If you don't care for math or don't quite feel like reading the whole thing, at least take a look at the last few sentences in bold for tl;dr
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I'm really struggling to determine how these figures were derived. Regardless of the method used (Mean,median,etc.) the numbers just don't add up. The bulk of Target's 350,000 workforce is comprised of team members because of Target's preference to have a high number of part-time employees rather than a lower number of full-time workers.
According to various
sources, when Target chose to lay off 1700 workers at the corporate level, they were laying off 13% of the corporate workforce. Simple math tells us that the original number was 13,000 (1700/.13=13,000) and 13,000-1700=11,700. So let's round up and say that that's 12,000 corporate employees remaining.
There are 28 distribution centers, I remember reading statistics stating that there were about 1000 employees per DC. I can't find those figures anymore so if anyone with more DC knowledge than myself could chime in that would be appreciated.
Anyway, if we assume that is correct and use the highest number possible, that's a total of 28,000 DC employees.
Moving along to ETLs and TLs. Since I no longer have access to official headcount information, I'm going to estimate total ETLs and TLs based on volume of sales. My estimate is that for every $7,000,000 in sales, 1ETL and 2TLs are present. Target's revenue for 2014 was $72,000,000,000. That divided by 7,000,000 gives you a value of approximately 10,500 which represents the estimated number of ETLs and 21,000 represents the estimated number of TLs.
Adding all those together (12,000+28,000+10,500+21,000) you get 71,500. Lets round up to 75,000 because I didn't account for positions like SFT, district management, etc.
Target's total employment is 366,000 which means the jobs at Target that actually have a chance to pay something represent little more than 20% of the workforce. Even if you vastly overestimate the average salary of a TM at $25,000/year and multiply it by the total number of TMs (291,000) you get 7,275,000,000
The article claims average salary at $33,500. That number multiplied by 366,000 gives you 12,261,000,000. Subtracting the TMs salaries leaves you with 5,000,000,000 between the remaining 75,000 for an average of $66,500 which seems reasonable enough right? But let's look at it a little closer.
Out of that 75,000; 21,000 are TLs. According to glassdoor, the average TL salary is listed at $15/hr give or take so let's round up to $32,000. Multiplied by the 21,000 TLs gives us total salaries of 672 million out of 5 billion. Suddenly, the remaining 54,000 non-tms have to make $80,000/yr to make these numbers work. Let's keep going.
10,500 are ETLs. Glassdoor's average is around $55K but to prove a point, I'm going to round up again to $60k. That number multiplied by 10,500 gives us 630 million. At this point, there are only 43,500 positions left unaccounted for and for the numbers to work, the salaries now must average $85,000/yr.
Let's press on.
It's difficult to estimate the annual salary of an average DC employee due to fluctuations of overtime, temp workers, etc. but let's say $50,000 (once again, I'm overestimating to prove my point) So that's 28,000*50,000 for a total of 1.4 billion. That leaves 2.3 billion in salaries to be claimed by 15,500 people for an average of $150k per person. Keep in mind, the bulk of this number includes low level corporate positions that pay between 40-60k. Less than 15% represents STLs DTLs etc. (people who actually make that much) In conclusion, the numbers don't work from a mean/average standpoint nor do they work from a median standpoint but I'll get into that in a moment. If the above was confusing, I've summarized the content in this handy chart:
Alleged Total 33,500*366,000=12,261,000,000
TMs 25,000*291,000=7,275,000,000
TLs 32,000*21,000=672,000,000
ETLs 60,000*10,500=630,000,000
DC 50,000*28,000=1,400,000,000
HQ+SFTs 75,000*13,000=975,000,000
Subtotal 363,500=10,952,000,000
Remainder 523,600*2,500=1,309,000,000
Total 366,000 12,261,000,000
I don't see 2500 people pulling in a half million a year in raw salary especially considering 70% of those are STLs earning in the 100-200k range. Keep in mind, top brass salaries are excluded from the article.
The median salary wouldn't seem to work either.
The median salary would essentially be the salary of the person right in the middle and since Target has 366,000 employees, that would be the 183,000th employee in terms of pay.
That person is most certainly going to be a TM or a low paid TL. Since there are an estimated 291,000 regular TMs at Target and 183/291=.6289, this person is going to be out-earning slightly more than half of all TMs at Target.
The hourly rate that yields $33,400/yr is $16.05.
This would be believable if Target were union or had some other form of rapid pay progression or an exceptionally low turnover rate... but in reality, none of these things are true.
A regular TM earning the 63rd percentile of all TMs is still likely to be within 10-20% of base pay due to Target's historically high turnover rate.
For the numbers to work, that would mean a starting wage of $14/hr which, sadly, is just not the case.
It's much more likely that this number is somewhere between $10 and $12
That being said the question still remains.... how in the hell did they come up with $33,400?
If you look in the article it states that they used glassdoor for wage information and used the median salaries provided.
Fair enough until you realize that basically all they did was take every wage submitted to glass door and take the one in the middle.
Think about it this way... Let's say 100 TMs submit their wages at a median of $9/hr and 101 ETLs submit their wages at a median of $55,000/yr. Let's say thats all the wages that were submitted (in reality there were over 15,000 but ain't nobody got time for that)
The total number of wages submitted is 201 which would make the median value the 101st wage. In this case, that is the lowest ETL salary and that's what Target's median wage would be in this scenario.
But what that's essentially saying is that in a store of 200 employees, 100 are TMs and 100 are ETLs which is, quite possibly, the stupidest way imaginable to arrive at a median value.
So high five USA TODAY! smdh