It is an idea that flies in the face of the prevailing ethos on Wall Street and in many executive suites the last few decades. But there is sound economic theory behind the idea. “Efficiency wages” is the term that economists — who excel at giving complex names to obvious ideas — use for the notion that employers who pay workers more than the going rate will get more loyal, harder-working, more productive employees in return. 
 
 Walmart’s experiment holds some surprising lessons for the American economy as a whole. Productivity gains have been slow for years; could fatter paychecks reverse that? Demand for goods and services has remained stubbornly low ever since the 2008 economic crisis. If companies paid people more, would it bring out more shoppers — benefiting workers and shareholders alike? 
 
 Deep in a warren of windowless offices here, executives in early 2015 sketched out a plan to spend more money on increased wages and training, and offer more predictable scheduling. They refer to this plan as “the investments.” 
 
 The results are promising. By early 2016, the proportion of stores hitting their targeted customer-service ratings had rebounded to 75 percent. Sales are rising again. 
 
 That said, the immediate impact on earnings and the company’s stock price have been less rosy. 
 
 The question for Walmart is ultimately whether that short-run hit makes the company a stronger competitor in the long run. Will the investments turn out to be the beginning of a change in how Walmart and other giant companies think about their workers, or just a one-off experiment to be reversed when the next recession rolls around? 
 
 The future health of the United States economy, and the well-being of its workers, may well depend on the answer. 
 
 Pressure From Investors 
 
 On the morning of Feb. 19, 2015, Walmart’s 1.2 million employees across the United States gathered — many in front of their stores’ vast walls of televisions for sale — to watch a video feed by their chief executive. Doug McMillon, wearing a sweater and sitting in the office once occupied by the company founder Sam Walton, more or less acknowledged that Walmart had made a mistake. It had gone too far in trying to cut payroll costs to the bone. 
 
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 “Sometimes we don’t get it all right,” Mr. McMillon said in the video. “Sometimes we make policy changes or other decisions and they don’t result in what we thought they were going to. And when we don’t get it right, we adjust.” 
 
 What most store employees probably didn’t know was that Mr. McMillon and his executive team, who had been promoted into their jobs a year earlier, were under extraordinary pressure from investors. They needed to reverse a slide in business and fight off threats in all directions — dollar discounters on the low end, Amazon online, direct competitors like Target and countless rivals specializing in one slice of Walmart’s business, from grocery chains to home-improvement warehouses. 
 
 People were shopping more — at Walmart’s rivals. 
 
 The company offers its millions of shoppers a simple way to make their dissatisfaction known. On the back of sales receipts is a message, “Tell us about your visit today,” along with instructions to log on to a website and answer questions about the store: Was it clean? Were they able to get what they came for quickly? Were employees friendly? 
 
 In early 2015, the answers that poured into Walmart’s global headquarters were, in a word, awful. The people paid to analyze the company tended to agree, too. A report by analysts at Wolfe Research in 2014 included photographs from a visit to Walmart of a sad-looking display of nearly empty bins of oranges and lemons and disorganized shelves of crackers. 
 
 “Walmart U.S.’s relentless focus on costs does seem to have taken some toll on in-store conditions and stock levels,” they wrote. The analysts wryly added: “If an item is not on the shelf, you cannot sell it.” 
 
 The company had been busy raising profits by cutting labor costs. The number of employees in the United States fell by 7 percent from early 2008 to early 2013, for example, a span in which the square footage of stores rose 13 percent. 
 
 Some of that reflects technological advances, like self-checkout kiosks. But when Mr. McMillon and a new team came in to reverse the slide starting in early 2014, they diagnosed the problem as having taken the cost-cutting logic too far. 
 
 From store managers nationwide, they heard that years of cost-cutting meant Walmart had become viewed as a last-ditch option for employment — not the place that ambitious people might want to work. They were under such pressure to keep labor costs low that the employees they hired showed little loyalty or career-building devotion to their jobs. 
 
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 “We realized quickly that wages are only one part of it, that what also matters are the schedules we give people, the hours that they work, the training we give them, the opportunities you provide them,” said Judith McKenna, who became chief operating officer in late 2014, in a recent interview. “What you’ve got to do is not just fix one part, but get all of these things moving together.” 
 
 That is how Walmart decided to build 200 training centers to offer a clearer path for hourly employees who want to get on the higher-paying management track. And it said it would raise its hourly pay to a minimum of $10 for workers who complete a training course and raise department manager pay to $15 an hour, from $12. It said it would offer more flexible and predictable schedules to hourly workers. 
 
