Walmart tends not to share information about its wages; it releases a few numbers to make things sound good, but comparing those numbers with other reports suggests that the company is either cherrypicking or lying. (Which, potayto, potahto.) So it's particularly interesting to see what Walmart's U.S. CEO, Bill Simon, was bragging about at a recent Goldman Sachs retail industry conference.
A slide in Simon's presentation stressing "opportunities" included the information that 475,000 Walmart associates earn more than $25,000, and more than 300,000 associates have been with Walmart for 10 or more years.
Small problem: There are a million workers in Walmart stores. That means less than half of them are earning $25,000, which is just within the 130 percent of the poverty line that makes a family of three eligible for food stamps. This should not be the information you pull out to show what a great employer you are! Especially when 300,000 of your workers have been with you for 10 or more years—being almost no longer eligible for food stamps definitely shouldn't be the big reward for years of work. And as usual with Walmart data, we have to question even this incredibly weak claim. After all, this is a company that claims a full-time average wage of $12.83 an hour yet throws an epic tantrum when a city threatens to make it pay $12.50 an hour.
There's just no disguising how bad Walmart's wages are. The company proves that every time it tries to make the case that it pays well.