Walmart Gives Weekly Bonuses to Keep Warehouse Workers

Walmart Inc. WMT 0.22% is offering weekly bonuses to many warehouse employees to forgo August vacations, as the country’s biggest retailer ramps up for the holiday shopping season with a tight labor market and stretched supply chains.

The warehouse worker bonus varies by location and job type. Some workers have been offered $200, others as much as $500. The majority of Walmart’s 190 U.S. warehouses are offering the weekly bonus to those who stay on the job and, in some cases, work more hours, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Walmart aims to acknowledge the efforts of employees with incentives, and provide opportunity in a competitive job market, said a Walmart spokesman. The retailer’s distribution warehouses “continue to see high volume as we are preparing for peak season,” he said. Walmart is the country’s largest private employer with 1.6 million U.S. workers, most of which are hourly workers in stores and warehouses.

Retailers and other businesses are straining to hire workers and face a global supply chain snarled by the pandemic and other factors as demand for many products and services grows.

While the peak holiday shopping season kicks off in stores in the fall, it is already the holiday shopping season in the supply chain and warehouses of large retailers. Retailers aim to have warehouse operations running smoothly ahead of the season and are already handling some holiday inventory.

Companies in a range of industries, from fast food chains to amusement parks are doling out hiring bonuses, raising pay or using other incentives to hire or keep workers on the job.

New jobs at restaurants, hotels, stores, salons and similar in-person roles accounted for about half of all payroll gains in June, according to the Labor Department. And workers in those industries are seeing larger raises than other employees.

Low-wage work is in high demand, and employers are now competing for applicants, offering incentives ranging from sign-on bonuses to free food. But with many still unemployed, are these offers working? Photo: Bloomberg

Amazon.com Inc. said in April it was raising wages for many workers, and offering $1,000 hiring bonuses in many locations. Amazon has a $15 an hour minimum starting wage. Walmart said it would give around 425,000 workers raises earlier this year, and kept a starting wage of $11 an hour in some markets.

In line with other retailers, Walmart has given out a series of pandemic-related bonuses to all its hourly workers. The current warehouse worker bonuses are a more targeted approach.

After early pandemic surges in demand for food and household goods such as toilet paper, Walmart’s in-stock levels improved but the company still struggled to stock some items earlier this year, Walmart U.S. Chief Executive John Furner said on an analyst call in May.

“It’s better in many cases, but there are some pockets where we continue to chase demand,” he said, citing adult bicycles and consumer electronics. “We’re monitoring things like delays at the ports and other factors in the supply chain, and we’ll watch all those things closely to continue to react. ”