The 20,000 Steps to a Walmart Manager's Six-Figure Salary

0:00Hey, it's Kate. We're off for President's Day, but we wanted to share an episode we made last year about U.S. Retail giant Walmart. In this episode, we look at how Walmart compensates some of its store managers with bonuses, stock options, and huge six-figure salaries. We followed one manager to see why the job demands such high pay and perks.

0:34It's about 7 in the morning at a Walmart outside of Waco, Texas. And Nicole Hart is getting the download from her night manager. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. How's everybody doing? All right. The night manager told her that some people didn't show up for their shifts overnight. and the letter T on the Walmart sign outside is burnt out. Those are things that Nicole would have to deal with that day. But first, she takes a lap around the store. Yeah, because I do this every single day. This is my morning. Every morning, we walk in a tour. So there's things that I already, I mean, we walk by granola bars on the cereal aisle.

1:12I already know they're coming in on the 24th floor. On this day, Nicole had an addition to her morning routine. Our colleague, Sarah Nossauer. Sarah was going to follow Nicole around to try to understand her job. Sarah became interested in managers like Nicole when she saw a press release Walmart published about raising their pay. What stood out to you in that release? Well, my first thought is, why do they feel they need to do this? Is turnover going up? Do they feel they're losing some of their better store managers to other big box stores? the competition for those folks is really, really, really high across retail.

1:54Walmart has a manager for each of its 4 ,600 U.S. stores. And some of them can now make more than$400 ,000 a year because the company is offering them bigger bonuses, higher salaries, and stock options. It almost can't be understated how important a store manager is to Walmart. They are the ones who have the most control over the sales and profit of that box, of that store. And those stores are the most important financial entity in the whole company.

2:29How would you describe a day in the life of Nicole? It's really hectic. It's not for introverts. And it's, she is expecting the unexpected.

2:45Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leinbaum.

2:58Coming up on the show, the hectic, unpredictable, and increasingly well-paid job of a Walmart store manager.

3:21A Walmart store manager is basically running a massive business inside an even more massive business. Its super centers on average generate more than$100 million in sales. And its store managers tend to be homegrown, like Nicole Hart. I spoke to Nicole from her office. How much time during the day do you spend in your office? Not very much, I would say. Maybe an hour tops. What are you doing the rest of the time? Walking my floor, touring my sales floor, meeting with my associates, just day to day. And at the end of the day, how many steps will you have walked? Oh, probably about 18 ,000 today.

4:07Is that a lot? That's a normal day for me. What kind of shoes do you wear? It just depends. Today I'm wearing flats. I have on some Kate Spade flats and a red dress. I might come to work tomorrow on a pair of Jordans. You never know.

4:26So would you mind telling us how you got started working at Walmart? I was 19 years old, and I was a mother of two little girls and needed a job. So I started here as just a part-time job, never planned on it to turn into my career. But as the years went by, I noticed the opportunities that Walmart can provide. And so I decided to climb the ladder. Do you remember how much you made? $6.25 an hour. Part-time? Part-time, yeah. Was that enough to support? No. No? Not at the time. No, it wasn't. It wasn't. But I mean, I saw the opportunity, right? That's what I saw. I was young. I had kids. I had responsibilities and I saw that, yes, I was making$6.25 part-time, but I could go and be a salaried member of management.

5:19When did you decide you wanted to be a store manager? I would say whenever I was an assistant manager. My boss would show me the amount of their bonuses and what the money they were making in that role. And that was the incentive to drive me because I knew I could do that. It just needed to put in the work. And so once I saw the financial benefits of becoming a store manager, I learned everything I could to get there. Do you remember your first day as store manager? Oh, yeah. Oh, my goodness, yes. What was that like? Oh, the second that I walked in the door of that store, I had associates come and just corner me almost.

5:59Like, oh, you're the new one. Fresh meat. Exactly, fresh meat. And that was something, you know, because I hadn't been in that type of a situation before. But it was just all in hell that you present yourself to them to win over their trust. They've got to be able to trust you. Nicole's been running the Supercenter in Bellmead, Texas for four years. She has to juggle managing her staff of more than 300, coordinating inventory, interacting with customers, and making decisions on the fly. That was all on display when our colleague Sarah spent the day with her. She did several sort of tours of the store where you're literally walking around the store and understanding what's going on in every aisle and what needs to be stocked and where is there a mess and what work needs to be done.

6:49Eggs and water, those are two big ones. I mean, if I don't fill that up early now, then how many sales am I missing throughout the day, right? She was always holding her phone because it has a Walmart app that a lot of the workers use to communicate. It's a big store. It's over the size of three football fields. So you can't just like walk up to every worker at every moment and say, you know, can you do X, Y, Z? So they do use this app and walkie talkies and they're talking to each other that way. They don't have segues. They don't have segues. I can see customers maybe not finding that that great.

7:21But she's constantly in contact, but also constantly walking around the store. And on that particular day, something unexpected happened with a customer who had a camera rolling. Hi. Can we get some Snoop cereal on the shelf? Snoop cereal on the shelf. Oh, my gosh. I used to have those, and they never sold. We had them forever. Thank you. You're welcome. Y 'all have a great day. You too. He was recording me. There was a guy who came up filming her, Nicole, and one of her managers, who was asking a question about Snoop's cereal. Snoop had sued Walmart. We didn't know really what was going on, but it was something related to that.

