Are Wal-Mart Academy grads ready for future?
Not clear whether training teaches employees valuable skills that will help them move into middle class
The procession started in toys, marched through electronics, down into grocery and past the registers at the front end.
Fifty-one men and women, dressed in shimmering blue and yellow caps and gowns, walked through the Wal-Mart to receive certificates on a stage set up in the store’s lawn and garden department. A bagpiper, wearing a kilt, led the graduates through the aisles.
For Roy Walts, it was the first time he had ever graduated from anything. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade after his father died of cancer and his stepmother told him to leave the house. At 15, he lived in a Salvation Army clothing collection box. One Christmas night he ate cookies from a dumpster.
So as Walts, 53, crossed the stage that April morning in front of the local mayor, Wal-Mart’s regional manager for upstate New York, and his son, who had worked overnight stocking freezers, he had butterflies in his stomach.
“I thought for sure I would trip walking up on that stage,” recalled Walts, the automotive department manager.
Walts is a graduate of Wal-Mart Academy, one of the largest employer training programs in the country. Since March 2016, Wal-Mart has put more than 150,000 of its store supervisors and department managers through the training, which teaches things like merchandising and how to motivate employees over several weeks.
Wal-Mart has spent $2.7 billion on training and raising wages for 1.2 million of its store workers during the past two years — an investment that reflects the pressures the company faces in the retail industry.
Fighting Amazon for sales, Wal-Mart is trying to make its stores more pleasant places to shop. That requires a well-trained workforce with a sense of purpose and self-worth, qualities that can be difficult to nurture in lower-wage workers.
But it is not clear whether this training is teaching workers valuable skills that could enable them to move into the middle class or whether it is mostly making them better employees.
And even with more skills, many retail workers may never be able to earn what factory workers made in places like Fulton, a faded manufacturing hub near Syracuse. “It is going to be very hard to replace what we’ve lost,” said Fulton’s mayor, Ronald Woodward. “Retail jobs don’t compare to manufacturing.”
The academy is geared to more experienced supervisors and department managers. Working in classrooms set up in 150 Wal-Marts around the country, employees learn how to calculate profit and loss statements and how to run their department like a small business.
In the past year, Wal-Mart has spent about $650,000 running television ads about Wal-Mart Academy, according to Alphonso, a TV data company. It has spent $17.6 million on an ad highlighting the company’s commitment to buy $250 billion in goods made or grown in America. That ad features scenes of factory workers and their families set to the squeals of Aerosmith’s “Dream On.”
“The caps and gowns, the symbolism, these are not trivial things,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “They are trying to create this feeling among employees that ‘we are the store.’ They are taking small-town America and putting it into Wal-Mart. Is that a bad thing? No.”
Other researchers say what many Wal-Mart workers need most is not training, but higher wages. The training programs, they say, may be helpful in boosting employee loyalty and performance, but increasing pay would benefit the workers most.
Two years ago, the company raised its starting wage to $9 an hour, a $1.75 increase from the federal minimum wage.
Fulton, a city of about 11,400 people, was once home to a factory that made Nestlé Crunch bars. The company shut the factory and moved operations to Wisconsin in 2003 to consolidate its production facilities and “increase the utilization of assets,” a Nestlé spokeswoman said in an email.
“I think what everyone misses most,” said Geoff Raponi, manager of the Fulton Wal-Mart Supercenter, “is the smell.”
They also miss the jobs — more than 1,500 of them when the factory was booming in the mid1980s, according to Woodward, the mayor. The local Wal-Mart has about 300 employees.
Woodward, who is serving his third four-year term as mayor, appreciates Wal-Mart, but he says he thinks it will take more to save his city’s economy. “You could graduate from high school, work at a place like Nestlé, buy a car and send your kids to college,” Woodward said.
When the Nestlé plant was roaring in 1985 along with a Miller Brewing Co. facility that was shuttered in the 1990s, the average wage in Oswego County, which includes Fulton, was about $51,000. Today, the average pay is 18 percent less, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Wal-Mart declined to disclose the wages at the Fulton store. But the company said that at its stores in New York state, full-time workers earned an average of $14.10 an hour.