Costco to Sam's Club, you'll notice that it's not that simple.

Costco doesn't have customer service. I can walk around and never see a single person.

At Sam's, I'm constantly bombarded with questions of if I need help.

Another post indicates that they already pay hourly employees $13.85 average.

Also, the fact that it is tied to employment could also be a pitfall. It's optional, until such point as it isn't. At least with other types of sharing economy type jobs it is optional. What happens when you feel obligated to make deliveries so as to not lose your day job.

You don't think you're jumping the gun here, maybe? Do you even know what the compensation will be?

>Instead of paying their employees a living wage, or offering benefits befitting a delivery driver,

Obviously you can criticize Walmart's current practices. The issue is whether this policy is any worse than what they had before.

>they can offset all of the risk, deprecation costs, etc associated with delivering a package all for the low cost of what amounts to a tiny raise in their existing payroll.

Do you give the same objection to every other company that pays for mileage for work-related travel? Is that also "shunting off depreciation costs"?

Why are you assuming that they won't have an insurance policy for such deliveries or pay for mileage like every other company?

Edit: clarified which part was responding to what

> You don't think you're jumping the gun here, maybe? Do you even know what the compensation will be?

Walmart is known for high wages.

If only we had some patterns of previous behavior towards employees at Walmart from which we could make inferences about whether the deal offered (well, eventually, this will be "offered" to employees, ie totally optional, unless you want to keep your job) will be a fair deal or exploitative.

I made a few dollars above minimum wage when I was 18 before I started college. Not much on my resume other than similar jobs expected of someone in highschool. I was very happy with my job there.

Are you already zorked this early on a Friday? Then why are so many of walmart's employees on social benefits? https://www.thenation.com/article/walmart-wages-are-the-main...

Sarcasm, I'm guessing.

If it is, then that needs to be clarified; because for its industry and the "local" general stores it is replacing, Walmart pays more per hour.

For the Uber/Ubereats and other gig economy estimates, $11/hr is well above the industry take home.

Walmart is in progress of raising it's minimum wage to $11/hr, 22% more than federal $7.25 minimum wage. The Times covered this in the past https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/20/business/walmart-raising-...

Before graduating college, the most money I made was working for Walmart at a distribution center. I made $19.20 an hour which was pretty good considering minimum wage was just over $5.

Can anyone actually live on $40 a day?

The poster's point is that $19.20 is significantly above the federal minimum wage and what Walmart is legally required to pay.

I want to emphasize in this context (gig delivery) that the recent UberEats Stockholm posting indicated even less than $5/hr.

Certainly in a place like Boise, ID. That's $800/month, $704 after tax. Rent with roommates will run around $300/month. Food is $150/month ($5/day). That leaves $250/month for misc expenditures. It would absolutely be tight, but people can and do live on that much.

Hope you never get sick and have to call in, your car never breaks down, and you never have a medical emergency!

If you get seriously sick 3X (5 time even) that amount won't save you. But as things stand now you'd have free(ish) healthcare anyway.

Car? What car? You are walking, biking, riding the bus.

It's doable, barely, just barely and there will be troubles if anything comes up.

Would that qualify as life or merely survival? Can a person under these conditions become a parent? Can someone in this situation raise a healthy kid?

I doubt it.

No, you can't have a kid on this money. Nor is it a very good life in terms of material possessions. You probably can't afford a horse either.

But none of those things were specified in OP's post.

That's more or less what it meant - a meaningful, healthy life, above merely survival. I would know - I'm the OP.

Ah yes, indeed you are. I had to go further up the tree it appears.

I don't disagree. Not a good life.

People live on a buck here and there and change they find in vending machines as far as a "living" goes. Technically they are "alive" but it can't be nice way to live.

Kind of makes one wonder exactly what level of "living" is acceptable. I suppose preferences vary.

What if you have a family?

Hopefully you have a second wage earner in it.

Food goes up a little bit, and your room is more crowded. Everything else is the same.

Go look at the size of a log cabin, they were about the size of a single bedroom today and large families lived in them.

> [if you have a family] Food goes up a little bit, and your room is more crowded. Everything else is the same.

The amount of money and extra time that we spent on just one baby was astounding - clothes, doctor visits, food. Many more trips to the store/pharmacy/doctor, etc, than normal.

The USDA's child cost estimator [0] says that raising a child in the midwest costs about an extra $12000 a year, on average. Not all of that breakdown may apply, but even if you were to ONLY look at food costs, an extra $1500/year in food (when you're only making the hypothetical $800/month discussed in the GP) is not "a little".

0: https://www.cnpp.usda.gov/tools/crc_calculator/

My wife is great at scrounging: kids didn't add much to my costs unless we are eating out. You can get last years styles all over for cheap. My kids can have a few stains - they will be putting their own on anyway.

It raises some interesting questions. Should every job pay a sufficient wage to raise a family? How big of a family? Should we require employers to pay a teenager as much as someone supporting a family of 8?

At least 80% of humans live on $10 per day or less.

http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-sta...

The parent meant in the area where Walmart etc are paying that wage.

Okay, then since the Walmart employees are still alive, the answer is yes. They can live on $40/day. As an added bonus, they have a higher standard of living than the vast majority of humans on the planet.

Well, no. If they could, they wouldn't be receiving assistance.

Walmart has turned, e.g., food assistance programs into a subsidy for themselves.

If you can imagine a world in which food assistance programs suddenly came to an end, would Wal-Mart raise its wages? Perhaps the workers would demand more. Either way, in the long run it's not possible for any employer to pay wages below the basic survival rate.

> Either way, in the long run it's not possible for any employer to pay wages below the basic survival rate.

Sure it is, if they are willing to accept more rapid turnover and the workers they are competing for have no better offers.

How long do you honestly believe an employer can sustain a business providing wages insufficient to purchase food to provide the calories necessary to complete the work?

Is walmart not proof that the answer to your question is quite a long time?

No, and this is exactly the point I was trying to drive home when I made my original post about over 80% of the all humans living on less than $10/day. When the OP asked if "anyone can live on $40/day" what they really meant was, "Can people live a lifestyle reasonably close to mine on $40/day." The answer to that is obviously not. The question is being asked by someone who is almost certainly in the top 1% of incomes across the globe (which is about $34k/yr). But the real answer is that a person can live incredibly well by global standards on $40/day.

That depends on how big the available labor force with no better offers is, and what the rate is at which people from outside that group move into it; potentially indefinitely, under the right (or very wrong, depending on your perspective) conditions.

I'd be interested in any examples you have.

Unpaid internships?

Well, you got me there so I gave you an upvote. Temporarily bartering labor for skills training is a complexity I hadn't accounted for.

Yeah, a rather extreme example, and of course we hope they are being sufficiently well compensated in experience, though we know that's not always the case.

As another example, there's the people working 70 hour weeks across 3 jobs - no one of those is paying what's necessary to sustain the employee.

Moreover, if you're okay with high turnover, there may be people willing to work for you unsustainably for a time just to lower their burn rate.

You are attempting to recast the question to looking at median subsistence-rates worldwide. The Walmart workers we are discussing work in communities in the U.S.

Certainly, some folks in the world survive on $1/day. That doesn't work in the U.S.

We know that Walmart wages are insufficient alone, because workers there tell us that they need, for instance, SNAP to feed their kids.

Thus SNAP is, in part, now a subsidy to Walmart.

The point of this discussion is to shine a light on how ignorant the OP's question was. The original question was whether a person could live off $40/day. But that's not what OP really meant was it? What they meant to ask was whether or not a person could live OP's approximate standard of living on $40/day. And the answer to that is obviously not. If you make more than $34k/yr you're in the global 1%. Virtually no one on the planet lives at the OP's standard of living. The question only shows the OP's hubris.

SNAP is a subsidy for every industry that sells products that people on SNAP might purchase. Every dollar not spent on food is another dollar someone might collect in rent, or cell phone service, or clothing. Wal-Mart may benefit greatly from SNAP, but it benefits far more from its customers having more income that they don't have to spend on subsistence than it benefits from its employees being able to accept a lower wage. And of course Wal-Mart accepts SNAP payments from its customers because Wal-Mart sells groceries.

> SNAP is a subsidy for every industry that sells products that people on SNAP might purchase

You're missing my point. SNAP is a direct subsidy to Walmart not because they sell food, but because many of their workers cannot live where they live without being enrolled in SNAP due to the low pay.

SNAP subsidizes Walmart by supplementing workers' paychecks.

It sounds like you are suggesting that wages should be set at a minimum level that is strictly above any government assistance. So if you have a job, you are disqualified from any assistance what so ever, and all the government assistance should be focused on people without jobs, essentially to bring them to that minimum.

