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More than 1.2 million Walmart employees will get a raise this Saturday. The company will boost its minimum wage to $10 an hour from $9. But it's not just minimum wage workers who are getting raises. The change applies to virtually all of its hourly workers, including some supervisors, which make up the majority of the company's 1.4 million workers. The wage hike will boost a full-time worker's average hourly wage to $13.38. The average hourly wage for part-timers will climb to $10.58 an hour. This is the second step of a two-phase increase announced last year. The company also...

(English translation) During his appearance yesterday [Wednesday] before Judge Jose A. Fuste at Federal Court in Hato Rey, Walmart Vice President for Special Taxes in Puerto Rico Anthony Walker stressed that the company will be unable to continue operations in the island if Law 72, known as the "Walmart tax" which imposes on the multinational [corporation] an estimated 91.5% tax rate, stands. "That is not sustainable for us. We recently closed seven stores in Puerto Rico as part of a strategy that has forced us to close a total of 254 stores around the world. Here in Puerto Rico, Walmart...

Major retailers in the United States are shutting down hundreds of stores, and shoppers are reporting alarmingly bare shelves in many retail locations that are still open all over the country. It appears that the retail apocalypse that made so many headlines in 2015 has gone to an entirely new level as we enter 2016. As economic activity slows down and Internet retailers capture more of the market, brick and mortar retailers are cutting their losses. This is especially true in areas that are on the lower portion of the income scale. In impoverished urban centers all over the nation,...

Washington, D.C., is beginning to look like a cautionary example of what can happen when bastions of liberalism throw caution to the wind in raising the minimum wage. As IBD recently reported, the nation's capital is now losing about 700 jobs a year at restaurants, hotels and other leisure and hospitality sector venues. That's a sharp reversal from the gain of 2,000 such jobs per year the city was enjoying before it hiked the minimum wage by 27%, first from $8.25 to $9.50 an hour in July 2014 and then to $10.50 in July 2015. Now, as D.C. employers brace...

A minimum wage of $12.55 an hour in Oakland, Calif., may be the culprit for a Wal-Mart store's closure. Wal-Mart announced Jan. 15 it will close 269 stores globally, including 154 locations in the United States-affecting about 10,000 associates across the nation... snip Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, a Democrat, has been leading statewide efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15. "This higher city minimum wage eliminated the jobs of the very workers advocates wanted to help," said James Sherk, a research fellow in labor economics at The Heritage Foundation... snip The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that most...

Here we are at the start of 2016, when Prime membership costs $99 a year, and a new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) estimates that there are currently roughly 54 million Amazon Prime members in the U.S. Overall, 47% of the people who shop at Amazon are Prime members, the study says. For Amazon, the astonishing growth of Prime is a tremendous win-win. Amazon benefits doubly with Prime because 1) it collects annual subscription fees from tens of millions of consumers; and 2) subscribers tend to spend a disproportionately high amount of money with Amazon compared to non-members....

Liberals are mad at Wal-Mart for NOT building new stores????? Well this seems like it’s right out of the Twilight Zone: liberals in Washington D.C. are upset that Wal-Mart had decided not to build two news stores!The Washington Post reports:District leaders furious Walmart breaking promise to build stores in poor neighborhoodsJanuary 15, 2015Walmart abruptly announced Friday that it was abandoning a promise to build stores in Washington’s poorest neighborhoodsUnder the initial deal, Walmart could build stores almost anywhere in the District, as long as it opened two stores in its poorest wards and areas of the city sometimes referred to as...

Last week, Walmart dropped a bombshell on the retail world with the announcement it was closing 269 stores worldwide, including 154 in the U.S. The vast majority being shuttered in the U.S. are Walmart Express stores -- the company's tiniest retail locations, which ultimately proved unprofitable for the big box-focused giant. Walmart isn't wasting any time in shutting the stores down. The full list of where and when stores are being closed can be found here, and it shows that the vast majority will close their doors on Thursday, Jan. 28.

Unlike government, which never has a bottom line and seems not to care one whit for economic consequences in U.S. deficit spending and counting)--such is not the case for any business or any rational person managing a household budget Apparently the liberal MSM and politicians confuse the name Walmart with the concept of welfare. The first is a publicly-traded retailer with stockholders that expect the company to remain profitable. The second is a government-sponsored entitlement program for the needy. The two are examples of entirely different economic animals: the first provides purpose, the semblance of independence and potential upward mobility,...

When China attacks, maybe Wal-Mart employees can go on unemployment in the City of San Pedro, home of the Port of Los Angeles.

