Why are people so Ignorant to the REAL Facts about Wal-Mart ??

There will always be a fight between the stockholders who demand high profits and the workers who demand pay and benefits.

I worked in retail for a number of years in a family owned business, a private big box retailer, and a public mass retailer. They all had slightly different pay and benefit structures from each other but the bottom line is: cashiering at a retail store is not a career and will never pay well enough to support a family.

A job's pay is supposed to reflect the value of the service performed. Scanning items at a register seems to be worth $8/hour on average from what I have seen in my experience. Even if you have years and years of experience, the act of scanning items will never be worth $20/hour to any employer. Quite simply, no specialized skills or education are required for these positions. Pay rises with skills and education. If you have neither, you will remain at or below poverty level. It is not the employer's responsibility to pay an inflated rate because you do not have the desire or ability to better yourself. If you want to make more money, go to school or learn a trade so that you can get a better job.

It is the same with benefits. If your job is only worth $8/hour to the employer, they are not going to spend thousands of dollars on benefits for you. Health insurance is not free and every worker should be expected to contribute to the premium. I recognize that $25/week or a higher deductible hurts more when it is taken from a smaller paycheck but no employers seem to be giving away free insurance anymore.

The big box retailer I worked for instructed us to staff our stores with 70% part time employees. After the management staff was counted, we only had room for one or two full time employees. This was to control benefit costs but it also gave us the most scheduling flexibility. Retail is not a Monday - Friday 9-5 job. We needed extra help around lunch time and in the evenings but didn't want a lot of people standing around with nothing to do during the afternoon. By using part time employees and shorter shifts, we were able to match our staffing to our customer traffic. This isn't to punish employees but to help the customers properly. This is a standard practice across the retail industry.

If you are going to pick on Walmart, get all the facts straight and realize that their practices are not really out of line when compared to the entire retail industry. Heck, look at Circuit City. They just fired all of the associates they thought made too much money and replaced them with cheaper associates. Radio Shack fired people via mass email. I've never heard of Walmart doing anything like that.