That's similar to what welfare was like before welfare reform in 96 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_...

I understand your point, I was just pointing you to a different perspective. Wal-Mart makes far more money from SNAP recipients as customers than it potentially saves in wages. I personally do not believe SNAP saves Wal-Mart any wages at all.

I'll circle back to the question I asked several levels ago. If SNAP suddenly disappeared, do you believe that would cause Wal-Mart to raise its wages? If not, then your point is moot since it's not saving Wal-Mart any wage costs.

Irrelevant without context.

I was intentionally providing context.

Yes. Most people want a higher standard of living, but if you live in a small enough apartment, walk everywhere, cook your own meals, have only minimal utilities (your furnace exists for the pipes not for your comfort)... it can be done.

Distribution center is different than in store associates.

You're right that I don't know all the details, but I know how Walmart tends to behave with regards to their workers, and I know that the system their proposing looks unusually ripe for abuse, to the point where it seems like it must have been intentional.

I'm tired of people wrapping shit in a pretty bow and trying to pass it off as a gift. It keeps happening, and people keep going along with it. Maybe this time we'll unwrap the policy to find a nugget of gold, but fool me umpteen times...

What do you propose?

I'm against exploitation of workers, too, but at the end of the day there is only so much you can do with jobs that require relatively unskilled labor. If a 15 year old can do your job as well as you can after a few months of training, it's not a safe job that you can expect anything out of. It's gonna get automated away anyway.

But here Walmart (whatever their other faults), offers a way for workers to make money doing something they already have to (thus it has more utility than their normal role), and they're evil?

If people's regular jobs paid a "living wage", people wouldn't have to Uber, but it's how the world works.

Kind of damned if you do damned if you don't isn't it?

> If a 15 year old can do your job as well as you can after a few months of training, it's not a safe job that you can expect anything out of

Yet there is a world of a difference between Walmart jobs and Costco jobs. Unemployment in the US is lower than some countries with better worker's rights.

> If people's regular jobs paid a "living wage", people wouldn't have to Uber, but it's how the world works

No, not the world, mostly just the US. For the rest of the world, the line between employment and unemployment is not so bad that you have people with full-time jobs and still need food stamps. I feel that setup is a covert government subsidy to corporates. But hey, we shouldn't mess with the "job-creaters", right? Or else.

If you work at Walmart, you've got fuck all to show for it.

Working at Costco sounds like a dream in direct comparison. Benefits, decent pay, etc. Hell, they have an entire wall dedicated to employees of the month that go way back. It's funny how a little goodwill towards your workers seems to have a ripple effect, making shopping at Costco a lot less stressful since the workers are relaxed and happy, willing to small talk while they ring ya up, the managment is roaming around managing, etc.

Being treated like a suspect for visiting the pharmacy without a membership card is my big gripe with Costco. However we just transferred my grandparents stuff to a better, more competent pharmacy. Now I have no gripes.

So you are against exploitation, yet you add a "but"? Who cares if someone else can do the job pretty readily. Anyone can be a prostitute or stripper (yeah, I know, looks and all). Some folks would argue that a 17 year old might do it better, but that's no excuse for exploitation.

"If people's regular jobs paid a "living wage", people wouldn't have to Uber, but it's how the world works." Just because some folks have to do it to get by doesn't make it right or desirable. If we can do things as a society so that people don't have to Uber just to get by - and we aren't doing it - we as a society are horrible people. And that is more where we are at now.

They currently don't use retail employees to deliver stuff. So you can't compare these practices.

As someone who is probably a professional salaried employee somewhere, it's hard to think about why this is bad.

When you're stuck in one of these gigs, you need to be in good with the floor managers to get hours -- those folks control you because they have the power to starve you out with limited hours or "on call" shifts (i.e. you wait around and be ready to report to work within 15-20 minutes), or just fuck you over by assigning you impossible shifts and firing you for attendance issues.

So it's pretty much a given that if you are that guy who doesn't agree to deliver crap on the way home, you're not going to be around for long.

They are replacing UPS/Fedex/USPS for a reason -- cutting corners on things like insurance, depreciation, etc allows them to make an incredible inefficient operating model cheaper.

From further down this thread:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/walmart-begins-testing-usi...

    Workers also have to ... provide proof of insurance.

This is exactly the same as everything else gig-economy, the money is made by offloading risk onto the unsuspecting.

" You don't think you're jumping the gun here, maybe? Do you even know what the compensation will be?"

Judging from the way most companies compensate their employees for extra work I bet it won't be much. Just a guess.

> Why are you assuming that they won't have an insurance policy for such deliveries or pay for mileage like every other company?

The fact that they're piggy backing on employees going home, regardless of extra pay, tells me that they're doing this on the cheap. If this part is on the cheap, there's no reason to assume that the rest isn't.

Win win!

Is it only shady because you believe Walmart employees are not paid enough as is?

Doctors can choose to moonlight and get paid extra, and I don't think anyone is complaining about that. And overtime is certainly a thing.

Coming from Walmart's perspective, I'm assuming it just seemed like a smart business decision rather than something maliciously intended. Like hey look, we can make our customers and employees happier in a profitable manner thereby keeping up with our competitor (Amazon).

If the employees have complaints about this then I guess perhaps it can be called into question. But at the end of the day won't most employees be happy about this?

> Doctors can choose to moonlight and get paid extra, and I don't think anyone is complaining about that.

Doctors have that choice, and yet they don't do that. I wonder why?

>In Medical Economics’ 2013 annual survey, 36% of family medicine/general practitioners and 35% of internists reported earning income from sources other than their primary practice/employer in 2012. That number was about the same for cardiologists (38%), but was higher for hospitalists (40%). Pediatricians and gastroenterologists were lower, at 25% and 27%, respectively.

http://medicaleconomics.modernmedicine.com/medical-economics...

To add to that, a lot of doctors at urgent care clinics (after hours, at least) are moonlighting.

Unless I missed it, that report doesn't indicate the total hours worked, only rates at which doctors perform work outside their primary clinical job.

There is also a massive difference between a doctor taking a side job because they enjoy it and a WalMart associate taking a delivery job because they have no choice.

> 35% of internists reported earning income from sources other than their primary practice

> There is also a massive difference between a doctor taking a side job because they enjoy it and a WalMart associate taking a delivery job because they have no choice.

I suggest you become more familiar with what medical interns get paid and their lifestyle. They are certainly moonlighting to pay the bills.

Internist as in "internal medicine", not as in "unpaid intern".

In the US, we have medical interns. They have completed their classroom studies, but not yet started residencies. They typically work as poorly paid interns for 18 months(?), doing quick rotations through the various specialties, before moving on to their residencies.

They are paid poorly. I think the base rate is about $35k/year. But, at this point, they are still effectively students. I believe the MD is granted upon completion of the internship (or maybe they have the MD, but not the license to practice, I can never remember).

Ugh. Internist is not a synonym for intern, unpaid or otherwise. An 'internist' is a sub-specialty of fully-licensed medical doctor, as in 'internal medicine'. It's equivalent to a pediatrician except specifically focused on care for adult patients, in contrast to a 'family practice' or 'general practice' doctor, who focuses on both adult and pediatric patients.

I doubt interns are moonlighting anywhere, as they don't have the accreditation to do so.

Perhaps you mean residents? The article discusses their options and does mention they might look for the extra income to pay down loans.

Regardless, the average salary for a family physician in the US somewhere around $175,000. Most specialists earn more. Yes, they can make poor financial choices and end up needing extra income, but at those income levels, I have to assume most of them are doing it for "fun".

Before this program was created they didn't have a choice. Now they do.

There's also a massive difference between a doctor taking a side job because they have no choice and a Walmart associate taking a delivery job because they enjoy it.

Don't assume!

Everyone assumes doctors are these fabulously rich people when many of them don't make a whole lot of money when considered on an hours-worked basis.

The poor creatures! Between their Mercedes-Benzes and their 5000 sqft houses (don't underestimate heating and cooling for that amount of enclosed space!) and the private schools for their kids and the cruise holidays to Madagaskar there is hardly any money left at the end of the month.

I'm pretty skeptical of the level to which they've dived into these results. 43% of the respondents said they receive supplemental income from "other medical" work. There exists a massive network of funding backed by pharmaceutical companies which essentially launders money into the pockets of physicians through things like highly-paid consultancy roles, speaking engagements, etc. Ostensibly these types of things would be covered by the 'speaking engagement' and 'consulting' categories, but the low figures there do not jive with my anecdotal knowledge of the field so I'm not really willing to accept these self-reported results as accurate considering that massive "other" result.

