Also it seems that $9.00 / hour still isn't enough if you were to listen to associates now.

Which is true because it's not enough.

Granted, the still high turn-over rates wouldn't be as bad if Walmart did a lot more to treat their employee's right and earnestly attempted to make them happy, which pay is only truly one portion of the equation there.

Aside from pay, part of the problem here is that Walmart is attempting to make their employees happier, not happy. They're too much of an 'old' profiting business to ever see the sense in doing otherwise.

But going back to wages, wage has stagnated at this level of employment. Walmart is paying people what the minimum wage should be at the very least, which is the only reason why they're doing it because otherwise there would be no reason to do it, which is really saying something.

My view here is that if Walmart can afford such a drastic wage increase over the federal minimum wage, which required convincing their primary shareholders to allow it, then it's fairly believable that they could afford to pay people quite a bit more than that and still be perfectly fine. I can see where people are coming from with the idea for $15/hour minimum wage, though I think something closer to $12/hour would be more realistic.

But even people who are making $12/hour are still scratching by. They at least have something built up for themselves, as small as it may be, but they still struggle quite a bit to have a normal life by US standards. From there, imagining pay lower than that and you get a better idea of how crap the federal minimum wage is and how Walmart isn't really doing a 'good thing' here so much as they're doing what is necessary to continue to succeed in a world that is turning against them and their wrong ways of treating people. But Society doesn't want to listen, though. They think of it as 'more pay means more cost, which is bad for me personally', but in reality that's not how economics work. The more people make, the more they spend, up until about $70k/year where it starts to drop off. It's healthy for the economy as it benefits, in many ways both direct and indirect, everyone aside from the absolute wealthiest. It is no surprise that the middle class is shrinking while the lower and upper classes are growing. The money is going somewhere.

Walmart shouldn't exist, but because of apathy they do. People do not care. It's as simple as that. If most people worked at Walmart, then they would care and things would change for the better for everyone, but they don't. That is why government exists. Unfortunately they're just as shit at their jobs as we are at ours.