Fueling Optimism and Community Wellness With Business One Cup at Time

I was born square in the middle of the massive, confusing, buzz-worthy generation known as the Millennials. Although I hate to put myself into that giant box, I recognize that I fit many stereotypes of my generation: I graduated with student debt in the middle of an economic crisis, the United States has been at war for more than half of my life, and most of my peers live paycheck to paycheck. Millennials get a bad rap for many traits that I unfortunately can't exclude myself from, but the characteristic I most like to identify with is my unwavering Millennial optimism for the future. Despite the challenges I faced as I entered the workforce, I have chosen a career that gives me purpose as well as success. My expanding role over the past four years at The Tea Spot, a certified B Corporation, has helped to fuel my hopeful approach to life and has shaped my career not only as a driven woman, but also as a force for good in the world.

I'll be honest; before I started working for The Tea Spot - an innovative tea and teaware company with a robust philanthropic arm - I didn't know what a B Corp was. I got the job through a friend of a friend and I was mostly grateful that I could use my degree for something other than waiting tables. It didn't take long, however, to realize that this small but mighty company was about more than just serving up a delicious cuppa. Founded in 2004, The Tea Spot actively supports the wellness of our community, our employees, and our customers by donating 10% of all sales in-kind to cancer wellness and community programs. This 10% Pledge was put into action by founder and cancer survivor Maria Uspenski, but our mission of promoting health and wellness with our product is embraced fully by every member of our team. This generosity isn't a marketing ploy; it's our way of putting our money where our mouth is - literally, one healthy mouthful of tea at a time.

For The Tea Spot, becoming a certified B Corp in 2011 was a way to have a third party formally quantify our donation efforts, but as we grow into a larger company, our certification means much more than just our 10% Pledge. We strive to constantly be a positive link in the tea supply chain by always sourcing high quality ingredients and materials, and we aim to make our tea blends as delicious as possible so that the enjoyment and health benefits of tea can be spread far and wide. We've made a concerted effort to substantially expand our organic line in recent years not only to keep up with growing demand, but also to help reduce our impact on the environment. As we continue to grow, we look to the example set forth by other B Corps to guide us and help us shape an employee culture that encourages lasting and fulfilling jobs for each member of our workforce. These efforts aren't just to make ourselves feel good. Every year we are contacted by hundreds of people who thank us for sharing our story and products, and who share their own tale of survival and wellness. These personal stories fuel us through every extra hour we put in at work and every extra effort we make to lift those around us.

It's easy to get overwhelmed by the problems that our world faces: climate change, poverty, disease, and warfare. By taking small steps as a company, The Tea Spot is part of a fast-growing movement to expand the definition of good business, and a group that is poised to make large changes in the world. Now present in 50 countries, B Corporations have become more than a few small businesses taking small steps. This attitude of collective change-making is what drew me into The Tea Spot, and it's what encourages The Tea Spot to continue to shine within this community. Whether the B Corp movement mirrors the millennial attitude or vice versa, this enthusiastic community of like-minded individuals and businesses encourage us to believe that it is possible to have it all: a thriving career, a profitable passion, and the ability to use business as a positive influence in the world. For The Tea Spot, our philanthropy and sustainability efforts aren't just an important part of our roots, it's a vital part of our decision-making process and the driving force that gives our work purpose.

The B Corp Life is a new blog series geared towards exploring what it's like to work at a benefit corporation. Why do b corps matter, and what does the future hold for them? Let us know at PurposePlusProfit@huffingtonpost.com or by tweeting with #TheBCorpLife.

Why Actively Promoting Happiness At Work May Not Be The Best Idea

Should we be actively promoting happiness in the workplace? My immediate thoughts are: “Happy workers are more productive workers.” Consequently, promoting happiness seems like a no-brainer, right?

After all, there are studies that provide strong evidence for this. For instance, Economists at Warwick University found that happiness led to a spark in productivity by 12 percent. Another study mentions several benefits: increased employee retention, improved customer satisfaction, and a higher likelihood that employees will engage in citizenship behavior.

Much of the research then is in favor of actively promoting happiness, not only for improved productivity but for a host of other benefits. And this is why it has gained much prominence among organizations:

“... happiness as a way to boost productivity seems to have gained increased traction in corporate circles as of late.”-Andrew Spicer and Carl Cederström, Harvard Business Review

As a result, Google (and other large organizations) has invested more in employee support and job satisfaction has risen by 37 percent. Companies now have happiness coaches, they engage in team building exercises and Google even has a Chief Happiness Officer.