Just looking at the figures as presented, it seems the average rate of moonlighting is in the range of 34%, and of the types of moonlighting reported, I'd only characterize about 37% as direct medical practice. So that adds up to 13% of practitioners who are actually practicing medicine somewhere else in their free time. Not unheard of, but far from the norm, so I stand by my point. The great majority of doctors are not picking up shifts somewhere else, because the great majority of them don't need the extra income.

Beyond Doctors, a lot of software engineers are highly paid and moonlight as well.

Or startup founders driving for uber.

> Or startup founders driving for uber.

So it really happens? I though it was joke in "Silicon Valley" TV series S04E01.

Well I guess just making things up is one approach to debate, eh?

That just isn't true at all. In fact, it's patently false.

https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/the-doctor-as-moon...

> Coming from Walmart's perspective, I'm assuming it just seemed like a smart business decision rather than something maliciously intended.

I think that's exactly what the parent comment was criticizing:

>> Ugh. I think that this sort of attitude (which was my initial reaction too) is a big part of what's wrong with our current economy.

To restate: what's wrong with our economy is that we evaluate things, first and foremost, on if they're a "smart business decision" or not. That leads to "smart business decisions" are shady when looked at from many other perspectives.

Wow, way to take something that would be a win-win for Walmart, its employees and consumers and turn it into some dark scheme.

>Instead of paying their employees a living wage

Walmart (and any other employer) doesn't arbitrarily pick wages. They pay the market rate which is no more than the employee's marginal productivity. This is why Walmart was offering entry level employees $17+/hour in North Dakota during the height of the fracking boom.

The market rate is unrelated to marginal productivity, unless you think North Dakota Walmart employees are twice as productive as Walmart employees elsewhere.

Walmart is, in many markets, a big enough employer in the low skills employment marketplace to be a price setter not a price taker.

I think you misunderstood what I was saying. To state the same thing differently: They pay the market rate which is less than or equal to the employee's marginal productivity, or, an employer is not going to pay someone more than their marginal productivity.

> unless you think North Dakota Walmart employees are twice as productive as Walmart employees elsewhere.

No, not at all. Walmart was merely paying the market rate. It's important to recognize that at some point with fewer workers the per-employee marginal productivity increases--a kind of inverse way of talking about diminishing returns. You can be sure that the Walmart in North Dakota paying $17+/hour was not hiring nearly as many workers as a Walmart paying people $8/hour.

EDIT: I want to add one more thing. Not only would the $17/hour Walmart not be hiring as many people as the $8/hour Walmart, but they're also going to have a lower over-all productivity rate unless the $17/hour workers had their labor complemented by additional technology. The cost of purchasing the additional technology is price prohibitive until labor costs rise.

Most of our local friends work at Walmart, because there's honestly not much other choice for them.

Our economy is so broken that the only people who win are people who know how to abuse the system, and who have designed the system to be easier to abuse and harder to survive by honest hard work.

I read once that Walmart uses their resources to take advantage of current (broken) laws to allow them to keep paying pennies for hard work, and forcing the government to pay the rest of a living wage. (Most of our friends are also receiving at least one or two forms of public aid.) I wouldn't be surprised if they also use their resources to "influence" laws to ensure that it stays this way.

That's surprising. In the past walmart has supported increases in the minimum wage because they know it hurts their competitors more than it hurts them. They shove the cost of higher wages off to higher prices for consumers and keep the same profit.

In any case within a few years these jobs will likely be automated, and walmart will stop hurting all those poor employees.

Walmart has acquiesced to increases in minimum wages only under protest from their workers and even then, the increases were pitiful. [1]

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/03/walmart-can-afford-15-minimum...

Walmart raising it's own wages voluntarily is different than supporting a law that forces all companies to raise wages.

Walmart raising its own wages under protest is different than Walmart raising them voluntarily.

>forcing the government to pay the rest of a living wage.

What difference does it make where the money is coming from?

If we force Walmart to pay more, low-income ppl who shop will have to pay higher prices as opposed to now where all the taxpayers are footing the bill.

For one thing, sometimes you can't get it when you need it. In our area, there's an 8 year waiting list on housing assistance.

utter nonsense. Walmart makes 131 BILLION dollars a year in pure profit [1]. Obviuosly, forcing walmart to pay their employees more could lead to them making less profit and the poor being better off.

EDIT: Basically there is no correlation between walmart's costs and how much the consumer pays.

[1] http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Wal-Mart_(WMT)/Data/Gross_Pro...

The page you linked doesn't tell the whole story:

http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/wmt/financials

The ~100+ billion number is revenue - cost of goods. Actual profit after _all_ expenses is around ~13 billion or so. Big number? Yes, but only around 3-4% profit margin. And it's been declining.

Walmart has 2.3 million employees. $13 billion doesn't make for huge pay increases when you've got that many people to cover.

>forcing walmart to pay their employees more could lead to them making less profit and the poor being better off.

What's stopping them from passing on costs to consumers, given they have eliminated all competition in large parts of the country.

The same thing stopping them from rasing prices right away without any change in the law.

walmart and target pay the same wages.

How does that effect the conversation?

Gross profit. Not Net profit. They made a tenth of that after all other costs are considered. [1] 13.6 billion spread over 2.1 million employees works out to about a $6500 per year raise or about $3.10 per hour given 2087 working hours in a year before they're in the red. It'd help a bit, but nothing life changing. You're vastly overestimating their ability to raise wages without raising prices.

[1]http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/wmt/financials

Are you sure that a 35% increase in sallary wouldn't be life changing for a person making 18k a year? https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Walmart-Sales-Associate...

>> ...Walmart uses their resources to take advantage of current (broken) laws to...pay...pennies...and forc[e]...the government to pay the rest of a living wage.

> What difference does it make where the money is coming from?

Because taxpayers are subsidizing Walmart's business, for one. That's unacceptable, especially if the subsidy is the result of conscious policy on Walmart's part.

> If we force Walmart to pay more, low-income ppl who shop will have to pay higher prices as opposed to now where all the taxpayers are footing the bill.

They will also get paid more to pay those prices, and the taxpayers will not longer be subsidizing Walmart's profits (if the grandparent is correct).

> Because taxpayers are subsidizing Walmart's business

We can assume then that taxpayers are subsidizing all businesses with employees making under $11 and hour, so why isn't the government changing minimum wage laws from $7.25/hr and $2.35/hr

There's something especially slimy about the #1 company in the Fortune 500 consciously doing it. And by it, I mean pay its employees so little they need to go on welfare, and then directing them to the welfare office.

> so why isn't the government changing minimum wage laws from $7.25/hr and $2.35/hr

Because it's been captured by people who like to pay their employees as little as possible.

Slimy about consciously, doing what? Paying a minimum of 122% of what they are legally required to? Paying an average of 191% of what they're legally required to?

[If nearly doubling "expectations" is slimy, what does it take to exceed expectations]

You're confusing legality with ethics and morality. You can behave can quite unethically and immorally while still meeting or exceeding legal requirements.

> I read once that Walmart uses their resources to take advantage of current (broken) laws to allow them to keep paying pennies for hard work, and forcing the government to pay the rest of a living wage.

I have never understood this complaint. I'm 100% onboard with the idea that, in a society as affluent as ours, no one should be going hungry, unhoused, etc. But how is that not our collective responsibility, as opposed to the responsibility of an entity who happens to be buying their labor?

The idea that Walmart is "forcing" the government to take care of poorer citizens is frankly idiotic: if you accept that there is a responsibility to take care of the poor (as I do), that responsibility is on all of us, and the government is the canonical expression of our collective will and action. Trying to shirk this responsibility by desperately shoe-horning it into the labor market is just a messy hack (the same is true of the idea that employers should be the de facto providers of health insurance, as opposed to the gov't). I can't help but think that people who think that this is somehow the ethical approach have a status-quo bias as a poor substitute for actual moral reasoning.

Because that is Walmart shoving their costs onto the rest of us. I'm glad that the social safety net exists, but a company that requires the rest of us to pick up their slack quite frankly should not exist. If they are not capable of paying their employees a living wage, then they are not a viable business.

I honestly cannot see how anyone can consider subsidizing a massively profitable multi billion dollar business is an "ethical approach".

You don't understand why someone would complain that a mega-rich corporation is increasing its own wealth by refusing to pay a living wage, which then requires everyone else - not profiting on this person's labor - to make up the difference?

I don't know how you get, 'Everyone else is turning their backs on the poor and forcing Walmart to take care of them' from 'Walmart should pay their employees a living wage.'