 The news from Bentonville made headlines worldwide. The federal minimum wage had been $7.25 since 2009, and the labor market had awarded meager pay gains for people at the lower end of the spectrum for decade, facts that helped increase Walmart’s bottom line. Now, the United States’ largest private employer — Walmart has about 2.3 million workers around the world — was signaling it was about to gingerly try a different approach, putting $2.7 billion where its mouth was. 
 
 Walmart says its average pay for a full-time nonmanagerial employee is now $13.69 an hour, up 16 percent since early 2014. In the same span, consumer prices have risen 2.1 percent. 
 
 Back to the Classroom 
 
 On a Thursday morning in late summer, at a Walmart Supercenter No. 359 in Fayetteville, Walmart trainees followed instructors around to learn what this particular store was doing right, and wrong, on this particular day. Teresa Rasberry praised a display of University of Arkansas tailgating equipment — coolers, grills and folding chairs — complemented by a fluttering effect created by putting electric fans beneath overhead banners for Razorbacks football. 
 
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 “See how it pulls the eye?” she asked the trainees. “Step back and think about how the customer sees it.” 
 
 Not so good was an end display of Mr. Clean, in which the various colors of the cleaning solution were jumbled together. Lining up the bottles so they make vertical stripes of color pulls more buyers in, she said. 
 
 “It may sound silly,” Ms. Rasberry said, “but it works! I’ve tested it myself!” 
 
 Back in a classroom, Walmart department managers discussed why a $15.86 bottle of Clairol hair coloring might be a bad fit for a store located in a place with an $80,000 average income. Women in that income bracket are more likely to get their hair colored at a salon, an instructor, Amanda Forslund, explained. 
 
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 This is one of the first of Walmart’s planned 200 training academies. New department managers will come in for two weeks of training covering general retail principles (customer service, inventory management) as well as specialized training for their specific area (the bakery or electronics, for example). 
 
 Walmart’s pay increases got most of the attention. But the new training and prospect of better career paths for hourly staff members could be more significant in the long term. 
 
 It’s not that the retail industry doesn’t offer potential paths to good incomes. Starting pay for an assistant store manager at Walmart is $48,500, and the manager of one of its large stores can make comfortably above $100,000. 
 
 The problem — described by Walmart managers and people outside the company who study labor markets — is that there is no clear path for an entry-level worker to get there. Much training is impromptu, and chains have tended to view their hourly workers as interchangeable cogs rather than resources worth investing in. 
 
 That reputation has been particularly strong at Walmart. 
 
 “I didn’t used to think this would be something I would want to do, to work at Walmart,” said Garrett Watts, a 22-year-old newly promoted customer service manager at a store in Fayetteville. “There’s a stigma with it. It used to be, if you worked at a Walmart, it was the equivalent of a fast-food restaurant.” 
 
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 He had gone to college for two years, suspended his education and was working as a desk clerk at a hotel when he switched to Walmart this year, lured not by the starting wage but by what he had heard from a friend about the potential to rise within a giant company. He was soon promoted to department manager and runs customer services for the store. He was hired at $9 an hour and now makes $13. 
 
 “I wanted something that wasn’t a stopgap, but could be a real career,” Mr. Watts said. He is starting to set his sights on one of those $48,000-a-year assistant store manager jobs. 
 
 ‘Step in the Right Direction’ 
 
 Walmart’s announcement of what it refers to as “the investments,” made during the all-staff videoconference in 2015, became something of a Rorschach test. To macroeconomists, it suggested that a falling unemployment rate was finally creating the response that theory suggests it should: employers raising wages to attract the workers they need. 
 
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 To labor activists, it was a sign that political campaigns to raise the minimum wage were paying off. To Wall Street analysts, it was the company owning up to the weaknesses long apparent in customer surveys and sales numbers. 
 
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 And in the company’s own framing, it was about doing the right thing. “It’s clear to me that one of the highest priorities today must be an investment in you, our associates,” Mr. McMillon said in the video. 
 
 It was all of these things, Ms. McKenna acknowledged. 
 
 The improving economy made it harder for Walmart to get good workers without paying more. Political momentum toward a higher minimum wage meant that entry-level pay would soon be rising in many places anyway. And executives really had concluded that customer service woes and slumping sales were because of underinvestment in employees. 
 