8:05She has to sort of have a calm answer while she's being filmed. What did you learn from spending a day with Nicole? I think seeing sort of how the chaos can be wrangled was just really, really interesting and eye-opening for me about what it really actually takes to run a store. How so? It's like they're managing all the humans that work for them and with them up and down, you know, managing up their bosses and the people that work for them. They're managing all the stuff and making sure it arrives at the right time and can be unloaded and is on the shelf. And then they're managing customer expectations and trying to drive sales.

8:46And now Nicole is getting paid more. Last year, her total income was$240 ,000, about half of that from bonuses. Walmart put out this statement announcing higher pay for store managers and bigger bonuses. Like, when you heard that, what did you think? I mean, I was excited about it. It's awesome. I mean, it's nice to be appreciated for the work that you put in. Why is Walmart investing in store managers now? I would say for retention, right? To be able to get quality leaders in these positions because it's a very important position to hold. And I think that they want to get the right people in the right place to be able to deliver results.

9:29Would it be helpful if that investment was going to your associates? They're investing in our associates as well. I mean, there's been several changes over the last few years. This was just another piece of the puzzle. And I think that they just looked at the management as well because we are associates too. You know what I mean? Like you've got to be fair and consistent across the board and you've got to be able to compete with competitors when it comes to pay. Did it feel like a shift in sort of how corporate appreciates people in your position? I don't know about a shift. I just think that they're recognizing that we have a very important role.

10:10And that, I mean, I don't know. I feel like they're taking care of us right now. Like, it's good. I mean, they're not giving us all this money. I don't know. It's not just like, here, take it. You know what I mean? Like, we've got to earn it. We have things that we have to do if we want to meet the metrics that are expected for us. So it's not just handed to us. But it's there within reach if you want it. And for Nicole to get that money, she's got targets to meet. That's next.

10:48Meeting sales goals is a crucial part of Nicole's job, and she needs to rally her more than 300 employees to get there. When Sarah visited, she went to Nicole's daily staff meeting, which Nicole kicked off by congratulating her team on a strong month of sales. Right, all the things that we're doing is working, so keep doing what we're doing. Keep going after the items, keep filling the holes, right? Keep working the meal picks, doing all the things that we do because it's working. It's working, and it's something to be super, super proud of. I'm proud of y 'all. The sales and profit goals for the store are set at, you know, in corporate offices and then filtered down to her, and she has to meet those, you know, month by month, day by day, week by week.

11:33And so she's thinking about that for sure, as well as how profitable her store is. What's within her power to achieve those targets? She can decide some of what gets sold in her store. There's certain things in areas of the store where it's really her and her sort of direct reports that are saying, OK, for our store, for example, there was a little refillable barbecue bottle that she was selling at her store for 97 cents. And when we walked by it, she explained like, this is something that works well in our store. We have a low income core shopper. I know that this product is a low price point, but a high margin and we can sell a lot of them.

12:14So here we put them in this high traffic area at the end of a shelf. You know, she can control some of the product decisions and then she can also have some control over what they spend on labor. Some of that is decided by corporate, but ultimately it's her and her direct reports that are kind of looking at that minute by minute, day by day.

12:37There's a new challenge for Nicole that doesn't have to do with the in-store experience. It has to do with Walmart's push into online shopping. What proportion of your store's sales come from online orders? It's about 25%. Is that on top of what existing sales had been? Mm-hmm. Wow. Yeah, and I mean, it just continues to grow, you know, year after year after year. It just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And the company just is rolling out many more initiatives that make people want to shop online. It makes the experience better. So it's a moving piece, but it's fun. I like change and I like challenges.

13:18How has that changed your day-to-day? it's not just the shoppers coming into your store. You've got thousands of shoppers that are outside of your store that are expecting you to deliver excellence to them. They want the items that they're ordering. You've got to know what items are being ordered and not being found so you can fix them. It's just, it's one more piece that's just added to the puzzle, but it also brings in a lot of dollars. But you have to hit sales targets. You have to make sure your store looks good. You have to manage people. It is a lot. not to mention like understanding your shoppers, what they want, where their price points are.

13:57What would you say is the hardest part of your job? I think the hardest part is when you take a new store and you have got to get all 300 people to push in the same direction, right? Because they've got to understand your expectations. They've got to understand their rules. They've got to understand processes. It's not me that does all of these things. This is my team, my 300 people that I manage that makes this big building work. It's not just Nicole, you know. And what are you going to do after this meeting? I'm going to go back out on my floor. I'm going to go follow up on the notes that I gave this morning and be sure that everything is ready for evening business.

14:34Go and walk the grocery side and be sure I have rotisserie chickens and bread and fruits and meat out for the evening. Just be sure that we're ready.

14:44Do you think Nicole Hart is a typical Walmart store manager? Or is she exceptional in some way? Yes and no. I've talked to enough store managers over the years to know that I think she is exceptional in some ways in her ability to sort of handle the multitasking that is needed to do the job without losing it. I think she's typical in the sense that she came up in the company. She doesn't have a college degree.

15:11She grew up in the place where she is. She knows the community quite well. I think those things are more typical. This is a job where a person doesn't have to have a college degree. They can make potentially$400 ,000. What does that say to you about the labor market? To me, it says that there are these still these sort of like choke points, jobs that are hard to fill because they're hard jobs and you have to have a lot of expertise over time to do them. I don't think any like college grad could waltz in and be the manager of a Walmart store. Right. And as Nicole herself told me, you know, if you can run a Walmart store, you can run a Home Depot, you can run a Target, you can do other things.

15:58And so once someone has gotten to that level at the company, it makes sense that Walmart would really want to keep them.

16:15This episode was originally published last May. Since then, Walmart's top performing store managers can now make even more. Over$600 ,000 a year. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening. We'll be back Tuesday with a new episode.