After pandemic-fueled higher turnover and fiercer competition for workers, Walmart (NYSE:WMT) CEO Doug McMillon said it’s gotten easier to hire people and get them to stick around.
“It’s more normalized,” McMillon said to the media Wednesday. “The unusual employment market that we saw the last few years has changed. We are able to staff around the country. Our turnover’s down. We’ve got more continuity, which is helping a lot.”
As the nation’s largest private employer and largest grocer, Walmart is closely watched as a barometer of both the health of the consumer and the strength of the country’s labor market. It has about 1.6 million employees in the U.S. This spring, Walmart raised the minimum wage to $14 for store employees. Its previous minimum wage was $12 an hour. Its competitors, Target (NYSE:TGT) , Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Best Buy (NYSE:BBY), had already hiked their own minimum wages to $15 an hour.
Earlier this year, Walmart signaled a potentially cooling labour market, too. It cut the starting pay for new store employees who pick and pack online orders and stock shelves by about a dollar an hour.
The labour market has cooled according to government data, too. Job openings fell in October to their lowest level in two and a half years, the Labor Department reported. The ratio of job openings to available workers is nearly at pre-pandemic levels, with the ratio at 1.3 to 1.
WMT was trading Wednesday afternoon down $1.70, or 1.1%, to $154.04.