 To some critics, though, it still amounted to a half-measure, and one framed to maximize public attention. “In our minds this is certainly a step in the right direction, but it’s typical Walmart in that it’s minimal and there’s a lot of spin on top of what’s really happening,” said Daniel Schlademan, a founder of the labor group Our Walmart, which wants the company to have a starting wage of $15 an hour. 
 
 In particular, new hires typically do not receive the $10 minimum wage until they finish a training program that is supposed to take six months but frequently stretches longer. And a promised increase in the predictability and flexibility of hourly workers’ schedules is being tested in only 650 smaller “neighborhood market” stores. It has not been rolled out to the full 4,500 Walmarts. 
 
 “The economic reality is that they put a great deal of pressure on managers to keep labor costs and hours down,” Mr. Schlademan said. 
 
 And the actions fall well short of what Zeynep Ton, an associate professor of operations at the Sloan School of Business at M.I.T., calls a “good jobs strategy,” in which a retailer builds its entire operating philosophy around better-compensated staff members who are empowered to make decisions. Companies like Costco and the grocer Wegman’s have a base pay closer to that of what the retail activists seek and are successful by many measures. (Costco pays entry-level workers at least $13 an hour, with hourly pay reaching up to $22.50). 
 
 But while Walmart’s changes aren’t as extensive as advocates would prefer, the company has shifted, in relative terms, up the industry’s pay scale. In early 2014, Walmart’s self-reported average full-time pay was 3.7 percent higher than the average hourly earnings for nonmanagerial workers at general merchandise stores calculated by the Labor Department. Now, it is 13.7 percent higher. 
 
 “It’s about being competitive in the market and making sure the talent pool of applicants was the right talent pool,” Ms. McKenna said. 
 
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 That sounds an awful lot like a reference to the concept of an “efficiency wage.” 
 
 Above the Market Rate 
 
 The idea is that, sometimes, it is in an employer’s best interest to pay more than necessary to get a worker into a job. The 18th-century economic thinker Adam Smith described the need to pay a goldsmith particularly well to dissuade him from stealing from you. More recently, economists (including Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, who worked on these topics as an academic economist in the 1980s) have found evidence that people are more productive when they are paid above the market rate. 
 
 An employee making more than the market rate, after all, is likely to work harder and show greater loyalty. Workers who see opportunities to get promoted have an incentive not to mess up, compared with people who feel they are in a dead-end job. A person has more incentive to work hard, even when the boss isn’t watching, when the job pays better than what you could make down the street. 
 
 Economists have found evidence of this in practice in many real-world settings. Higher pay at New Jersey police departments, for example, led to better rates of clearing cases. At the San Francisco airport, higher pay led to shorter lines for passengers. Among British home care providers, higher pay meant less oversight was needed. 
 
 What is interesting about this is that, if you look at what’s ailing the broader United States economy, it looks a lot like what you would expect if employers were, en masse, failing to understand the possibility of efficiency wages. 
 
 Employers have succeeded at holding down labor costs. The “labor share” of national income — the portion of the national economic pie that goes to workers’ pay, as opposed to corporate profits and elsewhere — has fallen. And average pay for nonmanagerial workers has grown more slowly than the overall economy. 
 
 This has coincided with disappointing results for the economy. Worker productivity has been rising slowly for the last decade, and prime working-age Americans are staying out of the work force in droves. This implies that plenty of people don’t see jobs out there that offer sufficient pay or opportunity to make the jobs worth doing. 
 
 Individually, employers may think they are making rational decisions to pay people as little as possible. But that may be collectively shortsighted, if the unintended result is less demand for the goods and services they are all trying to sell to these same people. 
 
 Just maybe, in other words, employers across the country are pushing down labor costs like Walmart, circa 2014 — and this is one of the major culprits behind disappointing economic results since the start of the 21st century. 
 
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 “The management philosophy that became popular in the 1980s that led companies to cut pay for low-wage workers, fight unions and contract out work may have been profitable for the companies that practiced it in the short run,” said Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist and leading scholar of labor markets. “But in the long run it has raised inequality, reduced aggregate consumption and hurt overall business profitability.” 
 
 Customer Surveys Improve 
 
 If you buy that theory — and, to be clear, it is more theory than settled fact — it means that the results of the Walmart experiment matter a great deal. That implies that if large companies were to spend more to pay and train their workers, it could create gains for the economy as a whole. And it would ultimately be better for those same businesses. 
 
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 So, 19 months in, what is Walmart finding? 
 
 Those customer surveys that were so terrible at the start of 2015 have improved, with “clean, fast, friendly scores” rising for 90 consecutive weeks. Surveys by outside groups, like the investment banker Cowen & Company, point to more satisfied customers as well. 
 
