Goldy and Paul interview author Rick Wartzman about how America’s biggest employer (Walmart) began taking better care of its workers (by raising wages)—and why that decision might be too little, too late. According to Wartzman, Walmart has gone through a remarkable transformation, but there are limits to how much positive change this brand of socially conscious capitalism can create.
Rick Wartzman is co-president of Bendable Labs, a technology, consulting and research firm that builds and tests social innovations in the areas of lifelong learning, workforce development and job quality. He’s the author of several books that meet at the intersection of business and society including Still Broke: Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism, The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America, Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire.
Twitter: @RWartzman
Still Broke https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/rick-wartzman/still-broke/9781549156250
Walmart and McDonald’s have the most workers on food stamps and Medicaid, new study shows https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/18/food-stamps-medicaid-mcdonalds-walmart-bernie-sanders
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David Goldstein:
I am David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures.
Paul Constant:
I’m Paul Constant and I’m a writer at Civic Ventures.
David Goldstein:
Paul, so just before we started recording, I revealed to Ashley that part of my past career that I was the co-author of an Off-Broadway musical flop. But you have an illustrious background as well, I understand.
Paul Constant:
That is correct. I worked at a Walmart in Colorado Springs for exactly three weeks.
David Goldstein:
Wow.
Paul Constant:
And it was part of my misspent youth. It was right after my career as a mall, Easter Bunny. But yeah, I worked at Walmart and it was one of the more demeaning jobs that I’d ever worked. It was actually a Walmart Supercenter that was going to open in Colorado Springs. And so we were just setting up, I didn’t actually do any customer service. I was just following the diagrams of the store, putting stock on shelves and all that. And then three days before the store was supposed to open, they announced that we weren’t far enough ahead of schedule, and so they were locking the doors and we were not allowed to leave until the shelves were stocked.
I remember this announcement very clearly, and then the managers came down and there were parents who were crying. They were like, “My kids, I’ve got to get home to my kids. What do I do about that?” And they’re like, “Well call a babysitter.” And so I went out to the loading dock and I said, “Hey,” to the receiving crew. I said, “Hey, can I get a cigarette before they locked the doors?” because I was a smoker back then. And they said, “Sure.” And so I went out the loading dock, I lit a cigarette, and then I jumped the chain link fence and ran away and never came back. It was … Yeah.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. So smoking really is good for your health, your mental health in this case.
Paul Constant:
It definitely saved my mental health in that case, yeah. It was not a great job. Every morning we had a store meeting where they would play Taking Care of Business and workers would have to spell out Walmart with their bodies. The store manager would say, “Give me a W,” and you’d make a W with your hands. And, “Give me an A.” And then this is back in the day when Walmart had a hyphen in its name. They got rid of that a few years ago. But for that part, they would say, “Give me a squiggly,” and everybody would have to shake their butts to signify the hyphen. It was a thoroughly demeaning job. And I did not regret running away from it at all. The minimum wage at the time, I think was 4.25, and they probably paid us 4.75 an hour for the privilege of spelling out Walmart with our live dancing bodies to the tune of Taking Care of Business. So anyway, there’s very little love lost between me and Walmart.
David Goldstein:
And so then you should be a very objective interviewer of today’s guest.
Paul Constant:
Today we are talking with Rick Wartzman. He is the head of the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society at the Drucker Institute. He’s a part of Claremont Graduate University and the author of several books. He has written a great book about the Grapes of Wrath. He wrote a book called The End of Loyalty: the Rise And Fall of Good Jobs in America. And for the purposes of this conversation, is the author most recently Still Broke: Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism.
David Goldstein:
Yeah, I’m not convinced how socially conscious Walmart’s capitalism really is. According to a study in 2020, Walmart had the most workers on food stamps and Medicaid, so how much progress could they really have made? And even with a minimum wage between $12 and $17 an hour, their workers are still broke, Paul.
Paul Constant:
And speaking of still broke, let’s talk to Rick.
Rick Wartzman:
I am Rick Wartzman. I’m the co-president of Bendable Labs. We’re a company that develops and tests different social innovations, different products in the areas of workforce development and lifelong learning and job quality. And my latest book is called Still Broke: Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism.
Paul Constant:
So Rick, tell us about what made you want to write about Walmart in the first place?
