Few working at Staples make a living wage.

[haele]

100. Which is sad, growing up, our next door neighbor was Produce Manager at a local Safeway.

Not a hard job, or a particularly skilled job, but a necessary job for the store - examining, accepting, and pricing the produce coming into the store, keeping track of stock and manging the stockers, ensuring the scales were working properly and there were sufficient bags, handling gear, and customer assistance items on hand, and doing a several-times daily sweep of the aisles to ensure the temperature was correct, there was nothing going bad and that the produce remained as fresh and clean as it could be. Nothing that required more than a high school science and math background and common sense.
This was in California, late 1960s (pre-prop-13). They owned the post WWII house, so he probably got it on the GI bill. His wife stayed at home and raised the kids I played with daily. In fact, she "babysat" me and my pre-school aged brother when I came home from school with her kids for an hour or so because both Mom and Dad worked - I don't know what arrangement my parents made with her to do this - it couldn't have been very expensive because we had very little money.
There were no signs of any financial stress in that house - so it was a good-paying job for the area. A job this man could retire from, if he didn't want to apply for Store manager or franchise ownership. A job he could train his head stocker to take over, if he wanted to leave and promote the guy.
In fact, when I graduated from high school, my friend, who had been working at an Albertsons as a cashier since she was 15, got herself promoted to a head-cashier's position and was able to move into her own one-bedroom apartment, furnish it to her liking, and still make enough to go to college and pay utilities without any room-mate or help from her folks. $8.00 an hour in 1977 with some benefits - that was damn good money - for a head cashier.
Nowdays, head cashiers may make a bit more, but it does not go very far, and is certainly not able to prosper on work that the companies that employ them needs them to do to remain profitable in that community.

WalMarts continue to close because the communities whose standards of living dropped as living-wage retail jobs disappeared (because the WalMart moved in) no longer has the income base to support them.
Its a vicious downward cycle in big-box retail - if you retain low or stagnent wages at your store (the "since it's just any old warm body doing the work, why should we pay more than minimum wage?" view of employment...), you cut into the incomes of your customer base as your employees are not able to purchase much of your product - no matter how "low" the prices are. Couple that to driving all local competition from your area, -further reducing local customer income base as higher-wage retail jobs disappeared, and you begin to not be able to sustain a profit margin.
If you required the community give you tax breaks to get a foothold into that community, that very lack of tax revenue impacts jobs and wages of the community government/contracted service workers, which again, cuts into the income of your customer base and decreases their spending capability which is the whole basis of your profits.
A smaller business family business model might be able to regroup within a recession by spreading out losses and sharing resources, but if your business is built on a insular corporate structure / shareholder profit model, you have to leave an area where you don't have enough customers to maintain profitability.


Haele