It’s Hugely Popular With Customers And Employees Alike
David McNew/Getty ImagesEmployees give the Walmart cheer during their daily staff meeting at the soon-to-be-opened Walmart Palmdale Supercenter on August 18, 2005 in Palmdale, California.
The received wisdom of capitalism is that inefficient and unpopular services die off, while efficient and much-needed businesses get rich. If there’s any truth in that, Walmart is one of the world’s most needed corporations.
In 2012, Walmart averaged one store opening per business day, with revenue of $446 billion, a number that jumped to $485 billion last year. All that money wasn’t falling from the sky; it came from customers who were (presumably) glad to shop at one of the company’s 11,500 locations around the world.
Whatever you think of Walmart’s business model, the market has clearly spoken; if Walmart was an independent country, it would have approximately the world’s 25th-largest economy, bigger than Belgium’s, Thailand’s, Norway’s, and many others.
In addition to such popularity with customers, Walmart is also popular with unskilled and low-skilled workers looking for a job. While working as a checker at Walmart is probably not an ambitious goal for most law students, Walmart does pay above the minimum wage for jobs that basically anybody can do.
The average full-time Walmart employee earns $13.38 an hour ($10.58 an hour for part time), which is pretty low for vascular surgeons, but mighty good in depressed Rust Belt towns where there’s no factory work and most people have high school educations.
Maybe that explains why in 2012, every job that opened at Walmart had an average of 38 applicants competing for it. For comparison, during the peak of the Great Recession, in 2009, there were an average of 6.9 applicants for every available job across the whole U.S. economy.
