At a job fair this week on Chicago's South Side, CBS 2's Dorothy Tucker talked to a former Walmart employee, Shaneka Aranda, who said that "Cashiers are coming in making $8.00, maybe $7.75."  In an attempt to reconcile those numbers with Walmart's claim of an $11.30 average wage, Tucker asked some Walmart representatives for more information on starting wages at the mega-retailer.  But they were "unwilling to say."

Local activists fighting to institute a living wage for big box retailers have long argued that the average wage figures provided by Walmart are inflated by management salaries and don't reflect the reality for most hourly workers (who are far more likely than employees of similar retailers to find themselves in financial peril).  When the company refuses to talk about its entry-level wages, they only fuel such suspicions.