However, there is a growing body of research which provides contradictory evidence, emphasizing the downside of doing so. This is highlighted by Spicer and Cederström who mention that “we also discovered alternate findings, which indicate that some of the taken for granted wisdom about what happiness can achieve in the workplace are mere myths”. Let’s have a look at the alternative findings.

Happiness doesn’t always lead to increased productivity

There are several studies that contradict the notion that happiness leads to increased productivity, with one study on British Supermarkets even suggesting a negative correlation between the two: Companies with higher profits had unhappy employees. And even for studies in support of this, a fairly weak correlation exists.

The paradoxical effects of valuing happiness

A psychological experiment highlights the paradoxical effects of actually valuing happiness or rephrased: by focusing on happiness, we actually become unhappy.

In the study, subjects were asked to watch a film that would make them happy. Before watching the film, one half were required to read a statement about the importance of happiness. The results were that they demonstrated lower levels of happiness after the film. But why?

In the modern world, we seem to focus on happiness as a moral obligation. The pursuit thereof has become a duty and failing to complete this duty makes us even more unhappy. According to the French Philosopher, Pascal Bruckner, we would be happier, if we just simply abandoned this mad pursuit of happiness:

“By the duty to be happy, I thus refer to the ideology... that urges us to evaluate everything in terms of pleasure and displeasure...on the one hand, we have to make the most of our lives; on the other, we have to be sorry and punish ourselves if we don’t succeed in doing so. This is a perversion of a very beautiful idea: that everyone has a right to control his own destiny and to improve his life.”

Happiness may not be good for all aspects of work

Today, both customer and non-customer facing employees are required to be happy. But happiness can also negatively affect our performance at work.

One study highlighted that people who were in a good mood were far worse at identifying acts of deception than those who were in a bad mood. A second study demonstrated that angry people achieve better outcomes during a negotiation than happy people.

Happiness can damage relationships with your boss, family, and friends

According to Susanne Ekmann, by expecting work to make us happy, we can become emotionally needy ― where we depend on our managers to provide us with recognition and reassurance. When we don’t receive the desired emotional response from employers we overreact as we see it as evidence of rejection; making us emotionally vulnerable.

In a book, by Eva Illouz, titled Cold Intimacies, it was found that those seeking emotional comfort at work started to treat their private lives as work tasks. The results were that family life became increasingly cold. This, in turn, pushed people to want to spend an even more unhealthy amount of time at work.

Seeking happiness at work can make losing your job even more devastating

Expecting happiness to come from work creates a dangerous dependence on it, to the extent that losing our job can feel like losing a promise of happiness. Spicer and Cedeström elaborate on this in referencing a book by Richard Sennet, titled, The Corrosion of Character The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism:

“Richard Sennet noticed that people who saw their employer as an important source of personal meaning were those who became most devastated if they were fired. When these people lost their jobs, they were not just losing an income – they were losing the promise of happiness. This suggests that, when we see our work as a great source of happiness, we make ourselves emotionally vulnerable during periods of change. In an era of constant corporate restructuring, this can be dangerous.”

Happiness can make you a selfish bastard

In one piece of research, participants were given lottery tickets and told that they could give away and/or keep as many tickets as they wanted. Those in a good mood kept more tickets to themselves. How’s that for generosity?

It can damage personal connections and make you lonely

This is demonstrated in an experiment, titled “The Pursuit of Happiness Can Be Lonely” where psychologists asked participants to keep a detailed diary for two weeks. Those greatly valuing happiness felt increasingly disconnected and lonelier afterward.

Despite all the above contradictory evidence, we continue to promote it, but why?

Cedeström and Spicer reference one study that says it comes down to aesthetics and ideology; where aesthetically it’s a convenient idea on paper and ideologically it allows us to avoid more serious issues at work. They say:

“... we can sweep more uncomfortable questions under the carpet, especially since happiness is often seen as a choice. It becomes a convenient way of dealing with negative attitudes, party poopers, miserable bastards, and other unwanted characters in corporate life.”

So where to from here?

There are clear downsides to actively promoting happiness in the workplace. Not only is the link between happiness and productivity questionable, but it can actually make us unhappy, damage our workplace and family relationships, affect aspects of our work, make losing our jobs even more devastating and even make us selfish and lonely.

