Walmart employees will soon be slightly less poor

Some small good news for American low-wage workers: Walmart is increasing its wages at the low end. By April, no Walmart employee will make less than $9 an hour; a year from now it’ll be $10. The retailer is also moving to improve its scheduling practices, a source of worker complaints.

Walmart’s decision is a voluntary one, made for business reasons. Megan McArdle allows that politics played a role here, both the pressure from labor groups and the fact that getting ahead of future minimum wage increases can allow the company to take credit for something that’s around the corner anyway. But McArdle makes a good case that the main catalyst here is Walmart’s changing business strategies, from more and better groceries to improved inventory practices:

What a lot of these changes have in common is that you need good workers to execute them well. (Terrible things happen in the grocery business unless you have an absolutely passionate commitment to rooting out expired meat and past-it produce.) Keeping stock on the shelves doesn’t sound hard until you try to get resentful teenagers to actually do so. And so forth.