I keep telling my out-of-work friends to apply at these stores:
The average American cashier makes $20,230 a year, a salary that in a single-earner household would leave a family of four living under the poverty line. But if he works the cash registers at QuikTrip, it’s an entirely different story. The convenience-store and gas-station chain offers entry-level employees an annual salary of around $40,000, plus benefits. Those high wages didn’t stop QuikTrip from prospering in a hostile economic climate. While other low-cost retailers spent the recession laying off staff and shuttering stores, QuikTrip expanded to its current 645 locations across 11 states.
Many employers believe that one of the best ways to raise their profit margin is to cut labor costs. But companies like QuikTrip, the grocery-store chain Trader Joe’s, and Costco Wholesale are proving that the decision to offer low wages is a choice, not an economic necessity. All three are low-cost retailers, a sector that is traditionally known for relying on part-time, low-paid employees. Yet these companies have all found that the act of valuing workers can pay off in the form of increased sales and productivity.
“Retailers start with this philosophy of seeing employees as a cost to be minimized,” says Zeynep Ton of MIT’s Sloan School of Management. That can lead businesses into a vicious cycle. Underinvestment in workers can result in operational problems in stores, which decrease sales. And low sales often lead companies to slash labor costs even further. Middle-income jobs have declined recently as a share of total employment, as many employers have turned full-time jobs into part-time positions with no benefits and unpredictable schedules.
QuikTrip, Trader Joe’s, and Costco operate on a different model, Ton says. “They start with the mentality of seeing employees as assets to be maximized,” she says. As a result, their stores boast better operational efficiency and customer service, and those result in better sales. QuikTrip sales per labor hour are two-thirds higher than the average convenience-store chain, Ton found, and sales per square foot are over 50 percent higher.
The reason most retailers can not use this model is that it requires skilled managers that can actually “manage” a valuable resource. Most retailers are run by book keepers, not managers.
Back in ancient times, Home Depot and, yes, Walmart offered decent salaries and retirement plans based on the company’s stock. Sam Walton is probably spinning in his grave…….
Walmart is on track to eliminate all of its cashiers in the very near future. Already you are seeing self-checkout counters all over Walmart’s frontend. So the customers are now doing the work that the cashiers used to do. They are checking themselves out. If Walmart can talk all of their delivery people into stocking the shelves like the bread, soda, and some produce folks already do then they could eliminate their employess altogether. Serve yourself folks and kill off the rest of the American workforce.