With the evidence mounting up, it is clear that organizations need to rethink the idea of actively promoting it and people also need to rethink their expectations. To end off, no one could have said it more aptly than Cedeström and Spicer:

“Happiness, of course, is a great thing to experience, but nothing that can be willed into existence. And maybe the less we seek to actively pursue happiness through our jobs, the more likely we will be to actually experience a sense of joy in them — a joy which is spontaneous and pleasurable, and not constructed and oppressive. But most importantly, we will be better equipped to cope with work in a sober manner. To see it for what it is. And not as we — whether executives, employees or dancing motivational seminar leaders — pretend that it is.”

What To Do During The Next Airline Computer Meltdown

Catastrophic computer outages that paralyze an entire airline are few and far between. Except this summer.

Last month, Southwest Airlines canceled 2,300 flights after a router in one of its data centers failed, delaying hundreds of thousands of passengers. And last week, Delta Air Lines suffered a massive computer outage, which triggered the cancellation of 451 flights in a single morning.

A rare look behind the curtain at Southwest’s meltdown offers several important customer-service lessons for passengers who experience similar delays in the future. And in an industry that depends on finicky information systems, these incidents are bound to repeat themselves. They’ve left customers wondering how to avoid getting stuck in another IT collapse, and what, if anything, an airline can do to make up for such an event.

Related: Frequently asked questions about air travel.

Jack Russell, who was scheduled to fly from St. Louis to Las Vegas last month, had a front-row seat for Southwest’s IT issues, which an employee euphemistically blamed on a “software problem.” The airline’s proposed fix: Fly him to Vegas four days later.

As the executive vice president of a software company in St. Louis, Russell knows a thing or two about computers that go on the blink. But he’s less understanding about Southwest’s IT implosion, which he says left him with little choice but to pay an extra $1,800 to reach his destination.

“I spent twice as much money as I thought I would to get to Las Vegas,” Russell says. “If my customers had an outage created by my company and I said, ‘Sorry, it was a freak occurrence,’ they would be waiting at my doorstep with their lawyer.”

The Southwest systems problem suggests how fragile even the best-run airlines can be. It started in the early afternoon of July 20, when one of its small Cisco routers, out of about 2,000 such pieces of hardware that direct the airline’s network traffic, failed.

This router broke in an unusual way. Instead of registering the error, which would have allowed network administrators in Southwest’s Dallas data center to take it offline immediately and replace it with a working router, it behaved as if it was still operating normally. Only, it wasn’t directing any traffic.

Although network administrators spotted the error within half an hour, enough traffic had backed up that critical systems needed to be rebooted — a process that took a full 12 hours and affected critical functions, including the airline’s website, its smartphone app and several internal systems used by Southwest employees to handle reservations. It was as if someone had turned off the lights for half a day.

When the systems flickered back to life, the problems continued. The airline still didn’t have enough information to restart all flights. Because its systems had been down for so long, it couldn’t be sure whether some of its crews had taken enough rest, as required by the Federal Aviation Administration. That forced Southwest to cancel more flights on July 21 and 22.

Brandwatch, a social-tracking service, charted a corresponding tsunami of anger on Southwest’s social media channels. The airline drew 36,905 mentions in a single day on July 21, an almost 20-fold increase from normal levels.

“The spike in incoming volume that this received was incredible,” says Joshua March, the chief executive of Conversocial, which offers customer-service software to travel companies. “But the really significant piece in this instance was the inability to effectively scale the response.”

Southwest had no script for handling an event of this magnitude.

“It was really rough,” says Robert Jordan, the airline’s executive vice president and chief commercial officer, who describes the IT catastrophe as a “thousand-year flood.” The airline sent 50-percent-off vouchers to passengers affected by the outage, and in some cases paid for them to fly to their destinations on other airlines. All told, he says Southwest spent “tens of millions of dollars” trying to make amends.

“We know we messed up,” he adds. “We know we have to work really hard to regain our passengers’ trust.”

Southwest is still cleaning up. Russell’s delayed flight to Las Vegas is among the thousands of cases still being processed. Under most circumstances, a full refund for a replacement flight would be a tall order, but these are not normal circumstances.

