One of the oldest Catch-22s in employment is that you can’t get experience without being hired. And you can’t get hired without experience. Some businesses learned that training their employees was the best way to make the worker you need, and retail giant Walmart (NYSE:WMT) is now focusing on job training to fit employees better into available positions. The move was just common-sense enough to garner it some love from investors, who sent shares up fractionally in Wednesday afternoon’s trading.
Walmart discovered that it was having a hard time finding people to fill certain roles, like pharmacy technicians or heating and air conditioning (HVAC) technicians. So, rather than continue to run ads and get frustrated when no one replies, Walmart started a new program, offering a way for current employees to learn a skilled trade and get their pay bumped up accordingly. Meanwhile, the firm is set to start offering hourly workers a bonus to stay: up to an extra $1,000 per year.
A 24-Hour Walmart?
Before the pandemic, many Walmarts essentially never closed, except, in some cases, for certain holidays. A Walmart that was open 24 hours per day was actually fairly normal, but then, retail restrictions forced many of those stores to close or at least curtail their hours. Throw in hiring difficulties and Walmart often didn’t have the people to staff such an operation. However, word emerged that suggested Walmart was looking to go back to an all-day-every-day operation. Walmart itself, meanwhile, denied the reports, noting that “There are no current plans to return our stores to 24 hours of operation.”
Is Walmart a Buy or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on WMT stock based on 24 Buys and four Holds assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 35.58% rally in its share price over the past year, the average WMT price target of $71 per share implies 6.32% upside potential.
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