Rick Wartzman:
Yeah, I’ve been a kind of student of Walmart, or maybe critic is a better word, for a long time, going way back while 20 years now. I was the business editor of the Los Angeles Times back in 2003. And my team took a really deep dive at what we described in this three-part series called the Walmart Effect as the high human cost of low prices. And we really took a deep and fair look at the company and the good it did. It brought a lot of high quality goods at low prices to regions of the country to consumers that wouldn’t maybe necessarily otherwise have access to those low priced goods. And we gave credit to Walmart for holding down the inflation rate somewhat for the entire country, at least as some economists calculated it. But we also looked at the other side of the ledger, if you will, and again, at that high human cost.
So it was everything from changing the aesthetic of downtown America and sort of driving smaller mom and pop businesses away. Walmart did, along with of course, many other kind of big box retailers, but Walmart is the Goliath of all this. Walmart pushing manufacturing overseas in this never ending chase for holding down expenses and trying to get low costs themselves so they could pass on those low prices to consumers. And of course, the way they treated their own labor in terms of not providing a paycheck that certainly a family could live on, but even in many cases a single Walmart worker might really struggle to get by. And so we looked at all of that.
And my team went on to win the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for this series. And I continued to follow the company over a long period of time. And over the last 20 years, I was a critic as well in my last book, the End of Loyalty, the Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America. I kind of held Walmart up then as a really a paradigm of, in many ways, 21st century capitalism. One that for a lot of companies valued profits over people, put shareholders first, and held up Walmart again, as kind of a negative example, if you will. And then I did notice some changes were beginning to happen at the company. And I actually developed a bit of a new relationship with them and wanted to dive in deeper and in a different way. So yeah, I can tell you about the turn if you would like.
Paul Constant:
Yeah. Could you talk a little bit about how this transformation played out and give us some ideas of what specifically has changed?
Rick Wartzman:
Yeah, absolutely. So just to kind of close a loop on my own, how I came to write the book. So I was actually out talking about my book, the End of Loyalty, in 2017 it came out. And I was giving some talks at different venues and among the things I was talking about in the context of the unraveling of the social contract between employer and employee in America over the last 50 years. Along with stagnant pay and eroding retirement security and health benefits, job security on the decline, all of these things. Another thing is that employers stopped investing so much in frontline worker training, skills training for folks. And was another part of this, again, this weakening of the social contract. And I was talking about some thinking I was doing around that in my day job at the time, I was at the Drucker Institute, a social enterprise based at Claremont Graduate University.
And I was just thinking about developing this kind of lifelong learning workforce development system that we could take to communities. And I kind of worked it into some of the book talks I was doing. And lo and behold, there were some Walmart executives in the audience at a couple of them. And they kind of sought me out and we began to find some common ground in the area, the need to develop skills training for frontline workers. And long story short, Walmart along with Google, they began to, well, they became a funder of this initiative at the Drucker Institute. And they were a generous funder, and I was shocked, as you might imagine, having been this long time critic. I thought, man, maybe they’re trying to buy me off. What is going on here? But it didn’t really matter. I mean, they turned out to be great partners. And it also gave me a new window into the company.
And I had again, paid attention enough to know Walmart had started to raise wages in 2015, they were investing in training. I came to learn that they were changing scheduling practices, providing more full-time hours, fewer part-time hours, all of these really positive developments that had begun under Doug McMillan, their current CEO, who had become CEO in 2014. And I approached somebody at the company, I then had this different relationship. I was no longer just a journalist kind of wielding a pen, I was a grantee and I had some relationships.
And I said, “Hey, I want to tell this story of how and why you’ve come to invest in frontline workers for the first time really in your history. I don’t think you’ve gotten the due you’ve deserved. And I want to tell that story. But I’m also, if I do this, I’m going to need access. And I’m not going to pull any punches. I’m going to talk to all your critics. I’m not going to sugarcoat any shortcomings I find, and I’m going to come to my own truth. But if you’re willing to do that, I’d like to be the one that tells this.” And the result is this book, Still Broke.
David Goldstein:
What do you think started this transformation? I mean, the flip side to Walmart’s old slogan, always low prices, was always low wages. And they were really consistent about that for decades.
Rick Wartzman:
Correct.