IT disasters of this scale are unusual. Back in 2012, United Airlines experienced several days of delayed flights and sluggish customer service as it struggled to integrate the IT systems of United and Continental Airlines. Last July, United also suffered an outage that made it cancel hundreds of flights after a network router stopped working.

Asked if passengers could have done anything to get to their destinations faster during such a systems collapse, Jordan paused. So many things went wrong during the event that the normal tricks didn’t work. You couldn’t fall back on calling the airline because even the call-center employees didn’t have access to their IT systems.

“There just isn’t a good answer,” he says.

That’s the consensus of the customer service experts, too.

Elaine Allison, a former flight attendant and on-board service manager who now offers training courses in customer service, says passengers are powerless to negotiate their way around a total systems failure. She happened to be in Las Vegas during the week of Southwest’s outage, but was lucky enough to be flying on another airline.

“Pack at least one day of clothing and small amenities, plus all medications, in a carry-on, in the event luggage is checked and immediately not retrievable,” she says. Russell handled the situation correctly by re-booking his flight on another airline, she says. Southwest must refund a ticket when it cancels a flight.

The trick, says customer service expert Teri Yanovitch, is to look forward and not back. Southwest needs to figure out how to say it’s sorry without losing its shirt, and customers need a game plan should they get caught in a future systems failure.

“Southwest needs to explain the situation and how Southwest will prevent it from happening again,” she says. “As a customer, the best you can do when all critical IT systems are down is to keep calm, don’t take it out on the employee — it is not their fault — and consider your options for alternate transportation based on the situation.”

Research suggests that Southwest can make a full recovery, Yanovitch says. When a recovery is handled correctly, 96 percent of the customers will return. And when it’s not? In 2012, when United Airlines suffered its first meltdown, it was the world’s largest airline. Today, it’s No. 3.

After you’ve left a comment here, let’s continue the discussion on my consumer advocacy site or on Twitter, Facebook and Google. I also have a newsletter and you’ll definitely want to order my new, amazingly helpful and subversive book called How to Be the World’s Smartest Traveler (and Save Time, Money, and Hassle).

Sponsorship: Evolution in Leadership Calls for Innovation in Thinking

You are cruising along in a stellar career.

You've worked in the same division of your current organization for 15 years, exceeding expectations, moving up the ladder, and taking copious notes on the successful habits of those above you.

All signs point to an eventual appointment to a leadership position. It might be two years. It might be five. But you're confident you're doing everything in your power to eventually lead the organization you've helped shape.

Then one day you get a phone call.

"How would you feel about a two-year deployment in Japan? You'd be doing something completely different, and you'd be filling a gap in your skillset. I know you have your heart set on a leadership role, and I think this deployment could not only help with that goal, but open up the door for other senior leader roles. It's a big challenge, but I think you'd be great!"

This is the kind of call you'd receive from a sponsor.

A sponsor is typically a senior leader or influential individual who identifies strong performers, guides them on their career path, and advocates on their behalf for leadership positions across the enterprise. Sponsorship generally drives positive career outcomes and provides needed support for individuals throughout their various career stages. However, sponsorship alone cannot provide the range of diverse mentoring needs or functions that an individual will need throughout his or her career.

Sponsors are important to the success of organizations like Deloitte LLP and are integral to the career development of students at universities such as the University of Pittsburgh as they prepare to become future business leaders.

Sponsorship is an attractive human resources tool for organizations in need of different kinds of leaders--especially diverse leaders. A meaningful sponsorship can foster an appreciation for the diversity of thought, skills, and experiences that are critical for individual leadership development. It can also expand the pool of qualified leadership candidates because it takes a more horizontal approach to finding leadership candidates, something which is vital for organizational effectiveness.

Our research shows that there is great demand for formal sponsorship programs. Part of the issue is that the traditional vertical pipeline of talent management in organizations often cannot keep pace with the demand for cultivating leaders who can lead diverse teams and collaborate across networks.

In Deloitte's Global Human Capital Trends 2016 report, which generated more than 7,000 responses from business executives in 130 countries, 89 percent of respondents rated the need to strengthen, reengineer, and improve organizational leadership as an important priority. More than half of surveyed executives said their organizations are not ready to meet leadership needs. And only 7 percent said they have accelerated leadership programs for millennials.

