If you want Walmart to run like Costco, Walmart has to fire over a million people to drastically bring down their head count to match the substantially fewer people that Costco employs compared to Walmart on a sales basis.
Costco sales: $99b | Costco employees: 175,000
Walmart sales: $469b | Walmart employees: 2+ million
As someone else noted, they're very different businesses. The comparison is Samsclub vs Costco.
If you want to know the job killer in retail, look no further than Amazon.com. While all the pundits are busy chewing on Walmart, at least Walmart employs a ton of people (I'm not arguing that's good or bad, it's just amusing that the pundits are universally missing the elephant running down the road).
Here's Amazon's ratios:
FY12: $61b sales | Employees: 88,000
Amazon would have perhaps 500,000 to 750,000 employees at Walmart's size. That's assuming Amazon would ever hire all those people to begin with (the KIVA purchase says they would rather not). Amazon can avoid all the labor problems, by simply not hiring so many people in the first place. Whereas to compete with Amazon, Walmart might have to fire a lot of people and shift to heavy automation. That isn't going to go well for Walmart = massive strikes, national headlines, endless political pressure.
Costco sales: $99b | Costco employees: 175,000
Walmart sales: $469b | Walmart employees: 2+ million
As someone else noted, they're very different businesses. The comparison is Samsclub vs Costco.
If you want to know the job killer in retail, look no further than Amazon.com. While all the pundits are busy chewing on Walmart, at least Walmart employs a ton of people (I'm not arguing that's good or bad, it's just amusing that the pundits are universally missing the elephant running down the road).
Here's Amazon's ratios:
FY12: $61b sales | Employees: 88,000
Amazon would have perhaps 500,000 to 750,000 employees at Walmart's size. That's assuming Amazon would ever hire all those people to begin with (the KIVA purchase says they would rather not). Amazon can avoid all the labor problems, by simply not hiring so many people in the first place. Whereas to compete with Amazon, Walmart might have to fire a lot of people and shift to heavy automation. That isn't going to go well for Walmart = massive strikes, national headlines, endless political pressure.