The only other alternative would be to drastically increase social services and tax people - like the Waltons - a LOT more.

> You don't understand why someone would complain that a mega-rich corporation is increasing its own wealth by refusing to pay a living wage, which then requires everyone else - not profiting on this person's labor - to make up the difference?

It seems like you've completely failed to understand any of my comment. I'm taking issue with the entire construction of the claim you're making. If I buy a guy's used car from him on Craigslist, and he doesn't have a job and that was his only income that year, am I "increasing my own wealth by refusing to pay him enough to live, which then requires everyone else to make up the difference"? No, and your claim makes as little sense as that one does.

My whole point is that I've never heard an argument for loading the purchase of labor with the responsibility for arbitrary parts of the seller's life. The only arguments I've ever heard in support of it (like yours) are just a poor excuse to shrug off the responsibility that society owes to its citizens.

> The only other alternative would be to drastically increase social services and tax people - like the Waltons - a LOT more.

Well _duh_. That's entirely my point. And it makes infinitely more sense to target governmental revenue intentionally (ie through a progressive tax code) than to resort to the current messy workaround and all the distortions of the labor market that it implies.

interesting perspective. my first impression was that this was a v1 test for getting into the on demand delivery business that Postmates is in right now.

>Instead of paying their employees a living wage

Are you operating on old assumptions? The average hourly wage is $13.38 for full-time workers and $10.58 per hour for part-timers [1]. While that might not get you far in the bay area (which doesn't have many Walmarts FWIW), its a pretty good wage for unskilled labor in much of the interior country (which is prime Walmart territory)...

1: http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/20/news/companies/walmart-pay-r...

Edit: Sorry, when I said bay area I was thinking of the area immediately surrounding San Francisco.

The Bay Area doesn't have Walmarts? Mountain View, Santa Clara, 4 in San Jose, Milpitas, Fremont, and that's just in the South Bay.

Sorry, I'm not from the area, I was thinking of the area immediately around SF on the lower peninsula.

> While that might not get you far in the bay area (which doesn't have Walmarts FWIW)

The Bay Area has, from a quick Google search and review of the list of locations, something like 25 Wal-Marts, which is substantially more than zero.

It says they can "opt in"... why are you criticizing this?

And yes, they can also "opt in" whether to find a new job, and quit Walmart.

True, but I'd bet those that choose to opt in are more likely to get raises/promotions and create a vicious cycle where it's still opt in but everyone basically needs it to stay competitive (smartphone, car, etc.)

If you think your employer is crooked, then... quit?

I can't do everything for you. This is basic life skills.

You could be totally right, but honestly this whole idea sounds like something a union would do. I don't wonder if this is to throw the employees a bone, in hopes of staving off employees trying to unionize.

My main worry is the safety. Who is controlling how many hours are worked? This may not seem safety related at first, but many state DOT's might have a problem with 8 hour shift employees then going and working 5+ more hours on the road. What is the safety oversight? For UPS, Fedex, etc, there are state guidelines about how many hours they can drive consecutively in a day, in a week, so on and so forth. Are these employees going to have to get a DOT health certification (checking vision and such)?

The system is designed to only minorly adjust the route taken on the way back to the associates place of residence.

As long as Walmart doesn't indirectly force people to participate, I don't see a problem.

By indirectly force, I mean, "you will effectively get fired for some BS reason like poor performance if you don't do some deliveries and take the meager compensation" type stuff.

I for one rarely go directly home after work. I have other things I like to do in the evenings before going home. I don't want work telling me I need to do otherwise.

It emphatically needs to be voluntary.

Nah, walmart finance inc will sell you a nice auto loan no probs.. you'll get a real good deal.. I'll make you an offer you can't refuse

Yep, and if they happen to get in an accident on the way to a delivery, guess who pays? Not the employee's insurance, unless they have commercial coverage, and I'm guessing not Walmart.

What? This is completely voluntary. If an employee looks at the extra pay and says "no thanks". Nothing happens.

If you want Walmart to pay a "living wage" for the bottom 50% of their employees - then you're asking Walmart to fire a million people in the next decade.

Walmart's net income has been declining for years. Their sales have topped out. Their margins are razor thin. Amazon is beginning to cut deeply into their business. Some non-trivial percentage of Amazon's growth over the next ten years must come directly from Walmart.

Walmart is in trouble, Sears style circa 1990. And you want them to raise wages significantly when they already can't afford the employee base they have. Good luck.

How does this sound instead? Fire a million workers, try to get the sales to employee ratio closer to Costco by automating anything and everything they can. Then raise the salaries modestly of the remaining million employees that are higher value labor. Then the fired million people become 100% subsidized by tax payers because there are no jobs for them and are not going to be. Nothing can stop some variation of that scenario from happening, the only thing slowing it down is the low cost of the labor in question. Raise that cost, Walmart will be forced to accelerate the employee reduction as their net income continues to contract.

Your sole choice re Walmart & a living wage, is full government subsidization of the low skill employees, or partial. Besides, Canada, Australia and every European welfare state uses a public subsidization system for low value labor: the top 50% pay for the welfare (healthcare et al) for the bottom 50% that do not earn much (who do you think is paying for the welfare costs of France's perpetually high unemployment rate?). If you take a job in the UK making minimum wage, you are not covering the cost of all of your benefits such as healthcare, and the UK has a relatively low corporate income tax rate, who do you think is subsidizing that low pay rate on the labor? This is common all over the developed world.

It's all fun & free-market capitalism until the employee gets into an accident and then who's liable, or if they go to some murderer/cannibal's house who was just ordering a late-night snack?

How is this different than any other delivery service in those aspects?

It's walmart,

So obviously it is a totally different universe than the bourgeois internet tech startup reality I inhabit and therefore is scary and uncivilized and prone to a different set of rules.. the laws of the jungle.

I think there's another problem with this. I recently was rear-ended while I was stopped at an intersection, and the second question my insurance company asked me is if the car was being used for commercial (ride-sharing) services then or at any time. I wasn't, but I assume this kind of delivery would be commercial use, and the cost to add this to your insurance would be way too expensive to make it worth it for the employees.

I assume Walmart's going to have to carry car insurance for deliveries. It doesn't seem like there's any reasonable way they'd be able to "contractor loophole" it.

Per the TechCrunch article, workers need to submit proof-of-insurance to participate.

The wear-and-tear is going on employee vehicles rather than company vehicles, the additional distance they travel will increase their personal insurance rates, and as with rideshare they will need to pay additional riders on their policies. (If they don't have the riders their policies will be canceled as soon as they make a claim!)

These additional costs make the deal worse for employees and better for Walmart in ways which are hard for the workers to understand. But I guarantee you that Walmart has studied it to death and knows exactly what advantage it brings them!

>Per the TechCrunch article, workers need to submit proof-of-insurance to participate.

I assume that's because of "we only want people on this who are insurable drivers in good standing to begin with" and not because of "we expect your personal policy to cover this".

>These additional costs make the deal worse for employees and better for Walmart in ways which are hard for the workers to understand. But I guarantee you that Walmart has studied it to death and knows exactly what advantage it brings them!

Walmart isn't Uber. I suspect they're much more cautious about making sure the relevant risks have the appropriate insurance. I also suspect they'll pay for mileage, but will probably try to get away with some "estimated increase in commute" rather than paying for the full distance to delivery.

> I assume that's because of "we only want people on this who are insurable drivers in good standing to begin with" and not because of "we expect your personal policy to cover this".

The costs I enumerated accrue to the employee even if Walmart has insurance covering drivers while they are "online" and actively making deliveries.

If that even got by you, what chance does the average worker have?

I get your general point (about non-obvious risks), but I addressed it with the point about compensated mileage, which is how these costs are paid for elsewhere. Edit: and it's not obvious at all that Walmart's policy won't cover any insurance missed by the personal policy, as is the case with Uber -- hence the comment!

>These additional costs make the deal worse for employees and better for Walmart in ways which are hard for the workers to understand.

That's pretty patronizing. I wouldn't assume people are stupid just because they work for Walmart.

This could be a great deal for people who need extra money. If I'm driving down a street anyway, it's not much of an imposition to drop off a package and not much wear and tear on the car.

It's not patronizing, I don't think I'm stupid and I had no idea of the insurance implications.

Reinforcement from an unlikely quarter!

The Big Ugly for anyone working in retail the past 20 years is that stores have done almost nothing to improve workers' productivity. Price scanners were a 1990s innovation and there hasn't been much to follow. So it's very hard for workers to make an economic case that they should be getting paid more. (There's a human-decency case, but that doesn't always prevail.)

