I'm sure they don't want to work for $6 an hour but that's all they are qualified to do so they'll do it. Who cares if Wal-Mart doesn't increase their starting wage. If people will work for it, why not? Do you know how much money they have to put in to training. I'm sure there is a pretty high turnover at Wal-Mart. They could pay them $10 an hour for a $6 an hour job but then the prices would go up, people would complain and stop shopping there, and the jobs would be gone. Anyways I don't think 1000 for 450 jobs is that crazy for an area with such a high population. I know you are picturing executives who can't find work because big bad George W Bush supposedly ruined the economy are the ones applying for $6 an hour jobs but they're not.

Prices wouldn't go up because Wal-Mart would go out of business if they raised prices. Instead, they would only make $100 billion a year profit instead of $200 billion if they paid a fair wage.

The benefit to customers of Wal-Mart would be that people who work at Wal-Mart might actually want to keep their job if they were paid a decent wage and might actually provide good customer service, something that's currently impossible to find at Wal-Mart.

If I'm the one making decisions and I have to choose between making $100 billion and $200 billion, I'm gonna choose $200 billion every time. That's what the decision makers are hired to do and if they don't they lose their jobs. If Wal-Mart employees are unhappy with their salaries they can look elsewhere. Even for $10 an hour you aren't going to get great customer service, no amount of money is going to make them turn in to the general store clerk you see on TV. They'll just be lazy, unfriendly employees who get paid more to be that way.

Actually, lazy employees would be fired and there would be a much longer list of people looking to take their place. I've worked retail and been a retail manager, and the biggest issue with finding decent help is that if they're a great employee, they're going to be hired away by a job that pays more.

The problem with firing lazy employees that make $6 an hour is that you're not going to get anyone better to replace them.

Wal-Mart is the largest employer in the country...when General Motors was the largest employer in the country, they paid around $25 an hour...30 years ago when $25 was a lot more money than it is today. The reason GM employees were paid so well wasn't because the job takes a college education or some amazing technical skills, it was because the company was making huge profits and the people responsible for those profits, the employees, wanted their fair share and unionized to get their fair share.

Wal-Mart takes a lot from our communities but they don't give much back. All their profits are shipped back to the Walton family. You might thing unions and fair wealth distribution are bad things, but when you don't have those things, you end up with a situation where the majority of the people in a country are so poor that revolution starts to seem like a good idea. Then you end up with a communist revolution where the rich are murdered and their lands and wealth redistributed to the poor so the cycle can start over again.