PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2014-06-08 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Sam Walton and Minimum Wage (de)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • Sam Walton is the American entrepreneur best known for founding the giant Walmart and Sam's Club chains of discount stores. Walton started out in that market sector by purchasing a Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas, in 1945, opened a second store in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 1950, and by 1962 he owned or co-owned some 16 stores in Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas. Walton opened the forerunner of the modern WalMart chain, an outlet called the Wal-Mart Discount City store, in Rogers, Arkansas, in July 1962. As Nelson Lichtenstein chronicled in his 2009 book The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business, Sam Walton recognized early on that in the discount retail business, payroll is one of the most crucial things you have to fight to maintain your profit margin: An account widely circulated on social media in 2014 maintained that Walton held down payroll costs by engaging in a scheme to evade federal minimum wage laws: As Lichtenstein reported, in 1960s Congress passed legislation that nearly doubled the federal minimum wage (to $1.15 an hour) and imposed stricter limits on which businesses were exempt from minimum wage standards (excluding only businesses whose annual sales were less than $250,000 per year, markedly lower than the previous ceiling of $1 million in sales per year). Walton, who had been paying newly displaced female agricultural workers rather low wages to clerk at his stores, managed to duck under the new minimum wage sales standard due to the unusual nature of his stores' business structure (a structure that was already in place for other reasons; not, as suggested above, one that was concocted solely to skirt minimum wage laws): As Lichtenstein also observed, when court decisions held that Walton could not avoid minimum wage laws via the method he was using and required him to pay back wages and penalties to clerks at three of his stores, he maintained that he would fire anyone who cashes the check before relenting: (The account of the I'll fire anyone who cashes the check quote is, according to the referenced book's endnotes, based on the author's interview with a Walmart store manager in 2006, some forty years after the fact, so its accuracy may be questionable.) (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url