It’s been nearly a year since a grinning Doug McMillon recorded a video message to the world in which he explained that WalMart (WMT) was set to raise the minimum wage for its lowest paid employees.

After all, McMillon said, “it’s our people that make the difference.”

Eleven  months later, those “people” (the lowly shelf stockers and cashiers) aren’t materially better off than they were before, because handing someone $10/hour instead of $9 is such a small concession that you might as well have done nothing. In other words, $10 is no more of a “living wage” than $9 is.

But while the impact on the retailer’s legions of hourly employees has been minimal, the consequences for the company have been nothing short of dramatic.

As we’ve explained on any number of occasions, you can’t very well just implement an across-the-board wage hike if you’re WalMart without making up for it somewhere. Why? Because the business model runs on razor thin margins and because WalMart is determined to maintain “everyday low prices” which means the cost of the raises can’t be passed on to the consumer.

First WalMart tried squeezing the supply chain by asking vendors to pass along savings to Bentonville and by charging a variety of storage fees. When that didn’t work, the company started firing people and cutting hours. Here’s how that works:

Some of the cuts came at the home office in Bentonville, meaning that the move to put a few extra pennies in the pockets of hourly workers resulted in the loss of hundreds of breadwinner jobs.

Finally, in October, WalMart threw in the towel and announced a shocking guidance cut that prompted the stock to plunge by the most in 17 years.

Earlier this month WalMart doubled down on the wage hike debacle by promising to raise wages for employees higher up the corporate ladder (something we predicted would happen last year). The retailer announced the new wave of raises just days after saying it would close 269 stores and fire 16,000 people.