David Goldstein:
And part of that Walmart effect was that when they would move into a market, wages would drop in retail specifically, even more so in supermarkets. So McMillan comes in 2014. In 2015, he announces their, I think it was a $10 minimum wage.
Rick Wartzman:
That’s right.
David Goldstein:
What prompted this? Was it a business decision?
Rick Wartzman:
I think fundamentally, yes. But I think it was a confluence of things. So one, pressure had been building both internally and externally at that point by early 2015 for really a decade. So the external pressures came from unions. You remember the big union campaigns by the Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers. It was wake up Walmart and Walmart watch, and they really took on the company and really gave it a kind of black eye publicly. There’s two campaigns which were not coordinated at all, but they both were from like 2005, 6, 7 in there, had really kind of sullied Walmart’s reputation, made it harder for the company to move into urban areas and attract more affluent customers and so on. They really went after Walmart like a political opponent. Very well funded, well coordinated efforts that did real damage. After that, of course, Our Walmart, this labor organization, had spun out of the Food and Commercial Workers, today it’s called United for Respect.
They continued to put pressure on the company. The interfaith community was putting pressure on the company. Walmart has engaged with the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, the nuns who come to Bentonville for the shareholders’ meetings and get in the company’s ear. You had politicians like Bernie Sanders and others decrying Walmart’s low wages, and journalists like me, pains with a pen who are going after them. And so a lot of outside pressure building over time and pretty unrelenting. You also had internal change agents. People who had come in the company had begun to see itself as, and I’m not cynical about this. I think they really were trying to become a more socially responsible company in many ways. It began when they did some real good around Hurricane Katrina, providing relief to the kind of hurricane ravaged parts of the Gulf States. And they invested a lot in environmental initiatives and other initiatives. But they really hadn’t done much on the worker front.
But that was building. And then you really hit it. It was really a business imperative, probably first and foremost, at the end of the day. They had cut labor costs so deeply that turnover was just running super high, even in the context of retail where turnover is high for pretty much everybody. But they were off the charts high. Stores were dirty, the shelves weren’t being stocked properly, items were piling up inventory in the back room, literally to the point that they couldn’t open the door into the storage areas because things were not being put on the shelves quickly enough. And they weren’t being merchandising right. And so you just ended up with a real business problem. They had declining same store sales quarter after quarter after quarter, largely because they had cut labor costs just to the bone. And I think Doug McMillan knew he had to invest.
Paul Constant:
Did raising the wages actually help retain workers hire new ones? And did it improve the quality of the stores, the shopping experience for customers?
Rick Wartzman:
Yeah, I think the easiest one to answer is yes, it definitely helped in terms of the shopping experience. And you can see sales recovered. Walmart has done by and large very well and continued to grow. And by all accounts, and all of their metrics, our stores cleaner, is customer service faster, are customers being served better, the answer is yes across the board. And turnover, by what they’ve told me, did go down. They did not disclose exact turnover figures to me, but I heard they were as high as 200%. There’s an anecdote in the book where a top executive goes into one Walmart and the turnover was 400%. This was before these changes. And so I’m quite sure that, yes, the investments, there has been an ROI or return on investment for investing in their workers to the degree they have. And so in that sense, it has paid off and they’ve continued to invest.
You said it, so in 2015 and then 2016, there was a two-step increase so that their starting wage went to $10 an hour. Before they instituted it, that two-step increase, the average starting wage at Walmart was $7.65 an hour, so barely over the federal minimum wage then, and still now of 7.25. And notable, they had never done any kind of across the board increase like this to their starting wage until 2015 from their founding in 1962 when Sam Walton founded the company. So in Walmart’s own context and in the context of their own history, of their own business model and so on, this was, as the subtitle suggests, so a remarkable transformation.
David Goldstein:
They certainly had competition who were operating under a different business model. Famously Costco, around the time in 2015, I think their average pay was around $17 an hour. And they had much lower turnover and higher productivity and higher sales per employee. And they competed directly with Sam’s Club, which [inaudible 00:16:45] really Walmart wages.
Rick Wartzman:
Right. That’s really the better comparison. And Sam’s Club did pay a bit more and actually accelerated its wage growth, but never has, is not where close to Costco still. And Costco is often seen as the counter example and the anti Walmart. And for good reason. And I’m a big Costco admirer and got to know Jim Senegal, the longtime CEO when I was at the Drucker Institute. And I think they show what can happen in this space. But Walmart is also a different, it a different business model right outside of the Sam’s Club, more apples to apples kind of comparison. And unfortunately, I think Walmart is much truer to the way most of retail is. And whether you look at Target or Best Buy or on and on and on, they’re all kind of the same really.
