Is Walmart that mazy? My impression is that stores that are better of a big chain are generally better run than single location mom & pop stores. Which doesn’t mean that a huge chain like Walmart is completely free of maze-style dynamics, but does imply that the big management structure is doing more to make the stores functional than to make the dysfunctional.
Being organized into a bunch of separate stores seems like it could help fight off maziness, since it means that there’s a local reality (at their particular store) which most employees are in some contact with. It also creates some buffer from whatever culture develops among the higher layers of management above the levels of individual stores. Also, I’d expect Walmart to have a lot of metrics that are pretty good & concrete, and don’t tend towards much of the Goodhart stuff you’d worry about.
Yeah. I guess I didn’t state explicitly but meant it to be implied: this is just meant as a first-pass approximation to get even remotely oriented in the space. Obviously it’d require followup work of “okay but what specifically makes things mazey?” to sus out more concrete claims.
(this is after dealing with things like “it’s not even clear where these numbers are coming from, whether they’re double-counting, etc)
Is Walmart that mazy? My impression is that stores that are better of a big chain are generally better run than single location mom & pop stores. Which doesn’t mean that a huge chain like Walmart is completely free of maze-style dynamics, but does imply that the big management structure is doing more to make the stores functional than to make the dysfunctional.
Being organized into a bunch of separate stores seems like it could help fight off maziness, since it means that there’s a local reality (at their particular store) which most employees are in some contact with. It also creates some buffer from whatever culture develops among the higher layers of management above the levels of individual stores. Also, I’d expect Walmart to have a lot of metrics that are pretty good & concrete, and don’t tend towards much of the Goodhart stuff you’d worry about.
Yeah. I guess I didn’t state explicitly but meant it to be implied: this is just meant as a first-pass approximation to get even remotely oriented in the space. Obviously it’d require followup work of “okay but what specifically makes things mazey?” to sus out more concrete claims.
(this is after dealing with things like “it’s not even clear where these numbers are coming from, whether they’re double-counting, etc)