 That seems to have done the trick in reversing the sales slump. At stores open at least a year, sales were up 1.6 percent over a year earlier in the most recent quarter. That’s better than it sounds. Overall sales at general merchandise retailers are down 0.4 percent this year compared with last, according to census data. 
 
 The profit landscape is less sunny. Operating income for Walmart’s United States stores was down 6 percent in the most recent quarter, reflecting higher labor costs and other new investments. The company’s stock has underperformed the overall United States stock market and an index of major retailers since the program was announced, suggesting investors are not convinced that these investments will pay a lucrative return anytime soon. 
 
 Walmart Stock Has Lagged The retailer’s share price has underperformed the market since announcing investments in worker pay and training. Percent change from Feb. 18, 2015 % +20 +0 -20 -40 Walmart S&P 500 S&P Retail Index Apr '15 Jul '15 Oct '15 Jan '16 Apr '16 Jul '16 Oct '16 Percent change from Feb. 18, 2015 % +20 +0 -20 -40 Walmart S&P 500 S&P Retail Index Apr '15 Jul '15 Oct '15 Jan '16 Apr '16 Jul '16 Oct '16 Percent change from Feb. 18, 2015 % +20 +0 -20 -40 Walmart S&P 500 S&P Retail Index Apr '15 Jul '15 Oct '15 Jan '16 Apr '16 Jul '16 Oct '16 
 
 But at the store level, managers describe a big shift in the kind of workers they can bring in by offering $10 an hour with a solid path to $15 an hour. “We’re attracting a different type of associate,” said Tina Budnaitis, the manager of Walmart No. 5260 in Rogers. “We get more people coming in who want a career instead of a job.” 
 
 Senior executives speak in the language you might expect from a manager worried about paying an efficiency wage. “Our associates are an asset,” said Ms. McKenna, the chief operating officer. “You don’t try to have the very lowest cost of an asset. You try to have the right asset. So rather than thinking about the lowest cost, the question is how do you get the best productivity.” 
 
 The question for Walmart, and perhaps the economy as a whole, is whether these changes turn out to be one-off, or part of a shifting philosophy of how work and compensation should work in a 21st-century megacorporation. 
 
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 “Out of the gate, they’ve seen some improvement, but I think that’s because they were doing Retail 101 so poorly,” said Brian Yarbrough, a retail analyst at Edward Jones & Company. “The better question is what happens next year and the following year. The low-hanging fruit has been harvested.” 
 
 Ms. McKenna declined to be specific about what might come next. And of course in a volatile corporate world, an unexpected recession or management change, or rise of a new competitor, could upend any plans. But she suggests that the company’s changes should not be viewed as a one-time event. 
 
 “This is a journey,” she said. 
 
 In the short term, the Walmart experiment shows pretty clearly that paying people better improves both the work force and the shoppers’ experience, but not profitability, at least not yet. 
 
 Still, here is one other nugget the company has found. The extra wages it is paying its workers don’t all go out the door on payday, executives said. Spending at the stores by employees has risen — offering a possible metaphor for what those efficiency-wage economists argue might happen across the economy, if wages were to climb. ||||| Photo Advertisement Continue reading the main story Stories from Our Advertisers 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 BENTONVILLE, Ark. — When the weather gets sultry here at company headquarters, Walmart workers everywhere brace for an icy blast. 
 
 Because temperatures at Walmart stores across the United States are controlled remotely by the retailer’s centralized systems here, employees stock shelves and tend to customers under conditions that, by many accounts, tend to be on the chilly side from one city to another. 
 
 So at an employees’ rally held here on Wednesday ahead of the retail giant’s annual shareholders meeting this week, company executives made one of several concessions by agreeing to raise average store temperatures by 1 degree for the majority of Walmart locations. 
 
 From adjusting the air-conditioning to relaxing the dress code and even jazzing up a store’s music, the overtures — however small they seemed — are part of Walmart’s effort to project an image of a more caring employer. 
 
 A day earlier, Walmart, the country’s largest private sector employer, said that it would raise the starting hourly wage for more than 100,000 managers in the United States. That was the second wave of wage increases at Walmart this year, after it announced in February that it would raise the pay for a half-million entry-level store workers. 
 
 “I love to listen to you, I love hearing what’s working, what isn’t. I want to hear your ideas. I even like to hear your frustrations,” Greg Foran, the head of Walmart’s United States division, told about 3,000 store workers. 
 