Paul Constant:
One of the things I’ve really enjoyed in the book is I didn’t keep track, it must be like two or three or four times, Walmart would call in someone and say, “Look, we have these problems. What’s going on?” And the response is always, “Well, you could raise wages.” And then they just basically either ignore them or boot them out or something like that. And you mentioned this internal struggle, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, was that a cultural thing from the very beginning at Walmart? They really resisted for a very long time, even intelligent people who they hired to tell them to raise wages. They just completely fought it tooth and nail, it seems like for decades. Was that unique to Walmart? Was it a retail thing? Where did it come from? What’s the deal with not wanting to raise wages?
Rick Wartzman:
So I think look, retail generally has historically, and across the board with a few exceptions, has not paid well. Sam Walton, who did supplement wages with profit sharing that in the end got taken away in 2010, the program he had put in place, and that made things more tolerable. But he acknowledged in his autobiography that he paid chincy, I think was his word. And so again, Walmart, I think like a lot of companies, I don’t think these are evil people or bad people. I think a lot of corporations, they drink a lot of their own Kool-Aid. And that plays out in a couple ways. So one is right, our social good, they would tell themselves is holding down prices for communities, particularly lower income communities and people who are struggling to get by. And the way we contribute is we let you buy things that are real value off our shelves. And one way you have to do that is you have to hold labor costs down. But we’re on the other end of that equation providing a social good.
Whether that really pencils out and so on, we can get into, I don’t think that argument holds a lot of water at the end of the day. But I think they genuinely persuaded themselves of that. I also think there is, again, very typical of a lot of big employers that don’t pay a living wage, they think they’re doing better than they are. I think that there is almost just a kind of an empathy gap, a lived experience understanding gap, particularly as income inequality has grown, and those in the C-suite are making hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times what the typical frontline worker is making. I don’t think they really appreciate what it’s like to try and get by on whatever, 14 bucks an hour or up until recently, 12 bucks an hour or whatever if you were at Walmart.
And so I don’t know if they appreciate what just the daily struggle is like/ and because they don’t, I think it’s very easy to convince themselves we care about our people. We’re doing right by our people. We listen to our people, we’re a good employer. And I think there’s a lot of self convincing that goes on.
David Goldstein:
And they’re not alone. We could call that the Starbucks effect.
Rick Wartzman:
Totally.
David Goldstein:
Howard Schultz, who seems convinced that he’s the best employer ever-
Rick Wartzman:
Correct.
David Goldstein:
And is just totally personally offended when his employees tried to unionize.
Rick Wartzman:
That’s right. And there it’s around voice, having real voice and decision making mean. I’m sure all these companies, it’s the same thing. To them, voices, well, we do a lot of pulse surveys and we have an open door policy, so of course we’re on top of what our employees really think and feel and want and how they want to contribute to actual decision making at the company. And of course that is preposterous. And it’s funny watching what’s playing out at Starbucks and at Amazon. Walmart really wrote the playbook on all this. They were the company that the Food and Commercial Workers tried for many, many, many years to unionize and organize and couldn’t get so much as a toehold in there.
And Walmart, going back to Sam Walton and setting up a company that would be vigorously, anti-union, organized labor, all the things that you see now and all the allegations and charges that you see filed for surveilling workers and shutting down locations where there’s organizing activity. And if there is a contract, not coming to the bargaining table in good faith and all these things. I mean, Walmart wrote the book on all this stuff.
David Goldstein:
So even with this transformation, how much of an impact is it having on Walmart workers in their communities?
Rick Wartzman:
So this was for me, I guess, and I remember coming to this and trying to make sense of what was going on at Walmart, which is to say, I really do give them credit for having turned a corner. Again, this was a company that hadn’t raised its starting wage across the company from 1962 to 2015. They’ve continued to invest, which is great. There was just in the last few weeks, they announced they were raising wages again, so that their starting wage is going to $14 an hour now. Their average wage is up to $17.50. They have more full-time workers, as I said, and relying less on part-time labor. They’re up to probably between 65% and 70% full-time labor now. They’ve invested in training, they have improved benefits some and so on. So all of that is to the good. And I’ve said before, I did not write the part of the subtitle, Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation. That wasn’t composed casually.
