Walmart workers unhappy about new 'dress code'

Some Walmart (WMT) employees are not happy about a new mandatory “dress code” or the fact that workers have to pay for clothes to comply with that dress code out of their own pockets.
The “new look” calls for employees to wear a navy blue or a white polo shirt and khaki or black pants or skirts. It also requires the return of the Walmart vest, but the company will pay for that.
The new dress code and the employee backlash were first reported by Gawker.
At issue is whether the new rules about what employees can wear amount to a “uniform” or a “dress code.” The U.S. Department of Labor says companies must pay for a "uniform," but not clothes required to comply with a "dress code."

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From Walmart.com

So is it legal for Walmart to require its employees to pay for a polo shirt and pants of a certain color?
According to one legal expert, Walmart employees who are unhappy about having to pay up may have an uphill battle. Federal Advocacy Coordinator at the National Employment Law Project, Judy Conti, told The Guardian that what Walmart is doing is legal.
“When an employer selects clothing you could wear anywhere else, they are not required to pay for it,” Conti said. “Black or khaki pants – it doesn’t come more basic than that. White or navy blue shirt: now, maybe you don’t wear white or maybe you don’t wear navy, but I’ll bet you wear one of them.”
Heidi Moore of The Guardian tells Yahoo Finance she thinks Walmart is asking too much of employees who already make too little.
“It is pretty much an egregious issue… it’s a huge chunk of their take-home pay and Walmart employees have been complaining for years - and even staging protests and walk-outs – that they are not paid enough, that they’re not paid a living wage.”

Walmart says its average full-time hourly wage in the United States is $12.92. The company says employees are free to buy the clothes anywhere, however, Walmart also has extended an offer for employees to buy the clothes from Walmart for a 10% discount. If employees buy dress-code appropriate clothes (2 shirts and 2 pairs of pants) from the company's own website, that would add up to abour $48, after the company discount of 10%, which Moore says is "tiny" compared to other retailers' discounts.

"If you work at any other store, whether it’s Macy’s (M) or Club Monaco, Urban Outfitters, you get 50% discounts, sometimes 60% discounts, so it’s also pretty chintzy on that front,” she said.

Source : Yahoo Finance

How Small Choices Can Have a Big Impact On Your Money-AdviceIQ

I spend a lot of time helping people make financial choices, sometimes about business and sometimes about personal life. In both cases and in many more, breaking huge issues and questions into smaller choices makes problems much easier to manage. Big financial decisions, depending on your age, include getting married, buying a home, paying for college, securing enough insurance and retiring, to name just a few. Everything from nosy relatives to the latest market and international news pressures all of us to solidify these moves financially as soon as possible.

You can start with a financial plan, a written idea of big goals for your savings and when you want to hit those goals. Along the way, though, the problem arises when you try to decide too much too fast (in Great Britain, for example, some homebuyers ink a deal in as little as half an hour). People generally make most decisions under time pressure yet most decisions – let alone big financial ones – also take a lot of time, according to one study from the American Psychological Association.

Break big decisions into simple steps.

Stay away from sunk costs if you lack the time to recover

When you spend months and months planning something – a big purchase, a major investing initiative – you may have a hard time backing away. A sunk cost is one you already made and can’t get back, at least easily, so you feel committed. Most of the time you’ll need to retreat, if for no other reason than to reconsider once more. You never get back this planning time.
Better to start fast, move fast, change fast and stop fast. All of these are easier when changes are small and are almost impossible with big changes. Fail fast and fail cheap: Recover quickly from your missteps and move on.
Rarely does one of my ideas come out right the first time. I usually keep modifying and modifying – and then it’s still not right.
But the smaller the change I work on, the easier the change. If I spend days, weeks or months planning how to tinker with a major idea, that idea is going to be hard to change to fit evolving conditions, such as the stock market’s ups and downs.

Small choices are not complicated

Deciding what to do next when it’s a small choice is easy.
Keep questions about scrimping and saving for the future simple. Do you really need that top-of-the-line laptop or will a cheaper model do? How much can you save now?
After you get that raise at a plum new job, can you save more? What are the best investments for the next few years and how can you easily shift your retirement plan money to them?
Do you have lots of extra time for big projects? I bet no. But I bet you can always find time for a question that takes 15 or 20 minutes to answer. The small gets done easier than the big.

