What's Your Wage, Mean Or Median?

Walmart jobs are poverty-level jobs.

Walmart’s average sale Associate makes $8.81 per hour, according to IBISWorld, an independent market research group. This translates to annual pay of $15,576, based upon Walmart’s full-time status of 34 hours per week. This is significantly below the 2010 Federal Poverty Level of $22,050 for a family of four. The Wall Street Journal reported that the average Walmart cashier makes just $8.48 an hour, far below the $11.22 national average for all cashiers.

 According to a 2011 report, if Walmart started paying a $12/hour minimum wage, its workers currently earning less than $9 per hour could each earn $3,250 to $6,500 more per year before taxes. If Walmart were to pass this cost directly to shoppers, the average consumer would need to pay only 46 cents more per shopping trip, or $12.50 per year.

Walmart's own corporate fact sheet state that the average full-time hourly wage for Walmart associates is $11.75. Since everyone at Walmart is an 'associate', including CEO Mike Duke who in 2010 received $18.7 million (1,201 times the annual income of the average sales associate), the mean wage is higher than the median wage.

from here and from Raj Patel's 'Stuffed and Starved' chapter 8, note 85

Oh, how the figures are presented helps the bottom line!