Walmart’s Plans

Walmart, a very shareholder driven company, or maybe it’s driven for one family only, is rolling out robots across its stores. This first article popped up in my LinkedIn. Noticing that the article is written by an unknown contributor (never heard of Jack Kelly), I decided to find out if there were more articles related to Walmart and robots.

For the first author that I just mentioned, CNN seems to be the source and might be the original source of all the opinion writers. CNN’s writer reached out to Walmart to find out what will happen to their employees as robots move in. The nutshell answer was the employees will be offered training that will move them out of the mundane, routine tasks and onto the customer service roles and up the salary totem pole. That sounds really good. But, of course, because it is Walmart and a shareholder driven company, there are some fears that the ultimate goal is to reduce payroll.

The third article starts out positive in that the author reports that current workers will be offered training and promotion and move into more satisfying roles and all of those wonderful things. But then the author asks, “What happens in three to five years?” Due to the nature of competitions, he thinks that eventually Walmart will lean into layoffs to maintain their cost structure. Walmart is currently riding on attrition but the author thinks Walmart will eventually be forced to employ layoffs.

The LinkedIn author was even more negative: he does not believe the rosy picture of people easily moving into better jobs. He basically says, in the reading between the lines: if the person was going to work on the better job, wouldn’t he have done it in the first place? This author lays out some pretty good reasons to be suspicious of the augmentation theory of robotization: robots will work side by side with humans, helping them out by augmenting their skills. He pretty much says that is all bunk.

Here’s why it’s really hard to believe companies are going to be altruistic. Since at least the eighties, companies have been rightsizing or outsourcing jobs to meet the shareholder driven directive of maximizing the profits. We still operate under that shareholder philosophy, so why should we believe that companies are going to be altruistic? There is no incentive for altruism. Instead there is still a lot of incentives for cost cutting and the ultimate cost cutting is to employ robots or automation software. As long as we have a shareholder driven capitalism, companies like Walmart will always be regarded with suspicion. It is only recently that Walmart has raised their minimum wage and that was only because of union activity and/or changes to minimum wage laws.