Yes or no becomes easier

Big projects come with big commitment if you say yes. If your choice involves a small matter, though, yes or no involves no big subsequent process. You also often get to start quicker – sometimes a big consideration in such aspects of financial plans as saving.

Small adds up to big

Cut a big project down to the smallest parts you can. Keep up with mortgage payments each month; open an individual retirement account; spend that half hour online not buying a house in the mountains, but Googling more sources of college financial aid.
When you string together a bunch of small projects, they become the big project: your mortgage paid off, your child’s tuition paid, your golden years spent in comfort. Communicate about finances with your spouse. Set your priorities. Create and, as time goes by, adjust your plan.
Make it small and make it easy.

Culled from cheatsheet

Richard Branson on Why Entrepreneurs Sometimes Struggle With Formal Education

Image credit: Richard Branson via Instagram

Q: I am an architect and a young entrepreneur. It’s fairly obvious that most of the world’s great entrepreneurs had issues with their early education. Why is this the case? -- Akosu Paul
This is a very good question, and one that I am often asked by students around the world as they weigh continuing their studies against starting up their own ventures and diving into the world of business. In addition, many also want to know how I was able to start my own career while I was a young student struggling with my schoolwork, and how I eventually got people to take me seriously as an entrepreneur.
Looking back, I believe that the qualities that make for a great entrepreneur -- such as boundless energy, a curious nature and, sometimes, an obstinate streak -- are not often attributes demonstrated by top students in the classroom. So it should not be very surprising that many of the world’s great entrepreneurs and business leaders had difficulties with formal education.
Often, their frustration in the classroom was a result of impatience: The greats were eager to get out and build their businesses, which pushed them to drop out of high school or forgo college in order to follow their dreams. For instance, Walt Disney famously dropped out of school at age 16 to found his animation company, while the great American tycoons of the late 19th century -- Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Thomas Edison -- had little or no formal education before they set out to seek their fortunes. Some entrepreneurs, including Carnegie and Henry Ford, the 20th century industrialist, came from impoverished backgrounds and did not have the support at home to start -- let alone complete -- their formal educations. Rather, they set up businesses to make ends meet and eventually flourished.
More recently, the retail entrepreneurs Philip Green and John Caudwell made their fortunes in the U.K. after leaving high school and building businesses at young ages. And in the tech industry, Steve Jobs of Apple, Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Inc., and Oracle’s Larry Ellison all dropped out of college to create their companies, and they all reaped the rewards of getting an early start.
One thing that entrepreneurs have in common is a talent for seeing things differently. This allows them to identify important gaps in markets or the need for new sectors to serve specific customer demands. But this ability often leads budding entrepreneurs to rebel against the conformity that is common in traditional education.
I was no exception, and I have written in previous columns that I was not great at school. I constantly pushed against rules and authority, and I liked to challenge the way that things were “always” done. My curiosity often got me into trouble with teachers.
But it was not just my attitude that was different -- I had dyslexia. When I was a young student, this learning disability was poorly researched and was often mistaken for laziness or a poor ability to learn. At school I was thought to be slow, and indeed I struggled to keep up. I initially channeled my youthful energy into sport, then after an injury, I got into early business ventures, which failed to take off.
But my learning disability has never been a setback -- it actually gave me a great advantage in business, since I have been able to bring a different perspective to problems and challenges, which often enables me to see solutions more clearly. For example, I have always hated jargon, and I am confused by long and wordy drafts of plans. So in Virgin’s early days, I would ask simple questions that others did not. Over the years, asking the simple questions and striving to answer them have become some of Virgin’s most important characteristics.
When I was a young student, my restlessness and curiosity prompted me to set up Student magazine when I was just 15. Running the magazine actually served as an entrepreneurial education - I learned to effectively build a team, sell advertising, create content and market a product. I was my own boss and never needed to ask permission to try new things, and if I got things wrong, I did not have to fear the wrath of a superior. After all, a willingness to try new things and fail is important to becoming an entrepreneur, yet making mistakes flies against the expectations of traditional schooling.
So in many ways, my education has been my career. For almost 50 years, Virgin’s varied collection of businesses and nonprofits means that I have studied and come to understand many sectors - aviation, banking, media, hospitality and the fitness industry, to name a few. More recently, my career has also given me interesting new perspectives on many significant issues such as climate change, conflict resolution and global health care.
In the end, solutions to big problems such as these won’t come from doing school reports, but by getting out there, asking questions, seeing things differently and finding the answers ourselves.

Culled from the Entrepreneur