Walmart is boosting what it pays regional store managers this year, enabling the top performers to take home more than $600,000 a year.

According to the Wall Street Journal, regional managers responsible for clusters of a dozen Walmart stores, a role known as a market manager, will be able to earn between $420,000 and $620,000 if they get their full bonuses this year.

That total is up from a range of roughly 320,000 to 570,000 last year.

The retail giant recently told these supervisors about increased bonus and stock awards, changes that reflect how their jobs of running a collection of stores have become more critical to the company's success.

At the same time, Walmart is pulling back on perks for office based staff, such as gradually ending remote work, cutting some pay and shifting workers to the same health insurance plans offered to most store staff.

Chris, are you pro or con?

Walmart increasing its benefits from for regional store managers, especially important since you were one.

Yes, I was.

But for Target.

Yeah, not for Walmart, not for Walmart, but for Target.

And were you making $640,000 a year?

Because that is pretty sweet.

God no.

And, and I was a store manager when the sales weren't that great at Target either, so it definitely was not.

Or a regional manager at Target when the sales were not great either.

So no I was not.

But the great thing about this headline to end the show is finally a headline I can laud.

I feel like I think every headline this week but this one I'm lauding.

I love this move and what you know, while other retailers are closing stores, Walmart is investing in its bread and butter and signaling to the entire organization.

This is my favorite part.

They are signaling to the entire organization that store level work is as important, if not more important than the work done in headquarters.

And I got to tell you, and to your point, having done this exact job at Target, that is true, the scope of the job is much harder, much, much harder and requires an entirely different skill set than what I was getting paid for at an equivalent salary for my HQ roles at Target.

Like hands down I would say that every day to the cows come home.

And at HQ also you're a dime a dozen.

But good, competent field leaders are much, much harder to find.

Like you can find pick some random MBA off the street.

But get get an MBA in there to run a store and let alone run a region, that's a whole different thing.

So Walmart, kudos to you for understanding what really leads to your success, which is fundamentally your performance in your stores.

Gotta give you credit on this one.

Yeah, I agree.

I mean I think it's about time.

I, I never understood even you know, in our days at Target why you know, we had different bathrooms than the head at the headquarters than the stores teams like it was, it's like little things like that.

And so I think even looking at like the healthcare being consistent across the board, like you should be treating these store teams who are still making the most impact to your bottom line.

They're responsible for successfully rolling out all this technology and eventually creating a positive customer experience that's going to keep all the HQ jobs funded anyway.

Like these are the people who you should be investing in.

Plus I think it's really important when you think of, and I hope that this, this helps with attrition in these jobs early on, like the early store associate jobs.

It gives you a really well deserved and well laid out career path for people to start working.

Yes.

Like if I know as a, an associate starting as a 16 year old bagging groceries like you know, Doug McMillan did or stocking shelves like that, that I have a career path that could net me up to $600,000 a year.

Like I am loyal to this company, I am working hard and I am invested in making sure that this is a great experience overall.

So I think it's a really, really brilliant move by Walmart and I think just goes to show how they are able to move so quickly and how they've come to the position that they're in because the hierarchy BS is not present.

They're, they're making sure that everybody's value is being appropriately rewarded in the organization.

It's not about you know, who's friends with who or you know, what, what relationships are in which places.

It's do the work and you get paid for it and we treat people equally here and I think that's really impressive.

Yeah, no, 100%.

And I gotta ask you because I'm sure our listeners are wondering and I'm wondering too, what did you mean about the Target bathrooms?

What was, what was that about?

I didn't understand.

I didn't.

I was just like when we were building store of the future and we trying to look at like what should the store bathrooms be like for associates, you know, at a Target store versus what the bathrooms were like at the headquarters.

And that was always like a sticking point was you know, headquarters has the, have these like beautiful floor to ceiling like windows and you know, state of the art beautiful.

It was like walking into a casino or a hotel room at headquarters to go into the bathrooms, and there's all these, like, paper products and feminine products out for people.

And then you go into the store's bathrooms, and it's like, you're lucky if you got a toilet that that's not clogged that you're gonna sit down at.

And it was just things like that that we were really working to invest in at Target.

And you've seen some of that in the store remodels that have happened certainly since then.

But just like, we wanted to make the experience as good as we had it at headquarters for the store, the regional managers, the store managers, and the team members that were working day in and day out, there's no reason they shouldn't have those things too.

Yeah, I got you.

So, like.

Yeah, we were.

I remember that.

Yeah, we were asking the questions, like, should we have a shower for the people that bike to work or to work?

You know, like we do at headquarters, you know?

Right.

You know, we were just talking about it at that time, but, like, those are the types of things that we're saying.

Yeah, that's interesting.

I had forgotten about that.

Thanks for.

Thanks for.

Thanks for taking me down memory lane.

And I was like, oh, my God, anytime, Chris.

You know, I'd do that.