An inside look at your local neighborhood MegaStore

I'll start off by saying that I hate WalMart. I don't shop there, partly with the feeble hope that Adam Smith's invisible hand will reach down and choke the life out of the entire Walton clan, fiscally of course, causing them to have to close stores. It's not just that they clearly want to screw every customer and employee, but it's the way they want to do it. And today, we learn that it gets worse:

Wal-Mart memo proposes cost cuts: report 1 hour, 51 minutes ago

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An internal memo sent to the Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE:WMT - news) board proposes numerous ways to hold down health care and benefits costs with less harm to the retailer's reputation, including hiring more part-time workers and discouraging unhealthy people from seeking jobs, the New York Times said on Wednesday.

The paper said the draft memo to Wal-Mart's board was obtained from Wal-Mart Watch, a pressure group allied with labor unions that says Wal-Mart's pay and benefits are too low.

The paper said in the memorandum Susan Chambers, Wal-Mart's executive vice president for benefits, also recommends reducing 401(k) pension contributions and wooing younger, and presumably healthier, workers by offering education benefits.

The memo is quoted as expressing concern that workers with seven years' seniority earn more than workers with one year's seniority, but are no more productive, said the paper, which posted the memo on its Web site (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/business/26walmart.ready.html ).

So fire 'em all after a year. It's not like they're earning anything working for you anyway.

To discourage unhealthy job applicants, the paper said, Chambers suggests Wal-Mart arrange for "all jobs to include some physical activity (e.g., all cashiers do some cart-gathering),"

Well, there would go the lovely Republican idea that when a 58 year old mother of 4 and grandmother of one loses her long-term, high-paying job because it's been outsourced to someone in another country willing to work for a nickel a day, she can always go work for WalMart - not if she's got a cranky hip, she can't - there's physical labor that needs doin'.

The memo also proposed that employees pay more for their spouses' health insurance, called for cutting the company's 401(k) contributions to 3 percent of wages from 4 percent and for cutting company-paid life insurance policies.

The memo acknowledged that Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, had to walk a fine line in restraining benefits because critics attacked it for being stingy on wages and health coverage. Chambers in the memo acknowledged 46 percent of the children of Wal-Mart's 1.33 million United States employees were uninsured or on Medicaid.

Think about that. Forty six percent of 1.33 million people, or about 610,000 people who get listed as having a job in George Bush's America, and who work for the company owned by the richest family in the country, either don't have health insurance or are on Medicaid.

Wal-Mart executives said the memo was part of an effort to rein in benefit costs, which have soared by 15 percent a year on average since 2002. Like much of corporate America, Wal-Mart has been squeezed by soaring health costs, the paper said.

The proposed plan, if approved, would save the company more than $1 billion a year by 2011, the paper said.

Of course, legally, they have every right to screw whoever they want, financially. But morally, wouldn't it be nice if they thought "You know, we might be one of the few companies to which a billion dollars isn't that big a deal. We'd rather have happier, healthier employees than to up the profit margin another percent."?

In an interview, Ms. Chambers said she was focusing not on cutting costs, but on serving employees better by giving them more choices on their benefits. Chambers also said that she made her recommendations after surveying employees about how they felt about the benefits plan.

One proposal would reduce the amount of time, from two years to one, that part-time employees would have to wait before qualifying for health insurance. Another would put health clinics in stores, in part to reduce expensive employee visits to emergency rooms.

Of course, to save money, they'll be staffed by kids in the first year of med school, but they'll be cheaper.

Wal-Mart's benefit costs jumped to $4.2 billion last year, from $2.8 billion three years earlier. Last year Wal-Mart earned $10.5 billion on sales of $285 billion.

Under fire because less than 45 percent of its workers receive company health insurance, Wal-Mart announced a new plan on Monday that seeks to increase participation by allowing some employees to pay just $11 a month in premiums.