Less Celine, More Work

Cleanup on aisle seven.

Walmart knows what its employees really want:

Earlier this year, the discount chain announced higher starting wages for hundreds of thousands of workers — costing an extra $1 billion annually — in effort to improve customer service. The idea is to encourage workers to think more about a long-term career with the company.

On Wednesday, at a meeting with 3,000 store employees in Fayetteville, AK, top U.S. Walmart execs announced new strategies to make employees happy including new cash incentives and a looser dress code. But one strategy that elicited a particularly loud ovation from the crowd: An end to the constant loop of Celine Dion and Justin Bieber music blasted into stores from headquarters.

I was working the morning drive at a Top 40 station when Dion had a monster hit with “Beauty And The Beast,” which we were required to play approximately every 12 seconds. It’s not that the song actually made me wished I were dead, but if there’s a worse reason to have to get out of bed at 4:30 in the morning, it probably involves an urgent need to score some heroin.

Walmart has done its employees — nay, the world! — an immense favor.