Two years ago, Thumbtack -- a startup that connects consumers with local contractors -- conducted a survey to see what they thought of proposals to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10, as per President Obama's bid "to give America a raise." The survey found that that a plurality of the small businesses that used Thumbtack thought a wage hike would be good for the economy. Most thought that a minimum-wage increase would have no effect on their hiring or firing decisions. But what happens if Washington passes Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders' proposal to more than double...

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will give nearly all of its hourly store employees a pay raise next month and not just minimum wage earners, an attempt by the country's largest private employer to combat a tighter labor market and chronic turnover.

Welcome To The New Normal: The Dow Crashes Another 390 Points And Wal-Mart Closes 269 Stores Did you know that 15 trillion dollars of global stock market wealth has been wiped out since last June? The worldwide financial crisis that began in the middle of last year is starting to spin wildly out of control. On Friday, the Dow plunged another 390 points, and it is now down a total of 1,437 points since the beginning of this calendar year. Never before in U.S. history have stocks ever started a year this badly. The same thing can be said...

Los Angeles residents of impoverished Chinatown were shocked to learn on January 17 that the Walmart they pleaded for years to get would be shut down at 7 p.m. Sunday evening due to the city’s new $15 minimum wage ordinance, and union harassment. (Update: The closure was described by the company as one of 154 closures “that took into account a number of factors, including financial performance as well as strategic alignment with long-term plans.”) Immigrant Hispanic and Asian residents of central Los Angeles campaigned for years for a “big box” retailer to locate in their economically depressed neighborhood to...

Walmart abruptly announced Friday that it was abandoning a promise to build stores in Washington’s poorest neighborhoods, an agreement that had been key to the deal allowing the retailer to begin operating in the nation’s capital. [Snip] "I'm blood mad," D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said at a Friday news conference. "It's an outrage," said former mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), who in 2013 completed the handshake deal for the stores. "This is devastating and disrespectful to the residents of the East End of the District of Columbia." [Snip ... buried toward the bottom of a long article] [Council...

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said Friday that it will close 269 of its stores globally, including 154 in the U.S., nine of them in California, as the company looks to reposition itself in a difficult retail climate. The retailer does not necessarily appear to be shrinking its U.S. footprint, however. The retailer said that in the next year, it plans to open more than 140 new stores nationwide. Plans include opening or expanding nine stores in California. Two Wal-Mart stores in Los Angeles -- one on Crenshaw Boulevard and one on West Cesar E. Chavez Avenue -- as well as one...

The last 12 months have not been kind to WalMart. When the world's largest retailer bowed to pressure to raise wages for its lowest-paid employees, the living wage crowd cheered. In short order, it became apparent that the reverberations from the $1.5 billion endeavor would spell trouble for the company. When a series of ill-fated efforts to squeeze the supply chain failed to plug the gap, the company resorted to store closures (or "plumbing" as WalMart calls it), job cuts in Bentonville, and reduced hours. Finally, in October, WalMart threw in the towel and cut guidance. Its shares plunged. Now,...

Walmart will shutter more than 250 stores worldwide and exit its Walmart Express small-store format entirely as the company adjusts to stiff competition from its online nemesis, Amazon. Walmart said in a statement on Friday that it would close 269 stores globally, of which 154 would be in the United States. That is about 2 percent of Walmart's global footprint of 11,600 stores, and 3 percent of its 5,310 locations in the United States. Those stores are scheduled to close by the end of January. The company has been slow to pull out of a flat sales period after the...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Wal-Mart is closing 269 stores, more than half of them in the U.S. and another big chunk in its challenging Brazilian market. The stores being shuttered account for a fraction of the company's 11,000 stores worldwide and less than 1 percent of its global revenue. More than 95 percent of the stores set to be closed in the U.S. are within 10 miles of another Wal-Mart. The Bentonville, Arkansas, company said it is working to ensure that workers are placed in nearby locations. The store closures will start at the end of the month.

Wal-Mart said Friday it will close 269 stores across the globe, including 154 in the U.S. The world's largest retailer also will open as many as 405 stores globally in the coming fiscal year, as it shifts its focus toward Supercenters and Neighborhood Markets in profitable locations. In all, 16,000 employees will be impacted by the store closings, about 10,000 of whom are in the U.S. Also domestically, Wal-Mart will also close 23 Neighborhood Market stores, 12 Supercenters, seven stores in Puerto Rico, six discount centers and four Sam's Clubs.