Ending Hunger in America, 2014 Hunger Report Full Report | Page 77

CHAPTER 2

BOX 2.2

RETAIL WORK
The nation’s 15 million retail workers earn a median wage of $10.09 an hour.41 One in
five retail workers is providing their family’s only paycheck.42 Catherine Ruetschlin, with the
nonpartisan public policy organization Demos, estimates that a wage standard of $25,000 for
a full-time, year-round worker at the nation’s largest retailers—

“There is absolutely
no tradeoff between
low prices and
good jobs.”
— Zeynep Ton, MIT

those employing 1,000 workers or more—would improve the
living standards of 5 million workers and their families.43 Would
this damage the businesses? Ruetschlin determined that it would
cost the largest retailers less than 1 percent of their annual sales.
If half the costs were passed onto consumers, the average household would spend just 15 cents more per shopping trip.44

“There is absolutely no tradeoff between low prices and good jobs,” says Zeynep Ton, an
expert on the retail sector at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.45 And, in fact, higher
wages are good for business:
a study by the Wharton School
of Business at the University of
Pennsylvania found that each $1

Figure 2.4 Gender and Wages in the Retail Sector
$11.00
$10.50

increase in worker pay leads to an

$10.64

$10.00

additional $4 to $28 in sales each

28.0

$9.50

month.46

Well-paid, experienced

employees provide better customer
service, and improvements in
worker morale lead to lower turnover, so companies save the costs
associated with replacing workers.
These are significant: Ton and her
colleague Robert Huckman found
that the cost of replacing a worker
earning $8 an hour at a retail chain
store is at least $3,500 and sometimes as much as $25,000.47

$10.13
$9.77

$9.00
$8.50
$8.00

$9.00

Average

Median

Men

Women

Median wage is calculated by dividing all surveyed wage earners into
two equal groups.
Average wage is calculated by dividing aggregate wages of the group by the
number of wage earners included in the survey.
Source: Retail Action Project (2011). Based on a survey of 2,000 professionals across the
United States in a variety of retail and fashion-related fields.

www.bread.org/institute?

? 2014 Hunger Report? 67

n