 “Our job, my job, is to make your life easier,” Mr. Foran said. 
 
 Long a target of protests over low wages and rigid work schedules, Walmart is appearing to appease employees in the face of rising competition to hire and retain workers as the job market rebounds. Other retail chains, like Ikea and Gap, have also started to offer higher wages for store employees. 
 
 Walmart is also trying to cast off an image as an exploitative employer with an army of minimum-wage workers, some of whom reportedly depend on food stamps or other government aid. Now, after the latest wage increases, all Walmart workers make above the minimum wage, the retailer says. 
 
 Walmart also is trying to improve customer service as it struggles with sluggish sales at its supercenters and neighborhood markets. 
 
 Sales at stores open for a year or more grew by just 1.1 percent from a year earlier in the first quarter, though its performance over the last few quarters has improved slightly after a period of sales declines. 
 
 Not all workers were impressed with the changes. And not all of them were in Bentonville at the company’s invitation. 
 
 Cindy Murray was in town with the labor union affiliate, Our Walmart, to speak in support of a resolution the group will be presenting on behalf of an activist investor at Friday’s meeting that calls for giving shareholders the right to nominate board candidates. 
 
 Ms. Murray, who said she earned $13.20 as a fitting room clerk at a Walmart store in Laurel, Md., and struggled to pay her medical bills, said the retailer was skirting its workers’ most pressing concerns. 
 
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 “Anything Walmart does to makes life better for workers is awesome. But these changes are also basic things we need to do our jobs better and sell more,” she said. “Hire more workers and better pay — those are the biggest things. I think they should stop dancing round the boat.” 
 
 Kristin Oliver, Walmart’s executive vice president in charge of human resources, acknowledged that workers harbored remaining concerns, and said Walmart was working on more flexible scheduling. 
 
 She also said the company hoped that the combination of higher wages and friendlier policies would make its work force less transitory, and more likely to build careers with the retailer. 
 
 “What we’ve seen in the last few years is people jumping for small wage increases. People will move from one retailer to another for 25 cents an hour,” Ms. Oliver said. “What we hope is going to happen with the investments we’ve made is to slow that down.” 
 
 To entice workers to stay, Walmart on Wednesday announced a number of other changes to its employee policies. 
 
 The retailer will ease a much-criticized dress code that had required store workers, even those in physically intensive jobs, to wear shirts, vests and khakis. Now, stockers and other back-of-store workers will be allowed to wear jeans and T-shirts. Service-oriented workers will also be able to expand their choice of pants to black or khaki-colored denim. 
 
 On special occasions, like days with sporting events or seasonal holidays, workers will be invited to wear team jerseys, ugly Christmas sweaters or pink shirts to support breast cancer awareness, said Deisha Barnett, a Walmart spokeswoman. 
 
 The retailer also said it was bringing back an in-store broadcasting service called Walmart Radio, with a D.J. who broadcasts music to stores, to address numerous complaints from workers about having to listen to the same Justin Bieber and Celine Dion albums all day. 
 
 And temperatures at stores in the East and central regions will rise to 75 degrees from 74. (In stores in the West, average temperatures will fall from 76 to 75.) 
 
 To acknowledge employees’ complaints, executives at the rally used an imaginary Walmart worker, a puppet they called Willy Sellmore, who offered a surprisingly frank take on the retailer’s policies. When an executive explained that the temperature changes had been discussed for a year, Willy appeared understandably baffled. 
 
 “A year? A year? How long does it take to adjust a thermostat?” he said. “This shouldn’t be so hard.”
– The New York Times has a deep dive on how Walmart bet big on its business by investing in its employees. In 2015 the retailer quietly implemented a new focus on employee welfare, increasing pay across the board and developing programs to make the management track more accessible to employees. Although the program hasn't helped Walmart's struggling stock price, it has allowed Walmart to increase sales, increase employee satisfaction, and claw back some trust and loyalty from consumers. According to its official fact sheet, Walmart pledged $2.7 billion over two years to increasing employee pay and benefits. The NYT reports that so far, the initiative has raised the average pay for a full-time non-managerial employee to $13.69 an hour, a 16% increase since 2014 and above average pay for retail employees. However, some business leaders and analysts remain skeptical. Writing for Bloomberg, columnist Megan McArdle notes that for a large, publicly held company like Walmart, profitability looms above all. If the company's renewed focus on worker welfare doesn't start paying real, quantifiable dividends, shareholders will push for it to return to a cheaper business model, even if that means relying on fewer workers.