I don’t think it’s totally PR. And I give them credit for and give Doug credit for making the changes that they have made. And they’re good. Every dollar increase helps people. And when you are a low paid worker, and this is true in industry after industry, every dollar or even some cents, it helps because you’re making so little. And so I don’t want to totally minimize it. But the hard truth is that at the end of the day, even with all this change, even at $14 an hour as a minimum, or let’s say the average wage, which they now say is 17.50 an hour, the average Walmart worker, when you do the math, and you kind of do a weighted average of how many full-time workers they have and part-time workers across their workforce of 1.6 million or so hourly workers, you get to a shade above $29,000 a year.
And even if you just count the full-time people, so just the full-time Walmart workers is like 1.1 million full-time Walmart workers. You get up, you go to work every day, the average Walmart worker is still making less than $33,000 a year. That is not a living wage. and that’s so crazy to me about this, is watching this company that has in many ways pushed so hard in the context of who they are and really trying and doing. And at the end of the day, well, their workers are still broke, as the title says. I think they’re still broke as a company because they haven’t really fixed this. And I think as a society we’re still broke because this is what sort of passes now for good capitalism.
David Goldstein:
So is one of the limits of socially conscious capitalism that no one company can possibly do this on their own because they’re competing against all the other companies, and maybe what we need is just a really high federal minimum wage?
Rick Wartzman:
That is the conclusion I came to. So I’ve always been a both end guy, if you will. I’ve always thought that there’s an important role for government and an important role for business to restore shared prosperity in America and carve up the pie in a way that really just gives labor its rightful share of a growing economy and growing amounts of productivity that they rightfully share in the fruits of their own labor, that workers can do that. And I’ve always seen a role for both government and business in that. But in my last book, the End of Loyalty, I did lean more onto the government sets the guardrails and provides a safety net when people really need it. But it’s really up to business to make this happen. And this deep dive into Walmart changed my mind about that because I concluded this is a company that is really trying and has a CEO, I believe really does care. And yet at the end of the day, after all of this and years of this now, they got to less than $33,000 a year for a full-time worker.
What it told me is that corporate America will never go far enough fast enough on its own. And that the only way to solve what I see is not just at Walmart, but a wage crisis affecting 25% to 40% of US workers, so you’re talking 40 to 65 million people who struggle to make ends meet often, even though they get up and go to work every day. The only way we’re going to fix this is yes, and I wouldn’t even call it high, I would just say a true living wage, which to me, and the book calls for $20 an hour. And then peg it to the median wage, or you could peg it to inflation so it keeps up with the cost of living after that. And that sounds crazy when you were at 7.25 for the federal minimum wage to go to leap to $20 an hour.
But you know, 15, the fight for 15 is great, but that started more than a decade ago. So $20 an hour is a little over 40 grand if somebody has lucky enough to have full-time hours. On its face, that’s a living wage and that’s a family living wage.
David Goldstein:
And it would still be less than what the minimum wage would have been had it continued rise with productivity as it had in the decades prior to, I think it’s peak in 1968.
Rick Wartzman:
69.
David Goldstein:
69?
Rick Wartzman:
Yeah, 68 or 69.
David Goldstein:
Right. It would be about $24 an hour today. And somehow even Walmart managed to get by paying that high minimum wage back then. So you know, you would think that they’d figure out how to do it again, continue that remarkable transformation.
Rick Wartzman:
Yeah, no, you would. But again, this really gets to, at the end of the day, we’ve now over the last 50 years, come to this place where who’s winning in all this? If workers haven’t been getting their fair share, we know, and again, you all know super well, where’s the money going? And it’s going to the top 1% or fraction of 1%. It’s really being paid out to shareholders at the expense of workers. And you can really see this play out at, it’s interesting, so Walmart describes itself, like all the other signatories to the business round table statement on the purpose of a corporation that came out right in 2019. And they signed on, Doug McMillan was the chair of the business round table right after Jamie Diamond was the chair when this new statement came out. And when they embraced stakeholder capitalism, we’re going to take care of all of our stakeholders, and specifically rejected this notion of shareholder primacy, of putting shareholders first.