Formal sponsorship programs can be an answer to these issues. The forthcoming book, "Mentoring Diverse Leaders: Creating Change for People, Processes, and Paradigms," reviewed the substantial body of research and best practices on effective mentoring strategies that drive success and support leadership development within global organizations. The authors found it imperative that organizations redefine sponsorship as a tool for cultivating diverse leaders, and they explored the idea of peer networks as a powerful and untapped source of sponsorship, support and influence.

We believe sponsorship programs and achieving organizational diversity go hand-in-hand. For example, early in his career, Mike established a process to find candidates for key positions in Deloitte Consulting LLP. For each position, he asked his team for four names: one considered vertical or "next in line"; one considered horizontal, or outside of the division of the open position; one minority; and one female. He found that this approach forced a different conversation about succession. Its impact was twofold: the pool of candidates widened, and the diversity of thought and experience increased. Both factors were important in creating effective leadership more quickly. Likewise, the sponsorship that was offered by knowledgeable, supportive and influential peers was critical to the success that Audrey has experienced throughout her career.

We talk with many executives and senior-level alumni in the marketplace. They often agree that a more diverse organization typically attracts high-performing talent and leads to better performance. A recent study reinforced the notion that inclusion can improve business performance and drive innovation, customer service, collaboration, and engagement and that mentoring has a positive impact on diversity initiatives.

Sponsorship can lead professionals to situations and places outside of their comfort zone--maybe even Japan. The experiences and skills transmitted via meaningful sponsorship should assist in setting their organizations and themselves up for future success.

We're Spending Less On Health Care Than We Thought We Would Before Obamacare

WASHINGTON -- Twenty million or so more people have health insurance now than they did before Obamacare, and yet the American health care system is on track to spend $2.6 trillion less from 2014 to 2019 than before the Affordable Care Act became law.

That's right -- $2.6 trillion, which is equivalent to about 15 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. That's the conclusion researchers at the Urban Institute came to when comparing health care spending projections made in 2010 before Congress passed the ACA, and projections made later that year after President Barack Obama enacted the statute, with more recent findings.

In other words, more Americans have health coverage and greater access to medical care -- and they're getting it -- but the country as a whole is spending less money than expected, and will continue doing so for at least the next several years.

Prior to the ACA, the actuaries predicted U.S. health expenditures would total $23.2 trillion between 2014 and 2019. After Obamacare became law, the office revised that projection to $23.7 trillion, reflecting the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to pay for the Affordable Care Act's expansion of government-subsidized health coverage. Last year, the actuaries further revised the total to $21.1 trillion. 

The Urban Institute

This chart shows projections for how much the U.S. spends on health care. The top line is what government auditors predicted after the Affordable Care Act became law. The middle line is their projection from before then. And the bottom line is their new estimate.

The Urban Institute report, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, uses data from the Office of the Actuary, an independent auditor within the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The actuaries are responsible every year for reporting the total amount that American businesses, the government and households spend on health care. They're also in charge of projecting how that spending will change in the future.

To be clear, the Office of the Actuary has always been extremely reluctant to attribute much, if any, of this trend to the cost-containment provisions of the Affordable Care Act, apart from the funding cuts for hospitals and other medical providers. And the Urban Institute authors don't go that far, either.

At a minimum, however, a combination of factors has resulted in a moment when the uninsured rate has reached a historic low even as the amount the nation spends on health care is turning out to be much lower than anticipated.

Whatever the cause, this country actually is making headway on a problem that's widely considered to be the biggest economic and fiscal challenge of our time.

And as the Urban Institute report notes, the Congressional Budget Office has similarly re-evaluated the Affordable Care Act's spending and also predicted that it will be less costly than originally estimated.

So what's happened since 2010?

The biggest factor is the economy itself. The damage wrought by the Great Recession squeezed down health care spending as people lost their jobs, incomes and health insurance, and subsequently had less access to care. The slow recovery in the years following the recession kept spending from quickly rebounding.

This is consistent with the pattern seen during previous economic downturns, which is why the Medicare actuaries continue to point to larger economic factors as the main cause for the slowdown in health care expenditure growth in recent years.

But historical patterns don't quite account for the fact that growth hasn't reverted to the levels before Obamacare and before the Great Recession, when annual increases could reach into the double digits, even though health care inflation has started to increase again. Instead, spending is expected to rise by about 5 or 6 percent a year from 2014 to 2019, a bit faster than the roughly 4 percent annual increase from 2010 to 2014.