In fact, average retail wages were 62% of the national average pay in 2000, and they're 55% now. More numbers are here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2017/05/23/the-loo.... What was a bad job then has become a worse job now.

Wal-Mart's new initiative isn't entirely beautiful, but it represents the first effort in a long time to say: "Hey, we discovered something about you that's more valuable than we realized. Your commute home is a potential asset to us, and to date we've paid you zero for it. We've now got a mechanism to pay you something for it, as long as you're willing to do Task X for Payment Y."

It's a lot easier for wages to go up -- in any field -- when workers create more value. We can argue about whether Wal-Mart has defined Task X and Payment Y properly, but at least this is a fresh idea in a field that's been devoid of them for a long time.

> stores have done almost nothing to improve workers' productivity

They also got their lesson with Amazon and other online retailers taking productivity to the max by streamlining warehouse operations and removing physical retail with its inefficiencies and expensive leases out of equation.

Currently US retail market can be broken down into three large groups - already bankrupt (Circuit City, Good Guys, Borders, Forever 21, Payless Shoe Stores), close to bankruptcy (JC Penney, Sears), or scaling down in order to avoid bankruptcy (Target, Macy's, Fresh and Easy).

Improving worker productivity at this point is as useful as optimizing horse-feeding stations a year after Henry Ford has unveiled Model T - you're likely to achieve a local maxima and claim a success, but the global maxima meanwhile changed significantly.

> I wouldn't assume people are stupid just because they work for Walmart.

The difference between the two parties is information asymmetry, not intelligence.

Walmart is organized and concentrated and can bring to bear entire departments of lawyers and analysts. It gets to repeat the transaction N times and amortize its costs across all the transactions.

The individual workers do not have such resources and are not unified. Each of them is at a severe disadvantage in the negotiation.

The result is an inefficient labor market.

If Walmart really is taking advantage of its workers, then why doesn't another company come in and offer better terms? Are you claiming Walmart has monopsony power over low-wage workers?

Various firms do, both large and small, but it is extremely difficult to compete across so many fronts without a massive amount of capital (logistics, distribution, negotiations with manufacturers, real estate, marketing, product development, etc).

The return on investment for such a massive deployment of capital isn't huge and Walmart could adopt your strategies at any time, undercutting your value proposition. I'm also 100% certain there is a lot more collusion going on but with CEOs smart enough not to write it down in an email.

That said, a tightening labor market is forcing Walmart and other competitors to slowly raise pay.

Whys should other companies offer better terms? There is enough unqualified workers everywhere so there is no need to compete for them.

They have. The reason why Walmart had to raise wages is directly because of this. Walmart was looked upon as the employer of last resort and it was showing in the cleanliness of the stores. The stores were a mess and turnover was huge. Eventually the paymasters had to relent and open the purse strings.

Not entirely true. The wage raising is because of where the market is moving.

However, turnover is actually not as large of a problem as most would like to believe. Cashiers are the positions with the highest turnover rate, many other departments have employees that have been in the same store for many years.

I'm not sure the OP was being patronizing.

One alternative to this program would be to buy each store a Fedex style van (or a few) and have a few dedicated drivers make deliveries all day. Once you think about that for a few minutes, you start to see all of the costs that they're offloading to employees. Not just insurance, but also vehicle maintenance, gas, etc.

I'm sure Walmart has done a ton of cost/benefit analysis and churned through a lot of data before deciding to offer a program like this, and the employees will almost certainly not get all the details.

If the delivery is on the employee's typical route home, this could be a win for both the employee and for Walmart (and a minuscule reduction in overall traffic and miles driven). That's not at all the case of Walmart buying a Sprinter van and driving it around all day on routes that weren't naturally being covered.

You've completely missed my point. No doubt it's favorable to Walmart - they've had a team of people running the numbers and they get to set the rules.

The question is whether or not it's actually favorable to employees and whether or not Walmart will inform them of the costs they'll be responsible for. "Here's $10 to deliver this" sounds great until you realize it's $5 in gas, your insurance is going up $50 a month, and your car will wear out a year faster.

The same question exists for Uber/Lyft drivers. I talk to them nearly every time I ride and for the most part, the drivers understand their costs in a rough sense. (I don't buy the "people are blind idiots" narrative that suggests that a commercial entity has all the power and we must protect people from corporations at every turn.) Only one driver (out of 40+ such conversations) struck me as the type who believed that his Uber earnings were straight profit into his pocket.

"Hey, there's $10 in it for you if you drop off a package on your way home." Let the employee decide if it's worth it or not. So long as there is no coercion, I don't need Walmart to educate the employees on maintenance, the cost of gas, etc. I do think it's fair and reasonable to disclose/inform/explain the insurance situation.

> I don't buy the "people are blind idiots" narrative

That's like saying criminal defendants shouldn't have lawyers because they aren't "idiots".

The problem is that the negotiation between the corporation and the worker is skewed by information asymmetry. Furthermore, the cost of changing jobs is high, and the same negotiation disparities exist elsewhere.

Collective bargaining would address those concerns, as it allows workers to amortize the cost of analysis across all their transactions. But labor unions are a heavyweight solution.

It would be nice to see other suggestions from people who don't wave off concerns over information asymmetry as paternalism.

The math on this really depends on the assumptions you make. $5 in gas would carry my car an extra 40 miles, which isn't really my idea of dropping something off on the way home. As far as insurance goes, it would be easy for Walmart to get a group policy that covers you until you drop off the package, the same way they would for the delivery van.

People who make ten bucks an hour are really sensitive to these kinds of costs. If Walmart institutes a program that isn't worth it for employees everybody's going to know within a week.

Ask yourself if you think you're stupid, then read the entirety of the agreement for your car insurance (or any insurance, for that matter), and then ask yourself if you think you're stupid.

And even if you read it, you're not actually qualified to understand it unless you're a lawyer. Even if you think you understand it, you don't.

The irony is that if a lawyer gave you legal advice about what a car insurance agreement means with zero background knowledge of insurance law or extra research, that'd be malpractice. But we hold ordinary people accountable for adhering to those agreements and understanding the implications.

Nothing wrong with holding the lawyer accountable.

If someone purports to be a professional about something, I expect them to be, particularly about matters as serious as law. I suspect we hold them accountable because those are the people society has entrusted with such matters. Same goes for doctors and medical malpractice.

I'm not saying anything is wrong with holding the lawyer accountable. I'm saying that it's ridiculous to hold ordinary people accountable for complex consumer contracts. Even if you're a lawyer, you need either some familiarity with the relevant law or need to do some research to understand these contracts. We'd say it would be reckless for a lawyer to advise a client about such a contract with no background knowledge of applicable law. But we expect ordinary people to do it all the time and pretend like they understand what they're signing.

That's pretty patronizing. I wouldn't assume people are stupid just because they work for Walmart.

Maybe it could have been worded differently, but I interpreted it as being that the workers would have a hard time computing the totality of their costs, not that they are of particularly low intelligence. I suspect most people in the US don't know how to work out the financials on this deal.

No, it isn't patronizing, it is the reality of 'negotiations' between mega corps and a disunited workers.

In fact, I find it pathetic that you call concern for the bargaining strength of low paid workers patronizing. That is a standard right-wing play, an every man for himself narritive, where rich coastal liberals look down on hard working Americans.

If Wal-Mart was being fair, or employees had a better negotiation strategy, or there were fair labour laws, there would be no question as to whether Wal-Mart would be the insurer, and employees would know exactly how many dollars they would earn, without having to gamble with life-altering risks.

It seems that lately chains large and small (Whole Foods, Stater Bros) are going the Instacart route, with both of these retailers advertising their Instacart URL at the store entrances.

I think even if the workers had a stronger negotiating position, it might not yield much, as anything they'd offer collectively would have to be a better deal for WMT than Instacart.

Where I work we need to submit proof of insurance to drive our own vehicles to job locations/for work purposes, but we are still covered under an employer policy when driving for said business purposes. They just don't want to deal with drivers whose vehicles aren't already personally insured (which seems sane). My understanding is that this is pretty normal, though I'm not 100% sure if it's an outgrowth of liability concerns or legal obligation. Either way, I can't imagine that Walmart wouldn't have a similar practice in place.

Not that I disagree that Walmart's cutting out hypothetical fleet maintenance costs with what they're doing. I'm sure there are a variety of advantages for them however they're structuring it.

A lot of rideshare / delivery companies include insurance as part of their service fee while you are delivering / driving people. I would assume walmart would do something similar.

Walmart's scale is such that they could easily self-insure.

If they follow their usual model they'll probably find some way to offload the cost onto taxpayers.

