No, the cost of a living wage won’t significantly affect prices
by David O. Atkins
WalMart has always claimed that paying its workers better wages would hurt the economy by leading to higher prices for consumers. Not so, according to a new report:
Would you be willing to spend one penny more for a box of macaroni and cheese if it meant that Walmart workers would no longer need food stamps to survive? Because that’s all it would cost, according to an analysis by American Public Media’s Marketplace.
While it’s unclear how many of Walmart’s workers are on food stamps, as many as 15 percent of the company’s employees in Ohio are. Applying that same percentage to the rest of Walmart’s workforce, Marketplace estimated the company would need an extra $4.8 billion to lift its average wages across the U.S. enough to get all of its workers off public assistance.
Walmart workers cost the government about $300 million a year in food-stamp costs, according to Marketplace. A single 300-employee Walmart store may cost taxpayers anywhere between $904,542 and nearly $1.75 million per year, a study by Democrats in the U.S. Committee on Education and the Workforce found.
Marketplace gets to its $4.8 billion figure by using an average wage for Walmart sales associates of $8.81 an hour. This figure, which was also cited in the congressional report by House Democrats — comes from market-research firm IBISWorld. Three years ago, an analyst at IBISWorld calculated the average based on job listings in urban areas, and posts submitted to the employer review site Glassdoor showed entry-level Walmart workers earning between $7 and $14, an IBISWorld spokesman told The Huffington Post.
Keep in mind, we’re not talking about the company making any less profit. They don’t pay their employees a decent wage not because it would be bad for business (see Costco for a refutation of that premise). It’s as much about raw Objectivist ideology as anything else.
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