Can you negotiate while working at Walmart?
This is a long post, but wealth worth the time of anyone who works at Walmart, especially if you’re female. Read the whole thing for the complete backstory, but basically it presents two sides that answer the title question to this post. Here’s one:
Of course, it’s no accident that the woman in this video [See the link] is younger than me, recently graduated from Stanford and got 60K/yr at her last, poorly-negotiated job. So if I, or someone else, were to say to her, “YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. LET’S TELL ALL THE WOMEN WHO WORK AT WAL-MART TO NEGOTIATE BETTER SALARIES, AND MAYBE WAL-MART WILL AGREE TO PAY THEM THE SAME AS MEN,” I’m sure she would be genuinely shocked to ponder that, for the vast majority of women, being fresh out of Stanford and needing to pull better than 60K out of your next round of “recruiter” interviews is not, in fact, the main problem.
Here’s the other from Susan Su (the woman in that video):
Many non-management retail or service jobs technically have non-negotiable wages, but this doesn’t mean people in those jobs can’t advocate for themselves in other ways.
My friend Hillary is a public schoolteacher whose salary is not negotiable, but who didn’t like the way she was being pressured to run her classroom around standardized tests. She advocated for her ideas, successfully negotiated for the diversified curriculum she wanted to teach, and is now starting her own charter school. That last part is an especially inspiring example of what can happen when you decide to take control and ask for what you want, but the point is that it can happen.
My friend Jon works at an hourly job through a temp agency where his wage is definitely non-negotiable. However, he was able to successfully negotiate for flex scheduling that has allowed him more concentrated time to work on his freelance business. Again, anyone can say “but I can’t do that! My case is especially bad because I work at Walmart / my boss hates me / XYZ” but I think it’s important to note that these are fundamentally limiting beliefs that we sometimes use as excuses. While they might be comforting in the short term, they do us no good in the long term.
Negotiating doesn’t mean you storm up to your employer and demand more money. Negotiating is not about alienating others, and it’s not about arguing with them either – it’s two parties working together to achieve an outcome that both can be reasonably happy with.
Some employers like Walmart have a long and well-publicized history of discrimination. We all know it’s not legal to fire someone because they asked for a raise or different hours or time off, and this is the reason why ‘Walmart’ and ‘lawsuit’ are such commonly associated words. And yes, even the women who work at Walmart, who are being paid less than their male coworkers in similar positions, should initiate conversations about their wages. If they don’t want to, because they perceive that there’s a risk of retaliation, then that’s one more unfortunate sign of persistent inequality in our society. Women – including Stanford-educated women – reaching positions of power is a great way to start to change this.
Obviously, the more skills ls you have the easier it is for you to negotiate anything because you are harder to replace. Yet even if you work at Walmart, you can prove yourself to be a reliable and valuable addition to the staff and negotiate something.
Whether this will work undoubtedly depends upon your direct superior in the chain of command. If they’re a schmuck, it won’t matter how valuable you are. You’re going to get fired. My fear would be that the folks in Bentonville actively encourage their store managers to be schmucks by putting short-term profit above everything.* After all, how long are they going to be around at a particular store anyways?
* As I understand it, this is precisely the root of all those uncompensated overtimes suits.