Most pizza delivery is done using an employee's car, so I imagine this is a well-trod path legally.

yes and it has been ruled that while you are delivering a pizza you car is not covered by your regular insurance unless you have a commercial use policy

There are significantly more ride-sharing drivers on the road than pizza delivery cars.

Yes, but from a legal precedent standpoint pizza delivery cars are more relevant

"The headline makes it sound coercive but that actually sounds like an efficient use of time and energy (less big trucks on the road, less miles driven ..."

I thought just the opposite, in terms of efficiency and miles driven, etc.

My understanding is that Fedex and especially UPS trucks are very highly optimized for their work and for fuel efficiency and that their routes are also extremely optimized (for example, UPS truck routes almost never include a left turn).

Meanwhile, J6P at walmart is driving an F350 diesel truck designed to tow 10k pounds of horse trailer[1][2] and is doing a stop and go mail route through his town that cannot possibly be as optimized as a UPS route.

[1] Remember, you can never have too much truck.

[2] The payments for which are almost the sole driver of the job in the first place, but I digress...

> My understanding is that Fedex and especially UPS trucks are very highly optimized for their work and for fuel efficiency and that their routes are also extremely optimized (for example, UPS truck routes almost never include a left turn).

Apparently UPS trucks get around 10 mpg [1]. Not many consumer vehicles are that inefficient.

I'd be surprised if UPS's ORION is better at route optimization than a consumer app like Google Maps. From UPS's own press, it sounds like ORION doesn't account for traffic at all [2]. Even if it did, Google has the most traffic data. I don't know whether Google Maps considers the cost of left turns, but if it did, it would likely factor it in as an extra cost in the optimization problem, rather than a crude "no left turns if possible" rule as ORION seems to use.

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-miles-per-gallon-do-UPS-truck...

[2] https://compass.ups.com/ups-fleet-telematics-system/

not many consumer cars carry as much weight as a ups truck. I am not sure looking at their mpg tells the whole story.

Weight is dwarfed by aerodynamics. These get shitty MPG because they are shitty technology, made possible only by lax emissions controls and fossil fuel subsidies.

The no-left-turns rule isn't crude, it's an incredibly valuable (and incredibly obvious) optimization. A mapping service that tells me to turn left in downtown San Francisco at rush hour is literally worse than useless. In many cases, if I follow its directions blindly, not only will I be delayed, I'll delay the traffic around me.

It's mind-boggling that Google, Apple, and other consumer-grade routing providers haven't gotten that particular clue yet. Seems clear that none of them have the vaguest concept of cost functions other than input from the local DOT traffic cameras.

It's crude because it's too general. Making three right turns might be the right choice on a busy street in SF, but on a side street in a quiet suburb, making a single left is normally the better choice.

For me it would also need to know the date because it is reasonable to make a left turn in winter but not in summer.

As I pointed out elsewhere, that's what user preference settings are for, but I'm curious: why the seasonal difference? Snow routes?

Sure. So add a slider to the configuration page: "Avoid left turns when practical."

It isn't just the wait time, but safety. There is less to look out for when turning right vs turning left, resulting in fewer accidents. This is the same reason some employers require employees to back into a parking space when possible.

From my house to the interstate, if you follow arterials, you take one left (at a protected light), followed by a right 6 blocks later and then the on ramp. Usually this is the route Google recommends. However during times of heavy traffic Google attempts to shield you from the horrors of waiting for two light cycles at the first intersection by instead directing you to take a left turn 2 blocks early, across traffic to a residential side street. You proceed for two blocks and turn right, then it expects you to do an acute blind left back onto the arterial street (with no light). This maneuver during times of heavy traffic is virtually impossible. The best part is that Google will invariably suggest this route to multiple drivers, so there is always a small line of suckers stacked up at the impossible left, unable to move forward or even back since it's a one lane residential road.

UPS truck also carries a hell of a lot more than your average employee is going to put in his car and on delivery-dense routes MPG isn't a great signal for efficiency

UPS trucks carry lots of packages so that they don't have to reload at the warehouse mid-day. That's not really a concern for Walmart employees, since they wouldn't be making any special trips to the store to load up on packages.

True, UPS has the advantage of denser delivery routes. But I'm sure Walmart has done the analysis and determined that they can deliver (some) packages more cost-efficiently than UPS despite this. Same with Amazon, which has been hiring their own couriers in some areas.

I worked at WalMart just out of high school. I totally would have done this.

> as long as it made sense financially

This is not likely. Highly recommend the part about being a Walmart employee in the book "Nickel and Dimed". As another commenter wrote, these guys are just offloading benefits and depreciation and other capital costs on employees who are already living in poverty. These guys are most literally evil.

I'm very interested to see what incentive they have for it.

Which of course is omitted, so they get the free advertising for their new service but you are not troubled by any specifics that might shape your decision of whether or not to use it.

I strongly suspect that workers will be given the opportunity to opt in...or find other employment.

This is much better than Uber and the likes which don't make you employees and therefore don't cover anything other than the straight hourly payment.

Unlike Uber, whose greatest contribution yet is allowing me to use an app to hail a black cab instead of a phone, this is actually a smart innovation that leverages the fact that employees actually drive home.

If it was a startup I bet a bunch of critical comments would have been supportive instead.

Questions I haven't seen answered yet:

* Employee gets a destination with no parking available, who gets dinged for non-delivery?

* Employee gets a destination with no parking available, but is told to double-park by local manager. Gets ticketed. Who gets dinged?

* Does this constitute a non-CDL delivery service, or courier service? Will Wal-Mart handle licensing and insurance coverage of personal employee vehicles?

* What exactly constitutes "on their way"? A block out of their way? Several kilometers out of their way?

* What guarantees are in place that the definition of "on their way" isn't expanded without due consideration in the future?

* Is the compensation piece work, or based upon time? If piece work as implied by the 10-package maximum, and an unforeseen traffic stoppage takes up employee's time, does employee have flexibility to bail on delivery and do some shopping while waiting for stoppage to clear? If there is no such flexibility, I can practically count upon the absence of "surge compensation".

* Do recipients have the option to view a picture of employee and vehicle, with map showing location as delivery draws near, ensuring security and privacy?

* Employee slips on stairs while walking down them after completing last delivery on way to their car, breaks a leg. Is this covered by worker's compensation, or is employee on their own?

* Employee is assaulted by dog/perp while making delivery. Who pays?

This is a laudable effort, I like the general idea, but this is all but guaranteed open to worker abuses in the future as management "optimizes" it, in a "pray I don't alter it further"-fashioned deal. I don't expect Wal-Mart stocker staff for example, to think of these and many other contingencies when signing up, for which they will almost certainly be hung out to dry if their number comes up.

Now, if only there was some sort of way to force Wal-mart to answer these kinds of questions. Maybe... A union of employees, who want to understand their relationship with their employer better, and to push back on unfair parts of said relationship.

> Maybe... A union of employees

Wow that's a laugh! Last time I checked, even speaking the word 'union' is enough to be fired for cause at Wal-Mart.

Also, most of the people who work there have few or no other options, the only thing keeping them out of company towns is what little worker protection legislation that's left.

If you don't understand why businesses don't like unions, you've never owned a business. Also, historically, unions in the USA for whatever reason a lot of times end up becoming mafioso (not sure if it's the same in other countries).

Yet without unions, employees are on their own to evaluate the non-obvious risks and hidden costs in deals such as this one. It's massive information asymmetry leading inevitably to exploitation; it's far from the ideal of perfect information and distorts the labor marketplace, leading to huge inefficiencies in the labor economy.

We desperately need innovation in how labor unions are structured and compete with each other to reduce the drag they impose while keeping the benefit they provide.

There are (was) unions around Walmart, however, historically, they're just massive cash grabs operating in locations where unionization is favorable and can be forced.

I don't think anyone lacks understanding as to why businesses dislike unions.

Meh. We have unions to thank for the vast majority of workplace protections as well as things like the five-day workweek. In light of this, I'm okay with unions not being perfect.

Right, businesses don't like unions because they decrease their power over employees. That's not a good argument against them, however. If anything, I'd say its a good argument for them.

I've often heard that the biggest problem with unions isn't higher salary and benefit demands but inflexibility. Unions often insist on things like work rules (who gets to do what) and are resistant to automation or other forms of efficiency improvement. They basically end up mandating that things never change, eventually killing the host.

From what I know of union work rules I can't even imaging trying to run any form of high-tech manufacturing enterprise under those conditions. You just couldn't do anything. That kind of bureaucracy and restriction is death to any kind of innovation.

