I’d like to point out briefly that any time we talk about anything in the actual, existing economy we have in real life, we’re talking about what’s going on in a mixed economy. The situation under an actual capitalist economy could be very, very different for any given specific example from the real world that we may discuss. Walmart, its owners, and the wages of its employees are all impacted by things like minimum wage laws, child labor laws, OSHA, the EPA, licensing laws, alcohol and tobacco laws, anti-monopoly laws, roads and other infrastructure being tax-funded, tax codes in general, laws favoring offering health insurance as a job benefit over purchasing it independently, etc cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera ad nauseum. Our economy, including what job positions already exist, what new ones can be created and how easily, what happens and when if one becomes unemployed and so on are all extremely heavily skewed from what they would be in a capitalist system. The alternatives people face in the here and now vary greatly in many ways and specific cases from what they would be in a capitalist system.
Maybe Walmart would exist in a capitalist system, maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe they’d exist and be a much smaller business. Maybe they’d be even bigger. They probably wouldn’t be paying $9 an hour starting wages though since that’s heavily influenced by minimum wage laws. Maybe they’d pay people less, maybe they’d pay more. There may be (if Walmart existed still) a lot more competition Walmart would be facing both in what other businesses they were competing with to sell products and in who they were competing with for getting people to work for them at all. If starting businesses wasn’t so full of legal nightmares, more people may start them, including more people who could offer potential employees better compensation and people who may have otherwise worked for Walmart themselves. What jobs exist at Walmart could even be very different due to different products and services that may exist without all these legal hindrances. What hours people work at such a hypothetical version of Walmart may be very different too if it still was a relatively low paying option. It could be something people did fewer hours at and treated more as a supplement to incomes from other, higher paying jobs rather than being something so many people worked at as much as they could and heavily depended upon for large percentages of their income.
So, yeah, please don’t assume that Walmart, or any other real business or job, is necessarily some perfect example of capitalism at work. People could have good intentions and goals and want and try to do things that would be in the spirit of capitalism and would be good to pursue under a capitalist system, and if so, that’s great, praise worthy, very moral of them, but they’re still going to have to work within and be impacted by the real world’s heavily distorted mixed economy. Specific real world scenarios are always going to be needed to be taken with a whole shaker of salt when evaluating them against what would, could, and should be done under capitalism.
So, the actions of the owners of Walmart and of Walmart employees are not what they would be in a capitalist system. Anybody can try their best to pursue ends in a capitalistic manner though, they can still make morally correct choices out of far from morally ideal options. A and B may both be rotten options, and the only options, but B is definitely worse than A, so A is the moral choice to make. I don’t know what the owner’s end of things looks like to evaluate if they’re making the most moral choices possible here as well as I could evaluate things on the employees’ end, but you don’t care about the owner’s end in your first post anyway. Within the context of our flawed, flawed real economy, taking a relatively shitty job with relatively shitty pay is generally done because all other known options at the time are simply regarded as even worse. People don’t take these jobs because they give a shit about the Waltons, they take them because they have some kind of unmet need of their own that this is the best thing they can find to try to fill it.
How much money the Waltons do or do not have is completely irrelevant, never even factoring into the decision to take the job or not. In our current, real economy, I doubt much would be achieved by trying to demand more pay just because the Waltons have a lot of money that, theoretically, they could give to employees. I doubt it since there are so many people out there just as desperate to get a paying job, maybe even more desperate. It’s not that hard for people to simply be replaced in the here and now. If employees were to just get a bunch more money, just because they wanted it anyway, there’s still so many employees and so much time to cover that I doubt you could go too long before the Waltons ran out of money and you had to go back to old wages again or the business got impacted in ways that may require cutting jobs or raising prices which could begin to make the business less successful or even fail too. You’re not going to get more money, especially not for long, just because somebody you work for has more and you demand they give you what they have, especially not in the here and now. The current economy lacks incentive to pay people lots more for typical jobs at Walmart and paying them much more may not be feasible even if somebody tried. So, again, how much money the Waltons have is moot to deciding whether to work for their company of not. Somebody’s life may still be notably improved over what it was before or what else they could have had by taking a job at $9 an hour even though it is still much less than what they may really want or need and much less than what they could have had in a real capitalist system. That’s why people do it. They have their own self-benefiting motivations. They offer their time and services and find that $9 an hour is still worth it to them over the available alternatives.
(Side note, whoa, I haven’t seen DavidOdden posting around here in aaaaaaaaages.)