Is It Time To Go Bargain Hunting In Walmart's Stock?

Walmart’s (NYSE:WMT) business has been squeezed from all directions these days. The first is the impact of Amazon on the company’s top line, as we wrote in a previous piece here. Then came the squeeze from minimum wage hikes, which pressed the company’s bottom line. Walmart is among the largest employers in the country, employing 2.2 million people, according to a recent count. So a wage hike places Walmart in a further disadvantage compared to Amazon.com, which has less labor-intensive operations. In fact, Amazon.com is far more efficient than Walmart, producing roughly one-fifth of Walmart’s revenues with one-eighteenth of its number of employees (see table).