I've heard that unions in some other countries like Germany and Japan are different. I'd be curious to hear a German take on it.

Union rules change all the time. Management just isn't usually willing to offer sufficient incentive during negotiations, since that would eat in to their profits.

Ultimately I think this comes down to the paradox of thrift.

You want everything as cheap as possible, which means you want everyone else to not belong to a union. But you want to be paid as much as possible, so you want to belong to a union. Your economic self-interest would be maximized if you were the only unionized person on Earth... but of course that's impossible.

It's not just "corporate greed." I mean that definitely exists and many executives are over-compensated, but compared to other costs like capital, labor, and taxes, that's usually just not that big of a cost center for a large company. That's part of how they get away with it. If CXOs were a significant cost center the shareholders would be less tolerant of those fat compensation packages.

Everyone wants everything cheap.

A popular assertion, but one which ignores the demonstrable willingness of people to pay more at places like farmer's markets or shop at stores that don't always offer the lowest prices or widest selection. Since many people willingly make sacrifices on either price or convenience, you're arguing from a flawed premise.

Alternately, it is a good assertion but the interpretation of cheap is wrong.

Cheap should be defined in a way that is inclusive of all the costs, both monetary and non-monetary societal costs. Then I think everyone does want everything cheap - this is just a statement that nobody likes waste.

But it's just word games. It would be better if we did away with these pernicious generalizations.

Nah, I'd be willing to pay more if it meant my fellow workers were all provided with the protections a union. There's more to life than just money.

Germany's economy seems to be humming, and while it has some industrial giants like Siemens the bulk of its economic energy comes from the mittelstand, quality manufacturing firms with 500 or fewer employees. Worker's councils are the norm in German industry and have a collegial rather than adversarial relationship with employers.

It's not hard to find more information about this. You might also find it instructive to consider the much narrower earning discrepancies between line and executive workers in other countries compared to the US, even after you filter out the more sensationalist comparisons and allow for the fact of the larger domestic market.

> and have a collegial rather than adversarial relationship with employers.

That's basically what I've heard.

I'd like to see a US company intentionally try to form a union among its employees along the German model. That'd be an interesting experiment. I could see this working in a high skill area where ability to attract and retain top talent is a major differentiator.

businesses don't like unions because with a union they cant treat their employees like expendable cogs.

The Union/Mafia problems stems from unions getting suppressed by corporate-hired goons, forcing unions get their own goons to fight back. said goons tended to be the local mafioso

Also, construction (Which is notorios for the presence of 'mafiosos') is a business where... A lot of organized crime is involved, regardless of whether or not the work is unionized.

I understand the concerns. They're absolutely valid. But I suspect a huge, multinational corporation like Walmart has likely done their due-diligence here. Or maybe I'm just feeling optimistic today.

This is the comment I was hoping to see. Real scenarios and issues that the hand-wavy policy doesn't make clear, and that delivery operations deal with all the time.

Fortunately Walmart's law firm has answers to all of those questions. And every one of them favors Walmart, because that's their job.

> and an unforeseen traffic stoppage takes up employee's time, does employee have flexibility to bail on delivery and do some shopping while waiting for stoppage to clear?

I wish every employer had a "traffic is hard, let's go shopping!" policy.

Also:

* What happens if fewer employees volunteer than is required to meet delivery demand?

As a professional delivery worker and an employee of the everyone-hates retailer i have this view:

This is an experiment. Only. Lore has said that 75% of delivery cost is labor related.

Wal-Mart is insane about not working off the clock. They won't force associates to do this.

From the delivery aspect:

When we get a new delivery person they suck for months. There are so many variables that make failure probable: unmarked addresses; multiple units; obstacles (including dogs); access; daylight; wrong address labels; "who gives a sh#t" attitude ("i just cant return with my delivery"); scanning failures

Plus. Ups fedex and usps are trusted with access-walking on peoples properties without question.

Imo lore is good at pushing things and this test will be called off.

Interesting view.

You mention many problems.

Most of them can be solved with data gathering - what's this unmarked address, which is the relevant unit, what the right access path, which workers do and don't give a shit, etc.

and with the right app, and so many employees, you can gather all that data relatively fast, assuming some repeat orders.

Heck, maybe do that with augmented reality via phone, to make it dead simple.

Also, if the employee still can find where to go, some sort of remote help from another employee can be had.

Yes, let's just magic up a borderline plausible/sci-fi fix to a foreseen problem.

Turn by turn directions are used sundays for Amazon. Gps in the scanner screams at the deliverer if the address is "far away" (eg 2.5 miles from location) like instead of 25 Hickory trail they are at 25 hickory lane or 25 highland st.

And still carriers get it wrong. Every Sunday.

Remote help from another employee? First, if that other employee is off the clock they cant help.

Repeat knowledge of family/address makes success.

I think it's also a worker quality issue. FedEx has never had an issue finding my apartment, being on time and the package has never "just disappeared but we swear it was delivered!"

UPS or USPS? Not so much. I'm in the Bay Area but I've noticed the same trend in both Vancouver and the Denver area so I do think it could be a widespread thing. The UPS people just don't seem to care as much or be as competent as the FedEx people.

Plenty of people like your employer, just very few of the ones that frequent sites like HN.

"Plus. Ups fedex and usps are trusted with access-walking on peoples properties without question."

This is huge. I know I wouldn't trust some random Walmart worker like I would a USPS/fedex worker. And I don't even trust them very much. I've had them break enough packages to be wary.

The discomfort I have with this is that Wal-Mart has a long history of sensible corporate policies (seriously, Wal-Mart at the corporate level has been surprisingly progressive on a lot of issues) that turn into draconian mandates by regional or store managers who are under intense pressure to maximize profit-per-employee. This just sounds like another good idea by corporate that will inevitably be crammed down workers throats.

I don't think corporate gets a pass on this. If they were serious about creating a more progressive workplace, they could change the incentive schemes for managers or fire managers who don't comply with the spirit of their policies.

In general I think this is a pretty cool program, but what I worry about is the "optional" nature of it. Do people who go the extra mile get promoted faster? Qualify for more raises? Don't get let go during slower times?

I could see it becoming a stick pretty quick.

The intense pressure is itself a product of corporate policy, so its effects must also be considered in assessing the reasonableness of other corporate policies which interact with it.

FTA: "Workers can opt in to earn extra money by making deliveries using their own cars. They’re assigned packages based on where they live so the route aligns with their commute home"

This sounds like a really good strategy - Walmart has thousands of locations and hundreds of thousands of people driving home form those locations. If they can leverage that into some efficiencies in the delivery chain, for either faster or cheaper delivery, that'd be awesome for them and their e-commerce customers.

What are the liability concerns for this? If they get in a car crash on their way home, does Wal-Mart pay? And if not, why not?

To me, personally, this smacks of late-stage capitalism. How long until "voluntary and paid" becomes "coerced and paid little"?

It's all about corporate entities with massive analysis resources using information asymmetry to offload risk onto individuals who are not in a position to understand what they are agreeing to.

ETA: Yep, insurance costs are on the workers. From https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/walmart-begins-testing-usi... :

    Workers also have to submit to additional background
    checks, motor vehicle record inspections and provide
    proof of insurance.

This hits it right on the head. Wal-mart has all the data and resources to analyze it for efficiency opportunities. Not only that, they also have have the marketing muscle to "brand" this program internally and make it seem appealing to their lowest wage workers.

Meanwhile, the average Wal-mart worker (many of whom are actually on food stamps and struggling to get by) has none of the resources or education or even time to properly evaluate this deal. No single mother with a high-school level education holding down 2 jobs to feed her family is going to have the time to properly discount the statistical increases to risk of injury; vehicular accidents and the subsequent insurance premium increases; the myriad of vehicle-related depreciation costs; the fuel consumption implications; the increased risk of encountering crime; etc.

Ultimately, the power and incentive structures at play here are inevitably going to lean toward exploitation in the absence of protections being built in to the program.

Something I really hope to understand better is what opportunities we have to improve the efficiency of the labor economy, so that labor resources are allocated according to better information. This would drive down the margins of exploitative companies, while improving the efficiency of the economy as a whole.

I'd like to think that such an approach is compatible with a "left-libertarian" marketplace-friendly outlook.

I can just imagine an employees quarterly performance review. "Mark you've done a great job this quarter, though I can't help but notice that you drive to work and aren't enrolled in our employee delivery program. It is important to me and to corporate that everyone who is willing and able participate to ensure our customers are satisfied. Don't you want our customers to be satisfied, Mark?"

First it will be optional, then it will be encouraged, and finally it will become coerced.

Fun fact: the mobile app for associate delivery was written in F# using Xamarin.

