Walmart plumbing?

[Vic Smith]

[taxed and spent]

You obviously don't know much about finance. What was their net income?

[Scott Lurndal]

better numbers here:

Note that operating income (before taxes) was $27B in FY2015, not $130B, which amounts to about USD5.00 per share. Of that, almost USD2.00 is returned to the shareholders via dividends.

net sales 482,229,000,000 cost of sales 365,086,000,000 SG&A 93,418,000,000 ----------------------------- Op. Income 27,147,000,000 Taxes (USFed) 6,165,000,000 (state) 810,000,000 (Intl) 1,529,000,000 ----------------------------- Inc. after tax 18,653,000,000 Deferred tax 519,000,000 ----------------------------- Net Income 19,272,000,000 Dividends 9,821,386,138 ----------------------------- Net Income 9,450,613,861

So, walmart really made $9B in FY2015, not $130B.

[Dan Espen]

Agreed, the amount of money they made is their net income.

But, if they paid out additional money in salaries, that number would be in cost of sales. So, taxes would be reduced, and logically, dividends would be reduced too.

So, it would be most logical to compare the additional salaries paid out vs. operating income or 27B.

[gfretwell]

Where did "$6" come from? You would then have the drones shuffling around Walmart who can't even point to the tire department making more than some skilled trades.

The line job at Ford was still something that took a few weeks or even months to learn. All the "line" did was keep that from being a craftsman who had years of training. Along with those menial jobs they still had a number of highly skilled workers like welders and machinists.

You can't compare that to a modern day retail person who doesn't even have to know how to count out your change. (watch what happens if the registers are down)

You can wax on about how wonderful it would be if everyone made $16 an hour for just showing up but at the end of the day, their labor needs to pay for itself or the company can't afford to hire them. Unfortunately the consumer has spoken. They are not willing to pay the price for competent service so we end up with places like walmart. It is only going to get worse and walmart is just the canary in the mine.

[gfretwell]

Gross is $127m on that link. not the whole story and Wiki invest even says so if you read down a little.

Their operating income is more like $27m and net income is $16m. Which number do you believe. That is not really much on a half a trillion dollar operation with over 2 million employees. A good chunk of that gets shared with the stockholders, some of whom are Walmart workers.

[gfretwell]

Folks keep forgetting that the CEO works for the stock holder and his bonus is based on stock performance.

[Scott Lurndal]

$27B - you missed three orders of magnitude, which is respectable.

[gfretwell]

Yup those millions, billions and trillions seem to all blur together in a country with a $13 trillion bar tab. But it is not 138B and that was the point

[larrymoencurly]

But if unions don't take hold, pipes can leak. :)