Amazon.com Inc Chief Executive Jeff Bezos on Thursday challenged retailers to hike their minimum wages to $16 an hour, prompting a comeback from Walmart Inc which asked its rivals to pay taxes.
Amazon.com Inc Chief Executive Jeff Bezos on Thursday challenged retailers to hike their minimum wages to $16 an hour, prompting a comeback from Walmart Inc which asked its rivals to pay taxes.
“Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage,” the billionaire entrepreneur said in a letter to shareholders.
“Do it! Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us.”
Some critics have said the hike was insufficient and note that Amazon paid zero US federal income tax on more than $11 billion in profits before taxes in 2018, and received a $129 million tax rebate from the federal government.
Walmart`s executive vice president of corporate affairs, Dan Bartlett, responded to Bezos by tweeting, “Hey retail competitors out there (you know who you are) how about paying your taxes?”
The two retailers, which are fierce rivals, rarely go after one another other publicly.
Amazon`s wage hike came as US unemployment was at a near two-decade low, with retailers and shippers competing for hundreds of thousands of workers for the all-important holiday shopping season.
Amazon`s third party sales in 2018 accounted for 58 percent of total sales, up from 56 percent in 2017, Bezos said.
Amazon has said that it pays all the required taxes in every country where it operates, including $2.6 billion in corporate tax and reporting $3.4 billion in tax expense over the last three years.