I was thinking about this today.
Walmart is hurting for help.
The normal solution is to offer more pay.

But when the base pay is already near what the value of the work being done is, there's not much room for merit pay.

Let's say you have two people stocking shelves. One does a good job, quickly, another does a poor job, slowly. Stocking shelves is worth,ultimately, only so much money to the company, and requires a minimal skill level (for the sake of argument). When you have to pay a lot for *anyone* to stock the shelves, that doesn't leave much room in the profit margin to pay good stockers more than you pay mediocre stockers. And you can't only hire good stockers and fire the mediocre stockers, because you need the shelves stocked and a good stocker can still only do so much, and when you fire someone you have a ton over overhead expenses thanks to uncle Sam.

Further, and more to the point, let's say you have a job of stocking, and then a job of inventory control. The latter may be worth a little more to the company than the former, but because the base pay of the former is so high, again you're hemmed in between what you have to pay *anyone*, and what the inventory control is worth to the company's bottom line.

When the minimum you have to pay any warm body is high, that leaves less room for you to offer people to enter at higher skill levels, or to move up the skill ladder on merit.

And as you can only raise prices so high, with every drone making a certain amount,that leaves limited room to reward industry and/or skill.

Yesterday,we had a nasty snow/sleet/ice storm. Our store was forced to send two people to another store. We had 22 people call-in, unable (read: unwilling) to come in to our store; we still were forced by corporate to send two people to that other store (they're doing inventory) even though they only had 12 call-in. (Total call-ins for our store over the 3-shift period was 62 people).

When you're paying so much out as a minimum, you don't have any margin to bribe people to come in on a nasty day, for example.

Predictably, the minimum wage rewards unskilled and/or non-productive people, and harms the skilled and/or productive, discourages ambition, and increases companies' overheads.