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.”

Skip for a moment the minor detail that post links are to posts written by people who despise Walmart from the Left; speaking as a Righty partisan: Walmart has earned this.  By supporting Obamacare in the first place the company decided to put politics above its mission statement, which is to sell reasonably sturdy consumer goods to middle and lower income workers at reasonably cheap prices.  And now that they’ve allegedly discovered that that same Obamacare’s rising health care costs and mandated coverage is going to make it impossible for the company to fully staff its stores?

Well, speaking generically I’m appalled.  In the specific case… :shrug: Nie moj cyrk, nie moje malpy.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

5 thoughts on “The crucial word not appearing in this article on Walmart’s staffing woes.”

  1. “At the supercenter across the street from Wal-Mart’s Bentonville, Arkansas, home office, salespeople on March 14 handed out samples of Chobani yogurt and Clif Bars. Thirteen of 20 registers were manned — with no lines — and the shelves were fully stocked.
    .
    Three days earlier, about 10 people waited in a customer service line at a Wal-Mart in Secaucus, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York, the nation’s largest city. Twelve of 30 registers were open and the lines were about five deep. There were empty spaces on shelves large enough for a grown man to lie down, and a woman wandered around vainly seeking a frying pan.”
    .
    Yes — one store is where the executives can stop, if not shop, and the other is hours away BY AIR. Which do you think gets more management attention? Which do you think is up-to-date on equipment, methods, and training?
    .
    The rest of their problems… well, they’re not only solvable, but have been solved. Been in a Kroger-owned store in the last year or two?
    .
    (But, then, Kroger runs TWO R&D departments. One is technological, the other process.)

  2. There’s a new WalMart near my house. It opened last fall. Already it looks like a disaster zone; merchandise is scattered on the shelves, and in general it looks very junky.

    This is what killed Kmart, too. Folks can, and will, go to Target.

  3. Secret shoppers regularly run through all these chain stores. You can bet that the deficiencies are known at headquarters.

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