Wal-Mart facts

From The New York Review of Books:

With 1.4 million employees worldwide, Wal-Mart's workforce is now larger than that of GM, Ford, GE, and IBM combined. At $258 billion in 2003, Wal-Mart's annual revenues are 2 percent of US GDP, and eight times the size of Microsoft's. In fact, when ranked by its revenues, Wal-Mart is the world's largest corporation.

...As of last spring, the average pay of a sales clerk at Wal-Mart was $8.50 an hour, or about $14,000 a year, $1,000 below the government's definition of the poverty level for a family of three.[4] Despite the implied claims of Wal-Mart's current TV advertising campaign, fewer than half— between 41 and 46 percent—of Wal-Mart employees can afford even the least-expensive health care benefits offered by the company.

Half of US productivity growth from 1995-2000 was in retail and wholesale distribution. Part of that comes from containing payroll costs, but IT and logistical efficiency are also key to Wal-Mart's success. Hopefully most of these clerks are only part-time workers and not sole breadwinners of their families. We noted before that Wal-Mart accounts for 10% of US imports from China.