Monday, March 31, 2014

Must Be That Employee Discount

The way this economy has been bouncing off the floor for the last six years, this does not surprise me.


Wal-Mart has a lower acceptance rate than Harvard

By Christopher Ingraham
March 28 at 3:31 pm

This year's Ivy League admissions totals are in. The 8.9 percent acceptance rate is impressively exclusive, but compared to landing a job at Wal-Mart, getting into the Ivy Leagues is a cakewalk.

Last year when Wal-Mart came to D.C. there were over 23,000 applications for 600 jobs. That's an acceptance rate of 2.6%, twice as selective as Harvard's and over five times as choosy as Cornell.


I think Harvard and WalMart do have something in common though.

They will let just about any idiot with enough money in.
at

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It will be even more exclusive when Walmart closes all their DC stores shortly after opening them because they lose too much in pilferage (by employees, "customer" and the DC city council). The city is already squeezing them about "living wages".

March 31, 2014 at 8:42 AM
BadTux said...

The reality is that Walmart is a poor match for any city that has high real estate prices and actual shopping options. Walmart made their bones serving small towns and suburbs where either retail was customer-hostile (most small towns, where the locally-owned stores typically had dusty outdated inventory, were open only when people were at work and never when people were actually home from work, and the owners in many cases had the attitude "I'm the only X store in town so if you don't like it, fuck you"), or where there just weren't any stores (most of suburbia, which was a wasteland of identical tract houses and no shopping). Their entire business model depends on having a large amount of cheap real estate to fill with cheap goods -- they use the fact that they have large volume to offset the fact that their merchandise is cheap so they don't get as much money from a single sale as other stores do. Where real estate is expensive they simply can't compete -- they can't get the margin to pay the real estate costs needed for a big box store. I was quite surprised when they went into DC proper -- it isn't their kind of market -- and if they fail it's because they had a bad business model for that environment (aka their managers are idiots), not because of pilferage, "living wage", or nonsense like that, which are just excuses the managers are using for their own failings.

April 1, 2014 at 9:02 PM

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