Tag: walmart

An Ambitious 20-Year Study Aims to Explain Human Behaviors and More Must-Reads

Posted on by robbie

 

This Audacious Study Will Track 10,000 New Yorkers’ Every Move for 20 Years, Vox
Doctors, sociologists and psychologists utilize longitudinal studies to analyze how we change over time, but their research presents a segmented view of human behavior. A groundbreaking project at New York University, recording everything that happens in 4,000 households over 20 years, will take a more interdisciplinary approach to its data. By the study’s end, we might see, for example, how sleep affects relationships or how genetics dictates what we buy.

The Janitor Felt Invisible to Georgetown Students — Until One Changed His Life, Washington Post
As students rush to class, it can be easy to forget who maintains a college’s pristine façade: the gardeners who tend the quad or the chefs who prepare the dining-hall fare. At Georgetown, one student’s friendship with a janitor led him to create a Facebook page featuring profiles of university staff, from window-washers to repairmen. The stories they shared were so popular, students raised thousands of dollars to help out a few of them, including funding a janitor’s dream to open his own jerk-chicken restaurant and buying a cashier a round-trip ticket to his native South Sudan to visit the family he hasn’t seen in 45 years.

How Did Walmart Get Cleaner Stores and Higher Sales? The New York Times
For years, Walmart executives looking to bolster the bottom line hacked away at labor costs. The results showed: dirty bathrooms, near-empty shelves and nonexistent customer service depressed sales. How did the retail giant make a turnaround? Last year, they upped wages and invested in training. Sales reversed course and climbed upward, showing that employees are only a monetary drain when they are treated that way.

Sustainable Furniture Company Puts Veterans to Work

Posted on by robbie

What’s more all-American than serving your country in the Armed Forces? Well, for one, furniture that’s made in America by U.S. veterans.
As more young servicemen return home in search of work, the Arkansas-based company EcoVet is tapping into the veteran workforce to create all-American, sustainable furniture.
The company, which launched in 2011, trains former service members to design and create high-end furniture out of reclaimed materials from old semi-trailers — typically from Walmart — that are destined for landfills. Rather than adding to trash heaps, EcoVet strips materials from trailers like oak or maple floors to create custom-made items like an Adirondack chair, which retails for $850. The company also donates other parts such as plywood to the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity and tires to automobile shops.
EcoVet has trained and hired 28 veterans since its inception and aims to employ 500 over the next three years. Focusing on college-aged U.S. veterans — which have a staggering unemployment rate of 24 percent — EcoVet pays its workers about $15 an hour along along with stock options and flexible hours to help those that are going back to school.

“They’ve been taught how to get things done,” co-founder Drake Vanhooser told Fast Company. “They all have the skill of being adaptable.”

Thirty-year-old EcoVet shift manager Jeremy Higgs is pursuing an associate’s degree in agriculture, food and life sciences at a local community college. The veteran-friendly environment means employees are understanding of outside responsibilities as well as emotional issues including PTSD.

“Everyone is going through some issues,” Higgs said. “We give each other advice.”

EcoVet is slated to open three more decommission centers in Chicago, the Carolinas and Nevada to add to its Springdale, Arkansas factory. The first is expected to open in the next 18 months. With 15,000 to 20,000 scrap heap trailers going to waste each year, EcoVet is hoping to remove 10,000 trailers from the stream of garbage annually.

MORE: Here’s a New Website Bringing Unemployed Veterans and Understaffed Tech Companies Together

Expansion shouldn’t be too difficult for a sustainable product that’s American-made by U.S. vets, according to Adrian Dominguez, the vice president for business development for EcoVet’s parent company, EcoArk. “It’s a profit center for us,” he said. “We manufacture furniture and wood accessories, and we are able to label it as 100 percent recycled, repurposed wood, made by American veterans, right here in the United States.”

Aside from furnishing Walmart vendors, EcoVet has managed to partner with wholesale retailer Sam’s Club, which features two lines on its website. EcoVet is also developing a high-end line for upscale retailers for the likes of stores like Macy’s.

The hope is to not only eventually pluck all scrap heap trailers out of U.S. waste, but to create a welcoming environment where vets can be proud of their work, too.

ALSO: A New Program Transitions Soldiers into Successful Tradesmen

The Cost of Walmart Paying Its Employees a Living Wage

Posted on by robbie

Take a guess how much the price of a 68-cent box of mac-and-cheese would increase if Walmart paid its employees a living wage. Twenty-five cents? A dollar?
Try a single penny.
In this fascinating video from Slate and Marketplace, you can see that if Walmart passed the cost of increasing their workers’ salaries along to consumers, prices would only increase by 1.4 percent.
MORE: A Medical Emergency Landed This Physician on Food Stamps, Now She’s Fighting Hunger Stereotypes
It’s no secret that Walmart pays wages so low to their employees that many rely on (yep, taxpayer-funded) food stamps. Many of these workers return to their place of employment, spending their food stamps on Walmart’s low-priced goods — funneling even more money to the big-box retailer in a vicious cycle. As the videos points out, the United States distributed $76 billion in food stamps last year, and Walmart took in 18 percent of food stamp dollars, or about $13 billion.
Of course, why make the consumer pay extra for Walmart to increase its payroll costs when the retail giant could easily absorb this expense? Slate and Marketplace crunched the numbers and found that by simply raising the average cashier’s wage from $8.81 to $13.63 (a point where they would be ineligible for food stamps), would only cost Walmart $4.6 billion — an amount that the company could simply absorb from the $17 billion they made last year.
Kind of puts the Walmart slogan “Save Money, Live Better” into perspective, doesn’t it?