Wal-Mart increases wages, cuts hours.

Shocking! – And by ‘shocking’ I mean ‘not shocking at all.’ If you are familiar at all with how business works, then you know that retail companies typically operate on a limited profit margin (Wal-Mart averages at about 3% a quarter). They do not have much of a margin. They certainly don’t have the margin that the Activist Left apparently thinks that retail stores do!  So if wages go up, either expenses go down, or profits do – and you need a buffer for bad months and/or years, otherwise the company starts losing money and then things get messy.

Here’s Wal-Mart’s comment, by the way: “Wal-Mart spokesman Kory Lundberg told Bloomberg that the company is reducing hours, but the reductions only affect stores that have have been overstaffed.” Translation: Wal-Mart can no longer afford to be easygoing about job performance. Time to earn that nine bucks an hour…

Moe Lane

PS: I am indifferent about the fate of Wal-Mart, but I wish more people would sit down and actually think about the math involved in running a business.

Crazy anti-gun white dude attacks law-abiding black man; former gets arrested.

Man.  White people: “Surveillance video of a Tuesday morning attack a man carrying a concealed weapon in a Brandon Walmart was released by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office today…. Michael Foster, 43, of Lithia, was arrested after he attacked Clarence Daniels, 62, who had a handgun in a holster and a concealed weapons permit Tuesday morning, according to a release from the sheriff’s office.” This happened in… Florida. Indeed. Things like this always happen in Florida, it seems. Anyway, Foster’s in jail for assault, because ‘suspect was a moron’ isn’t really an acceptable reason to arrest anybody any more.  Oh, and in case it isn’t obvious: Foster’s white, Mr. Daniels is black, and guess who I’m more sympathetic towards?

Continue reading Crazy anti-gun white dude attacks law-abiding black man; former gets arrested.

The Nation calls out the Center for American Progress for *selling* out to corporations.

Oh, my.  Progressives for sale, indeed:

A liberal think tank with close ties to the Obama administration took money from General Motors and other businesses it did not disclose while campaigning for policies benefitting those companies, according to The Nation magazine.

Members of the “Business Alliance” of the Center for American Progress (CAP) include bailed out car company GM, unsafe Bangladeshi factory utilizer Walmart, and embattled solar energy company First Solar, according to a membership list obtained by the liberal magazine.

CAP, as the article lovingly goes on to note, supported the auto bailout.  Reading between the lines, this seems to be a grudge match between CAP and The Nation, or maybe a grudge match between the Clintonistas and the hardcore progressives, or maybe even the first shots of 2016.  Not that you care about that, any more than I do: all you care about is whether both sides are ready and able to carve each other up into seething little lumps.  Continue reading The Nation calls out the Center for American Progress for *selling* out to corporations.

The crucial word not appearing in this article on Walmart’s staffing woes.

Said woes being, Walmart doesn’t have the staff to handle the business it currently has:

[Merchandise is] piling up in aisles and in the back of stores because Wal-Mart doesn’t have enough bodies to restock the shelves, according to interviews with store workers. In the past five years, the world’s largest retailer added 455 U.S. Wal-Mart stores, a 13 percent increase, according to filings and the company’s website. In the same period, its total U.S. workforce, which includes Sam’s Club employees, dropped by about 20,000, or 1.4 percent. Wal-Mart employs about 1.4 million U.S. workers.

And what is that word?  Why, it’s Obamacare: “After making a big deal of publicly supporting the Affordable Care Act, Walmart—the nation’s largest private sector employer—is joining the ranks of companies seeking to avoid their obligation to provide employees with health insurance as required by Obamacare.” Continue reading The crucial word not appearing in this article on Walmart’s staffing woes.

Market reacts predictably to gun control threats.

Very predictably.

With President Barack Obama endorsing sweeping gun restrictions in the wake of the school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, prices for handgun magazines are surging on EBay (EBAY) and semi-automatic rifles are sold out at many Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) locations.

Continue reading Market reacts predictably to gun control threats.