May the Food Drive Bless Us Everyone: Walmart, Wages and Workers

[Loren Pechtel]

It's the most common meaning, not the only meaning. Stat data all too often uses the median without mentioning it.

That doesn't make it the average. Sorry, but mean and median have distinctly different meanings. For a distribution that is truly symmetrical, the median may equal the mean, but that does imply the concepts are the same. In that case, the value of the mean equals the value of median.

Of course the concepts are different. They're both described as "average", though.

 

[DBT]

If you run a luxury yacht, have a mansion on the hill, a villa in the Rivera, and keep a mistress with a BMW in an apartment in New York while your employees struggle with the basics of life in spite of working full time in your business...you are most probably taking advantage of their time, skill, labour and and a large chunk of their one and only lives in order to enrich yourself at that expense.

But even if they can afford basics of life, they probably can't afford luxury yacths. And nobody is saying they should. That's why it's silly to say that that Walmart should pay its employees more so that they could afford to by Walmart's products... what you can say though is that Walmart should pay its employees more so that they can afford basic necessities of life in general. Same as the hypothetical luxury yacht store.

I'm saying that their pay should be more than enough to meet their basic necessities. Doing full time productive work for the company, they should have a wage that enables them to live a decent life, including a few luxuries, perhaps a modest motor cruiser for weekend fishing trips (if they so wish), as well as savings. Given the profits that are generated by their input into the business, they should get a commensurate share in its bounty.

 

[laughing dog]

That doesn't make it the average. Sorry, but mean and median have distinctly different meanings. For a distribution that is truly symmetrical, the median may equal the mean, but that does imply the concepts are the same. In that case, the value of the mean equals the value of median.

Of course the concepts are different. They're both described as "average", though.

Unless you can show that these are muddled in the data in this thread, why are you even bringing this up?

 

[ksen]

It beats talking about how shitty wal-mart is.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Of course the concepts are different. They're both described as "average", though.

Unless you can show that these are muddled in the data in this thread, why are you even bringing this up?

We don't know if the data is muddled or not. All too often such data is.

 

[laughing dog]

Unless you can show that these are muddled in the data in this thread, why are you even bringing this up?

We don't know if the data is muddled or not. All too often such data is.

Let me get this straight. You have no evidence whatsoever that this data is "muddled". Nor have you shown that conflating the median with the mean makes any difference to the OP. So what exactly again is the relevance of this?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

We don't know if the data is muddled or not. All too often such data is.

Let me get this straight. You have no evidence whatsoever that this data is "muddled". Nor have you shown that conflating the median with the mean makes any difference to the OP. So what exactly again is the relevance of this?

I'm saying that data such as this *FREQUENTLY* uses the median instead of the mean. Thus we should not assume one or the other without further information.

 

[Jayjay]

Let me get this straight. You have no evidence whatsoever that this data is "muddled". Nor have you shown that conflating the median with the mean makes any difference to the OP. So what exactly again is the relevance of this?

I'm saying that data such as this *FREQUENTLY* uses the median instead of the mean. Thus we should not assume one or the other without further information.

The "data" in question is an informal statement by Walmart, which would have vested interest in using mean rather than median.

 

[laughing dog]

Let me get this straight. You have no evidence whatsoever that this data is "muddled". Nor have you shown that conflating the median with the mean makes any difference to the OP. So what exactly again is the relevance of this?

I'm saying that data such as this *FREQUENTLY* uses the median instead of the mean. Thus we should not assume one or the other without further information.

It would have shorter to just say "I have no real reason" because you cannot tell us why
1) this may make a difference, and
2) your feeling that the two are "frequently" interchanged is an accurate reflection of reality.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I'm saying that data such as this *FREQUENTLY* uses the median instead of the mean. Thus we should not assume one or the other without further information.

It would have shorter to just say "I have no real reason" because you cannot tell us why
1) this may make a difference, and
2) your feeling that the two are "frequently" interchanged is an accurate reflection of reality.

We have conflicting numbers here. It's likely we are dealing with a mean vs median issue.