Walmart To Pay Truckers $110,000 A Year, More Than Double Average College Grad Salary

Walmart is raising the starting salary for in-house truck drivers to as much as $110,000 a year and no lower than $95,000, up from an average starting salary of $87,000.

Walmart plans to focus more on its in-house delivery service to scale back reliance on third-party deliveries.

A Walmart spokesperson says the company has also granted pay raises to its current drivers. The company employs around 12,000 truck drivers, 7,000 of whom Walmart hired in the past two years.

Walmart will also give several lower-paid staffers the option to get in the trucks with a newly launched internal training program. In just 12 weeks, a Walmart cashier can hop in the truck and make six figures.

For context, Walmart drivers make more than the average college graduate with a four-year degree. College graduates start out with an average salary of $55,260. Walmart truckers make double that, without the debt and wasted hours in the classroom with a nutty professor.

Society sells college as a must. It's a hustle. For some students, like those who enroll in STEM programs, college is ideal. Then there are the others who spend $100,000 in tuition for some useless degree and make far less than truckers, plumbers and welders do.

I spoke to Tucker Carlson about this topic last year. Here's what he said:

There is this idea that college improves your worth. Where is the evidence of that? I'm sure that hard sciences do. If you're an engineer or you are in medical school, you would learn discrete information, actual facts that you can use and that you need to know in order to join the profession that you want to join. But for kids like me who go in for liberal arts education, I believe it diminishes you.

I pushed for all four of my children not to go to college, all four. Think about that. My fourth is about to enter college now. I said to all four of them: "Please, don't do this." I told them, "I'll take the money we're gonna spend in college — we were blessed to have, we saved money for them — and figure out something more interesting to do with this." But, to my shame, all of them went. And they're independent, smart, and freethinkers. But the pressure, the social pressure to conform and take this path — which is so clearly a dead end for so many kids — it terrifies me.

I'm not even factoring in drug addiction, alcoholism, and chlamydia. Do you know what I mean? There are all the other costs of college before even the financial cost. There's the spiritual cost. Are you more secure? Are you more curious? Are you braver? Are you better educated than you were when you entered? And for most people, of course, the answer is no. So, why are we doing this?

I think everyone should opt out, except people with very specific goals. I don't believe in the system at all. Again, just to restate how much I don't believe it: my own children, the most important thing in my life, I counseled them all to skip it. That's how I feel.

Unlike jobs in tech or media or education, blue-collar companies don't care about your political leanings. You can support Donald Trump and oppose the sexual indoctrination of young children and still drive a truck.

Trucking companies don't promote and demote you based on your skin color either. Those jobs do still exist.

Further, blue-collar workers are in-demand. All over, companies are in search of truckers, construction workers and furnace installers.

"We have 7.3 million open jobs right now, most of which don't require a four-year degree," Mike Rowe told Fox Business. "They require training, they require skill and they require a willingness to master a trade that's in demand."

There's a shortage of skilled laborers in the country. If you learn a trade, you will have options immediately and prosper faster than that gender studies major with a strong Twitter following.

Truck driving jobs are not going away. Rather, they'll increase as Americans rely more on online shopping.

Truckers showed their worth earlier this year during the Freedom Convoy in Canada. Estimates say that the week-long blockade along the Ambassador Bridge -- which connects Detroit to Windsor, Ontario —could ultimately cost the US and Canadian economies $1 billion. No wonder our rulers fear the truckers.

Trucking work matters. All trucking matters. That includes the now well-paid, honking Walmart drivers.