Seventy k, the new minimum

[Flying Pig]

That may be the point - if it's the sort of company who will hire (frankly) just about anyone to do the basic jobs, the people supervising them are even more important. If you hire somebody basically competent to look after a checkout, you can just let them get on with it. If you hire somebody who's generally not very good at things, they might well make the sort of mistakes that leave you asking 'how would anybody do that?' if left to their own devices. Picking up the military analogy I made earlier, that's certainly true of soldiers!

 

[Hygro]

Walmart has a team that put together an amazingly efficient supply chain—their genius is in their operations technology. They have the biggest/best distribution system in the world.

Beyond that they just need a huge amount of manpower to move a huge amount of product at razor thin margins. Simply, they cannot sell that much stuff without their employees, it cannot happen. The entire business model is predicated on volume

So yes, I am overall talking about labor vs capital's political agency and economic share of profit, and specifically I am also saying that the marginal employee of Walmart is responsible for moving way more product than that worker is getting paid. He or she may have been equipped by Walmart's system, unable to move that product without the program designed by others, but design all day, ultimately Walmart needs that 15k employee for that 200k revenue.

 

[Flying Pig]

More accurately, Walmart needs all of those employees, minus a bit of slack in the system, to get all of that revenue. If one chap doesn't turn up for work, the whole thing doesn't collapse. They could probably have somebody at floor level retire and do without a replacement reasonably indefinitely. That's not true, though, of (say) the CEO or the CFO - things would go quite badly wrong if they lost one of those and didn't replace them quickly. I agree with you that the 'total amount of money made by labour' is easy enough to work out, I'm just not yet convinced that you can derive from that the 'total amount of money made by John on the shop floor'.

 

[El_Machinae]

I think there's a mistake in the numbers. How can Walmart be getting so much more profit per employee than McDonald's? We're talking 30x more.

Are McDonald's margins really that much tighter? It's not like Walmart is devoid of competition.

Edit: though they pay about $3k per employee as dividend, which is really impressive.

 

[Zelig]

They have the biggest/best distribution system in the world.

I'd content that CloudFlare or Akamai trounce Walmart with their distribution systems.

(And more seriously, I'd put Amazon ahead of Walmart.)

I think there's a mistake in the numbers. How can Walmart be getting so much more profit per employee than McDonald's? We're talking 30x more.

Gross income. 1.5x more.