Wal-Mart and Costco are equally important to the American trade market, but their management strategies are vividly different. Twenty percent of Costco employees in the USA are working in unions and, regardless of paying better salaries and large health and retirement welfares, Costco is still able to compete with Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is the prime company in the world, currently with more than two million workers and an income of almost five hundred billion dollars.
Apparently, Costco supports the unitarism model. This statement is supported by one of the Costco’s employees, who mentioned in an interview with Kasmir (2008), that “the biggest complaint that he would have about Costco is the consistency and although Costco will tell you they try to be consistent, from one warehouse to the other it is not” (p. 16). He also claimed that each storeroom was, in fact, an image of the nature of the warehouse supervisor.
This intended that if there were an authoritarian kind of executive, you would find out that the warehouse was managed that way. If there were a more tranquil, empathetic supervisor, you would see the storeroom was run in that manner. Although the warehouses all have similar policies corporate-wide; they’re not certainly managed that way (Kasmir, 2008).
Wal-Mart embraces the radical model of management values. For the store supervisors, they have created a “leash” that makes it possible for senior managers tosee the instantaneous happenings at every single store. Thus, Wal-Mart supervisors inhabit the societal role of a middleman who is pushed upon from directly above by top management’s request for sales, and stressed from beneath by a superficially untrustworthy unit of employees whose assignment to the position requires a clever blend of discipline and pretense (Thornley, Jefferys, & Appay, 2010).
For numerous Wal-Mart employees, an obstinate shift, unfulfilled hopes, and struggle with their boss ends up in discharge or an offensive goodbye in not more than a couple of years. Wal-Mart not only pays low salaries and suggests uncertain reimbursements, but has speciously disregarded the discrimination based on the employees’ gender. The company settles more than 50 complaints declaring unlawful salaries discrimination against womankind every year.
Nowadays, Wal-Mart can precisely estimate its catalogue wishes, display the goods that are out of commission, and in so doing vary the procurement agenda in a significantly condensed period of time, but it does not necessarily pay attention to the values it implies to its employees.
The analysis of the values helped the author understand the different approaches taken by management at Wal-Mart and Costco. It may be that Wal-Mart and Costco just have client demands that are quite unalike (Phillips, 2011). For the motive that the two corporations have dissimilar primacies in helping their clients, they have different priorities for other shareholders, too. A different task and unalike values are going to do that.
Costco has devoted personnel who will be considerably more likely than is their Wal-Mart colleagues to take thought for the triumph of the corporation all together. Wal-Mart has had a distinct mission at all times: to bring excellent goods at reasonably low prices to its clientele regardless of the problems with the staff or management. Any argument about values is truly probable, but it may not be conceivable to come to the balanced decision that Wal-Mart’s values are greater than those of Costco or vice versa.
References
Kasmir, S. (2008). Rival Pay and Benefit Strategies in Mass Market Retail: The “Costco Model” vs. the “Wal-Mart Model.” Regional Labor Review, 10(2), 13-17. Hempstead, NY: Hofstra University.
Phillips, R. (2011). Stakeholder theory. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Thornley, C., Jefferys, S., & Appay, B. (2010). Globalization and precarious forms of production and employment: Challenges for workers and unions. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.