Doug McMillon, set to retire as Walmart CEO in February 2026, has been getting extremely positive reportage in the business press in recent months. In October, the Wall Street Journal reported that since McMillon became chief executive in 2014, Walmart–once a byword for exploitative, low wage labor–had become a marvelous place to work for its rank and file store employees (“associates”).  The Journal explained that Harvard Business School would soon profile the company in a published “case study in how to treat workers.” 

The Journal related that under McMillon’s leadership the company launched a series of wage raises and benefit enhancements for Walmart workers. By 2025, Walmart’s reputation as a low wage corporate leviathan was happily in the past: it was now in the middle of the pack compared to its retail competitors in terms of employee wage levels–no longer at the bottom. The Journal reported that hundreds of corporate executives from around the United States were travelling to Walmart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas in an effort to learn how to replicate within their own companies the retail megacorporation’s worker friendly culture. 

A More Realistic Picture

Now, as an ordinary Walmart associate, let me share my perspective: it is substantially different from the one painted by the Journal. 

To me, Walmart is a place where any desire to exercise one’s creativity and organizational skills as a Walmart store associate is heavily eroded by supervisors bullying one for not measuring up to physically and mentally exhausting productivity metrics. It is a place where an associate often feels completely voiceless, like a mere cog in a machine (or a pack animal). 

It is a place where employee turnover is high because, as a team lead of mine in my store’s Online Pickup and Delivery Department (OPD) pithily put it while leading a 2024 department huddle, “this job sucks.” The team lead was so upset about serious understaffing within the department which was leading to chaos, severe psychological stress among department associates and poor customer service that he chose to vent about it to his subordinates. 

It is a place where one store associate is often left to do the work of three (the company, like any business, is keen to minimize labor costs by squeezing the maximum amount of productivity among the least number of employees). It is a place where I’ve occasionally seen the most dedicated and intelligent employees suddenly burst into tears, unable to bear the psychological strain of trying to meet unrealistic expectations (and the threat of being upbraided by supervisors for the failure). I myself have sometimes been unable to stem my own tears from flowing. 

Metrics and Safety Threats

It is a place where the relentless drive by supervisors to improve store productivity metrics leads to threats to employee and customer safety. One salient case that I’ve experienced relates to the pick rate metric, which measures the speed of “picking” associates in OPD. These employees push a “pick cart” through the sales floor and select items ordered online by customers for eventual pickup by the customers (or rideshare delivery drivers) in the store parking lot. 

During four years spent as an OPD picker, I’ve seen the minimum pick rate for associates rise from 90 items picked per hour to 100 and now 115. My most recent OPD supervisor was absolutely obsessed with the pick rate metric to the exclusion of seemingly more meaningful metrics (such as total items picked per shift or accuracy in picking items). She frequently offered heavy handed criticism of myself and other colleagues when our pick rate fell into the 90s (as it often did because it is difficult for many pickers to achieve a pick rate in the 100s). 

Needless to say, if one is going too fast with one’s pick cart through store aisles crowded with customers because one is trying to meet the boss’s demands for increased speed, it dramatically increases the chance of injuring a customer or other associate. Myself and other pickers have had multiple close calls in potentially injuring customers. 

Of course, when such accidents do happen, store management can place the entirety of the blame for the incident on the picker. They will idiotically insist that it is entirely possible to get a fast pick rate while reasonably looking out for the safety of others. In all likelihood, the company’s resolution of any such accident will be addressed not by changing policy but  by merely firing the associate who caused the accident–after all, this person can be easily replaced with another from America’s large army of low-wage workers. 

I have a strong suspicion that productivity metrics serve less the purpose of measuring  actual worker productivity than as a way to psychologically terrorize Walmart employees. For example I doubt that the pick rate metric has much to do with measuring how effectively an OPD department is delivering ordered items in a timely manner to customers. I’ve seen situations where OPD department supervisors appeared stumped by the conundrum of why the average rate among department pickers was 108 or 112 at a given time of day, yet customers were still waiting much too long (20 minutes or half hour) for their orders to be delivered in the parking lot. I wonder if it ever occurred to them that perhaps the pick rate metric didn’t mean much–that its ultimate function was to serve as an excuse to berate workers when they didn’t measure up to it. 

Unionization?

In his excellent 2022 book Still Broke: Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism, the business journalist Rick Wartzman suggests that all the celebrated reforms to working conditions Walmart has implemented under McMIllon’s leadership have been mere nibbling at the edges of deep seated problems within the company. 

Wartzman suggests that unionization may offer substantial help to Walmart employees. This is much easier said than done of course, especially given the weak protections given to worker organizing under US labor law. Moreover, the company equals Amazon in the strength of the anti-union apparatus that it is able to deploy to crush worker organizing. However, unlike at Amazon warehouses, organizing among Walmart associates has been seemingly dead in recent years. The company has effectively crushed it. 

Unions have tried to devise creative ways to give voice to Walmart workers. One such way has been the launching of multiple organizations which do not seek legal recognition as collective bargaining agents but rather serve as a forum for Walmart workers to protest and educate the public about the conditions of Walmart workers. The latest project in this line has been United for Respect (UFR), launched by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). 

In his book, Wartzman notes that the company has rendered UFR’s organizing impetus virtually dormant. He notes one particularly illustrative incident: in 2016, the company decided to close its store in Pico Rivera, California for multiple months for the stated purpose of fixing plumbing problems. The store happened to employ a disproportionate number of associates who were active in UFR. When the store reopened, it was probably not coincidental that none of these UFR activists were rehired. 

Wartzman observes that it was a much more subtle form of anti-union repression than that previously employed by Walmart: for example, in 1982, company founder Sam Walton engaged in the blatantly illegal tactic of threatening the withdrawal of the company’s profit sharing benefit if workers at one of the company’s Arkansas distribution warehouses attempted to unionize. Like all the other repressive aspects of working at Walmart under McMIllon’s leadership, the anti-union repression was more subtle but just as devastating. 

A sustained and successful organizing campaign at Walmart would be a real breakthrough for the American work class. As it is, right now, Walmart associates are doing their damnedest to get through each day. 

(The author is a current Walmart worker and uses a pseudonym for their own protection.)

---