And I did the math and you look at it, and Walmart’s invested F from 2015, that first pay raise to the end of 2021, where kind of my book ends, Walmart invested five to 6 billion in higher wages, again, better scheduling, more training, and so on. That’s great. Now that’s real money, five to $6 billion. So are they a stakeholder capitalism company? Yeah, you could say that’s a real investment in their stakeholders, the workers. At the same time, over that same period, they bought back 43 billion worth of their stock. So I’m just the old journalist in me, I just follow the money and I say, “Okay, I believe you’re more of a stakeholder capitalism company, but you can’t tell me shareholder primacy is dead because I’ve got 43 billion over here versus five to six over there.”
David Goldstein:
Well, to be fair, at least one of the Walton’s believes in high wages because they bought the Denver Broncos.
Rick Wartzman:
Yeah, exactly.
David Goldstein:
Gave Russell Wilson a raise to $49 million a year.
Rick Wartzman:
There you go. There you go.
Paul Constant:
It’s trickle down.
Rick Wartzman:
Yeah, I’m sure.
Paul Constant:
Well, I think we’ve kept you a little longer, but I wanted to ask you the question we ask all of our guests. Why do you do this work?
Rick Wartzman:
Wow, that’s a really great question. This may sound really corny. I do this work because of the way I was raised by my parents. Particularly my mom, who my dad was a attorney and did quite well. I grew up with a private school. I was a upper middle class, or a rich kid. Grew up in Baltimore, very privileged, lucky. But my mom and both my parents had grown up very working class. And my mom, I think in particular just never forgot where she came from. I mean, one, she just treated everyone she ever interacted with with just a huge amount of genuine respect. And I think both of them just instilled in me, who wants to grow up in a society where, again, tens of millions of people, they wake up, they go to work, and then they have to make these trade-offs between, do I keep my house or buy medicine? Do I put enough food on the table for my kids or pay my rent?
That’s just awful. I don’t want to be in a society like that. It makes me sad, it makes me angry. We see the ramifications of what it does to us socially and politically, how it’s tearing this country apart. That’s why I do what I do. It’s upsetting.
Paul Constant:
I really enjoyed this book. I mean, I learned a lot from this book. I thought it was a really well written book. So I wanted to thank you for writing it and for giving us some of your time today to talk about it.
Rick Wartzman:
I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Great to be with y’all.
David Goldstein:
So Paul, you ready to go back to work for Walmart?
Paul Constant:
I am not ready to go back to work for Walmart. I really, really enjoyed this book. There were some times where I’ve been so primed because they are my former employer and because I’ve read a lot about their malicious practices, where I admit I was pretty skeptical reading Rick’s book. But I think in this conversation, the book ends with a chapter, the last chapter I would recommend to anyone. It’s a real barn burner about income inequality and the nature of work in America and all that. So no, I mean, do I believe that Walmart is trying to do a better job with their employees? Yes. Would I want to work for them again? Hell no. And I think that’s the case for a lot of retail work in America. It’s just extractive and exploitative.
David Goldstein:
And that is an indictment of American capitalism that you wouldn’t want to work for the nation’s largest employer.
Paul Constant:
I often think that if retail employees did what they did away from our line of sight, that they would have more respect. That a retail job is just as hard and as just as deserving of dignity as factory work. But because we interact with them on a daily basis and because we see what they’re doing, then we think that their job is easy or that it’s frivolous or that it’s something that’s not worthy of a living wage. So I think that in a lot of ways, customers are complicit in this as well because we think of retail work is unskilled labor. When I can tell you, having not just worked at Walmart, but worked at independent bookstores and chain bookstores, and I worked at Sears and various other retail jobs, it is a skilled job that is just as worthy of a living wage as any other. So it’s not just Walmart. Walmart is not just to blame for this. It is society wide for sure.
David Goldstein:
We will put a link to Rick’s book in the show notes. Or you can go pick up Still Broke at your favorite independent bookstore. You can get it from the library, or surprisingly, you can actually buy it at Walmart.
Paul Constant:
That’s right. It’s marked down. It’s 21.90 on walmart.com right now as I speak.
David Goldstein:
Always low Prices,
Speaker 4:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at Civic Action and Nick Hanauer, follow our writing on Medium at civic skunkworks and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at Pitchfork Economics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.