HellCatted

Walmart once promised a truck driver $100,000 if he stuck around for 20 years. He stuck around. He retired with $707,000. Sam Walton offered that same deal to everyone, including a lady named Gayle who started at the Owensboro store around 1981. Back then Walmart automatically dropped up to 4% of your pay into profit sharing. You put in nothing. The company funded all of it, mostly in Walmart stock, and the stock went up for 40 straight years. Cashiers and shelf stockers from that era retired with six and seven figures. As late as 2008 Walmart was still putting $724 million a year into retirement money for 839,000 hourly workers. Then in February 2011, Walmart killed it. The free money became a 401k match, which only pays if a worker making $11 an hour can spare 6% of her own check. Most can't. The savings went to quarterly store bonuses instead. So Gayle worked about 30 years under Sam's deal and 14 under the replacement. Here's the part nobody in the comments will guess. If she was enrolled early, those first three decades of stock may have quietly done more for her retirement than any party ever could. A greeter in a blue vest can be sitting on more money than her store manager. Everyone's mad about the flowers. The thing worth being mad about happened in 2011, and nobody took a photo of that.