Source: I work at Jet, but not on this team.

Why F#?

https://tech.jet.com/blog/2015/03-22-on-how-jet-chose/

The app for associate delivery was written by Jet developers. Pretty much all of Jet's code is written in F#.

Edit: Actually I think it was written mostly by a contractor who had experience writing Xamarin apps in F#, possibly with contributions from full-time Jet developers.

You in the WM Slack?

Also if anyone is interested here's the announcement blog post.

http://blog.walmart.com/innovation/20170601/serving-customer...

It took Wal-Mart a long time to wake up and realize they have one of the largest captive workforces in the world (and that there's a lot of untapped on-demand value therein). Great move on their part to start experimenting with this.

I think my biggest complaint is that someone making minimum wager or near minimum wage will value money above their time, so many will take this opportunity. Most will take up any reasonable opportunity to earn a few extra dollars. However, this takes away from time that could be spent with family or used to better their skills. The working poor are in a tough position and this program takes advantage of that.

They are presenting it as a very time efficient thing for the employees. We'll see.

I think there are valid arguments against this plan, but in general I don't like the idea that we've got to protect poor adults from their own decisions. Like a lot of ideas to protect the poor from the elites, it's elitist itself

How far from minimum wage is acceptable? Walmart's min wage is targeted at $11, 122%; the average is $13.85, 191%

"someone making minimum wager or near minimum wage will value money above their time"

I understand your concern about the poor not having enough time to spend with their family, but it's not clear why you are singling out this move.

This is like going on a minimum wage job posting and claiming that the kind of people who'd take up that job are doing so out of desperation and it will keep them away from their families.

This program does not take advantage of poor people. Being poor does.

Why is it our job to determine how much time they chose to spend working? It seems kind of condescending to say that we shouldn't give them the choice to make a bit more money because we think they should spend more time with their families.

I think my point is that they are given the choice, knowing that it is a choice they do not have the luxury to pass up. Just a frustrating situation that these employees will then continue to work outside of their normal work hours. I'm sure many will be grateful for the extra money, I'm sure many pick up shifts or maybe drive for a ride hailing service on the side. That is time they're not building a relationship with their kids, helping them succeed in school, etc. That sucks. It's a shitty situation.

Sure, I don't mind running errands during my commute so long as that time's on the clock.

Well, it's an opt-in program, so presumably.

Can pretty well guarantee the fine print includes that they are acting as private contractors while delivering. Walmart isn't going to risk employees becoming full-time because of bad traffic.

Sam Walton, in the early days of WalMart, got a pilot's license so he could fly between store locations (vs a much slower commute by car). He noticed while flying that he could see traffic patterns and scout out new store locations for his expanding business. I think Sam would be proud that the same out-of-the-box, resourceful thinking is still happening today.

Nice one, They could also ask them to drive to work on their days off to pick up some deliveries ;-)

shrug the natural instinct seems to be to skewer WalMart for oppressing their employees but this seems like a good idea to me.

> Workers can opt in to earn extra money by making deliveries using their own cars. They’re assigned packages based on where they live so the route aligns with their commute home, the company said Thursday in a blog post. Wal-Mart didn’t specify how the employees will be compensated.

It's not uncompensated -- so it could be really symbiotic.

"Wal-Mart didn’t specify how the employees will be compensated."

They can be compensated by a coffee voucher. Or compensated by the joy and feelings of accomplishment they'll derive from their new work tasks.

Just saying.

Seriously tho, if they get into an accident delivering the packages is that something that'll get covered by Walmart? How about the wear and tear on the vehicle?

It really seems like it's a better deal for Wallmart. A handy way to offload delivery costs to the workers for a small compensation.

It's a violation of federal labor law to pay less than minimum wage for work.

Wal-Mart stores have been found many times to have coerced employees to work unpaid hours, but this wasn't successfully shown to be corporate policy.

Then they're free to not do it. How is this an issue?

Of course it's a better deal for Walmart. This is Walmarts thing to do or not do. They're the biggest party in the negotiation. They will always dictate terms that benefit them at their workers expense. It's negotiation 101.

Amazon has a program, "Fulfillment By Amazon", where you can pay Amazon $2.50-$4.00 to pick, pack and ship an item for you[1]. Would Wal-Mart be better off just paying Amazon than paying all the people involved in its process? I'd imagine Wal-Mart is paying its people at least $3 per delivery, in addition to paying the people in its stores to pick/pack the item...

Does turning Wal-Mart stores into distribution centers and retail employees into pickers and delivery people beat dedicated DC's and delivery people? I'd guess not.

[1]https://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/pricing.ht...

> Would Wal-Mart be better off just paying Amazon

That sounds like McDonald's paying Burger King to sell Big Macs.

Walmart is paying it's people their hourly wages(let's say $14/hr in Texas), and lets them deliver up to 10 packages. With the right route. If 10 packages take an hour, it's $1.4 per package. It may take less.

It leaves $1.6 for handling, and shipping to store(large trucks, very cheap). Seems possible.

BTW: Are there any distance limits for the Amazon offer?

WalMart is trying to compete with Amazon at the logistics business, not give them more.

Wal-Mart's business isn't just stores, it's their whole system of product acquisition, inventory, distribution, etc. The store is just the frontend. They don't want to retreat into just being distributors, they want to expand into front-door delivery.

Does anyone remember Parcelnet from Britain 15 years ago? It was mums and retired people delivering packages for several retailers, and it was a complete disaster. Your orders just wouldn't show up. That's on top of the sharing economy exploitation.

Maybe this is just me, but I wouldn't want some random person that lives near me to know what I'm ordering from Walmart and have them hand deliver it to me.

Just because they have the uniform and the truck of a brand you might trust, doesn't mean that person is a decent person. This happened recently in Silicon Valley of all places. http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/05/23/hayward-man-charged-wi...

The similarities to Uber/Uber Eats exist. Is a neighbor uber driving knowing who you are, where you live, and leave the house keeping you from using their service?

Interesting detail I haven't seen mentioned here:

There's not just added income per delivery (or whatever model Walmart chooses to employ here); there's also the tax write-offs employees can take on mileage driven between their Walmart location and the final delivery stop assuming that mileage hasn't been specifically covered by Walmart directly.

Can an accountant check me here? My thinking is this also helps with commuting costs for quite a number of low-wage employees.

Who assumes liability? If they fall foul of some regulation (using their cars as commercial vehicles), will Wallmart have their backs?

In any lawsuit against the driver, Wal-Mart would also be named as a defendant. It might be that enough of these types of things will have to happen before local laws regulate this sort of non-traditional thing.

My initial guy reaction is that this is really weird and I wouldnt want my package to be delivered by a stranger. Then I remembered my packages are already delivered by people I dont know. It seems like a nice way for Wal-Mart to cut down on shipping costs and a good way for their employees to pick up a little extra cash.

UPS/FedEx drivers make decent salaries. I wonder how much base pay impacts desire to steal obviously valuable packages. For a Walmart employee the pay is much lower but they will end up with the same knowledge of where/when packages arrive.

If someone wants to steal something, they aren't going to steal what they just delivered (mostly they are not that stupid) - people already do that just cruising neighborhoods that they do not live in - it's enough of a problem that vids pop up every month on reddit. Real thieves would be casing houses and figuring out which one would be worth burglarizing.

I'm a fan of the idea, but unless the data is completely hidden from local management, it's difficult to imagine this not being mandatory in practice. No matter what the posters in the breakrooms say.

Will they, from now on, hire people strategically based on where they live?

Next step could be to use employees homes, cars, etc. as a distribution of drone base stations.

As long as you pay me at least $0.54/mile, pay me my regular wage for the entire time spent driving, and insure me and my vehicle until I get home, I would have no problem with this.

That said, I doubt Wal-Mart would be avoiding dedicated delivery drivers if they intended to do all that.

Having worked for walmart I fully expect many walmarts to have a goal for buy in to this program and employees to be pressured to make deliveries without compensation.

They are the worst company I have ever worked for, just bad people.

So... Will they lay off their delivery drivers?

Looks like some internal manager won their "Its like uber but with packages" pitch.

I wonder how self-driving cars will leave my mail on my doorstep in a couple years

a) How many employee commute routes will map to affluent delivery buyers? b) More none-descriptive cars and persons in residential neighborhoods knocking on doors, waiting to be shot through the closed door. (I'm not even kidding.)

What package? haha

My hate for Wal-Mart is white hot, but this is a very uncharitable headline. This would have been better:

"Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home"

Ok, we'll use that. Thanks!

Now, I just have to get Bloomberg to update their original article ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com