And the relatively higher spending seen since 2014 doesn't represent out-of-control costs so much as it does the simple fact that more people are in the system.

Although the Urban Institute researchers stop short of crediting the ACA with the seeming shift in the health care spending trend, they do note that if the Medicare actuaries and the CBO are wrong, and if Obamacare's cost-cutting initiatives are working as Congress intended, the overall numbers could wind up smaller still.

"Even the current CMS forecast could prove too high," the report concludes. "If current CMS projections do not fully reflect this pattern, spending projections will continue to fall and it will become harder not to attribute at least some of the sustained cost containment to the ACA."

Jonathan Cohn contributed to this story.

Gun Stocks Are Up Sharply. You Know Why.

Gun stocks trended sharply higher Monday morning, a day after the deadliest mass shooting in American history killed 49 people and wounded 53 more at a gay nightclub in Orlando. 

Given the increased frequency of these types of attacks, at this point, the sad correlation between mass shootings and gun manufacturers' stock prices surprises no one -- not even the gun manufacturers themselves.

Bloomberg via Getty Images

AR-15 rifles are displayed at the NRA annual meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, on May 20, 2016. On Sunday, a shooter in Orlando used an AR-15 to kill 49 and wound 53 more.

In a letter to shareholders early last month, Sturm, Ruger & Co. CEO Michael Fifer noted a "significant spike in demand" that "was strongly correlated to the tragic, terrorist events in Paris and San Bernardino."

A shooting early last December at a social services center in San Bernardino, California, left 14 dead and 21 wounded. A month earlier, terrorists in Paris killed 130 people and injured hundreds in coordinated attacks.

"[In the past decade] there have been some significant ups and downs in demand, as political rhetoric and threats have spurred demand above the underlying normal rate of demand," Fifer wrote. "These spikes in demand have been followed by periods when demand retreated as the threats to gun rights failed to materialize to the degree that caused the spike in the first place."

True to form, in trading Monday, Sturm, Ruger & Co. was up 8.6 percent:

Google Finance

Smith & Wesson also jumped in early trading, opening up 10 percent before relinquishing some of the gains as the day continued:

Google Finance

"The No. 1 driver of firearms sales is fear," Brian Ruttenbur, an analyst at BB&T Capital Markets, told Bloomberg in December, after the San Bernardino shooting. “Primarily, fear of registration restrictions, banning and things like that.”

Ruttenbur added that people may also fear for their personal safety.

Apparently that fear has become a dominant force. There are more guns in America than there are Americans.

Fundraising Websites - Crowdrise

Here's What It Would Cost Walmart To Raise Wages To $15 An Hour

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Wal-Mart Stores Inc <WMT.N> would have to spend an additional $4.95 billion if it were to raise the minimum wage for its hourly employees in the United States to $15 per hour from the current $10 per hour, according to an estimate by the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research.

As the country's largest private employer, Wal-Mart employs nearly 1.5 million people in the United States. Of that, 1.1 million are hourly employees, according to the study. The study estimated that 979,000 employees would get an increase if Wal-Mart went to $15 per hour.

The world's largest retailer raised wages for its hourly workers to $10 per hour earlier this year, but labor groups have called the raise inadequate. They have been demanding a $15 minimum wage, and the "Fight for Fifteen" movement has been a topic of discussion during the U.S. presidential campaign.

The research was released last week and has so far not been reported widely by the media. It was conducted at the request of OUR Wal-Mart, a union-backed group.

A $15 per hour minimum wage would mean an annual hike of $4,006 for part-time employees and $5,836 for full-time employees, the study showed.

The study used government data and worker surveys rather than internal numbers provided by Wal-Mart. The study used the $10 increase in hourly wages at the start of the year as a baseline and simulated that to calculate the results for $15 an hour.

Wal-Mart spokesman Kory Lundberg declined to comment on the wage estimates. He said the retailer is investing $2.7 billion over two years in training, education and higher wages.

In the year ended Jan 31, 2016 the retailer generated $482.13 billion in revenue and posted net income of $14.69 billion.

In an online opinion piece on the study, Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project said, "Wal-Mart can easily afford the $15 minimum wage", based on the retailer's annual earnings.

"An employee working 34 hours per week at $10 per hour still earns less than $18,000 per year and cannot meet her family's basic needs on Wal-Mart's wages alone, even in states with low costs of living," she said.

(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Chicago; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)