[xb95]

Wal-Mart has listed key executive compensation of around $63m USD this past year [http://insiders.morningstar.com/trading/executive-compensati...] and reported yearly revenue of $473,000m USD [http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=WMT].

I'd argue that spending 0.01% of revenue on key executive compensation (which is the 'paying executives millions' you talk about) is irrelevant to Wal-Mart overall and how much they can or can't pay their workers. Even if you stripped the executive compensation and gave it to the workers (2.2m of them), you'd only be handing out $30 to each person. That's a few hours of work total, and amortized over a year? Not a factor at all in the grand scheme of things.

...

The article is well worth a read. It's interesting and insightful and discusses more interesting things like business models, target demographics, value-mindedness, etc. I recommend it if you can get it to load. (It was fine for me.)

[curveship]

That's $63m to just the top 6 executives. Total executive compensation would be far far greater. And for comparison, Costco paid its top 6 only $19m, which I think is the GP's point: http://insiders.morningstar.com/trading/executive-compensati... .

[furtivefelon]

I don't know, seems pretty reasonable, Costco revenue is 105B. Walmart has >4x revenue, and 19m*4=76m, more than Walmart. Based on your comparison, Walmart is paying their executives fairly.

[yardie]

About as reasonable as getting 9 women to make a baby in 1 month. This would only be true if those 6 executives were doing 4x the work of the executies at Costco. Conservatively, they might be doing 1.5x or even 2x the work. But I doubt they are putting in 160 hours a week.

[twoodfin]

Brad Pitt doesn't make a movie 10x faster either, and he certainly doesn't do 10x the work. But he's paid 10x what many other actors are paid.

Is it reasonable? There's a lot of money to be made by the studio that can prove it's not by making consistent blockbusters without stars. But nobody has figured out how to do that yet, so Pitt keeps getting paid. Outcomes are what matter, not hard work.

EDIT: I realized there is a studio that makes consistent blockbusters without stars: Pixar. In a way, they're like the movie studio equivalent of Costco, since they figured out a way to make hit movies with far, far fewer (but much higher paid) laborers. But like Costco vs. Walmart, Pixar can't make all the movies that the other studios can make, so they'll likely always have to settle for a small chunk of total box office receipts.

[danielweber]

Executive compensation in America is totally fucked up.

But it's not at all the case that the executives are "stealing pay" from the guy working on the floor or whatever other crazy rhetoric people are saying now.

If the CEO is stealing money from anyone, it's the shareholders, and for a whole bunch of reasons (good and bad) they have been unable to get a cap on that.