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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

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

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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!

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.

> 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.

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