I my opinion this is one shitty corporation...

[jmowreader]

34. In 2011 they made $419 billion in sales

$25 billion in profit on $419 billion in sales is...oh, 5.9 percent.

Now let's play with Business Insider's numbers. And to do this, try a fun site I found: livingwage.mit.edu which will show you the living wage in any area of the country. I used one adult with one child for my family size and found that the "average" living wage in the US for that kind of family is about $18.50 per hour.

A lot of Walmart's jobs are minimum wage, but let's say our hypothetical Walmart associate pulls down $10 per hour. Giving each of their employees a $5000/year raise would amount to an hourly increase of $2.40 per hour, or less than $12.50 total pay. (On a weekly basis it's $96.) Subtract $12.50 from the $18.50 "living wage" and you're six bucks an hour shy. And as Samuel L. Jackson might say, "I don't care how you cut it, that's a whole lot shy."

Let's go at it from another direction: To give a $10 per hour employee enough of a raise that they make a living wage would cost $17,680 per year per employee. To give 1.4 million people enough of a raise to make them all living wage employees would cost $24.75 billion - almost their entire 2010 profit! (In actuality, some Walmart associates do earn a living wage, a lot of them don't even make close to $10 per hour, the number that constitutes a living wage varies depending on your family composition and where you live, and there are more employees now so these numbers aren't accurate, but they give a decent picture of the problem.)

When you have this much of a disparity between what is and what should be, diverting a little bit of profit, lowering the CEO's salary ($10 per US employee) or other band-aid measures simply will not fix the problem. They are going to have to take in more money without increasing their expenses, and distribute the surplus cash to their employees. The only possible way to do this is to raise prices. Increasing sales is a double-edged sword: more money comes in, but more also goes out because, mirabile dictu, you've gotta buy the additional product before you can sell it to people, you've got to dispatch more trucks to haul it to the stores, you've got to have more stores to sell it out of and more people to work in them, which means your profit margin doesn't actually change.

The real answer is to get some actual industry in this country so no one ever has to say "I work retail because it's the only job in town." But that's an issue for another time.