Stockers and Order Fillers

Stockers and Order Fillers pays $37,330 where the typical American job pays $50,020 — $12,690 a year short, or $6.10 an hour. That is a liveable wage in a cheap state and a difficult one in an expensive city, and nothing about the national figure tells you which you would be in.

2,833,810 people are employed as Stockers and Order Fillers, which puts it among the largest occupations in the United States. At this scale you are never short of a vacancy and never scarce, and the second fact is why the first one is cheap.

These roles suit people who prefer to be busy physically rather than sat still, and who value being able to find the same job in any city.

How long it takes to become one of the 2,833,810 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.

The quarters sit at $34,450 and $44,650, $850 a month apart at a ratio of 1.3x. Narrow enough that what you can expect is close to what everyone else gets.

The bottom quarter is under $34,450, $15,570 short of the $50,020 typical American job. The question worth answering before entering Stockers and Order Fillers is how long people spend in that quarter, because the median says nothing about it.

Avoid it if your back would not take years of it, because the work does not get lighter with seniority.

You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 2,833,810 is a headcount of the employed, which is a numerator without a denominator — everyone who qualified and never got hired is missing from it, and we will not estimate them to complete a percentage.

At 1.3x between $34,450 and $44,650, this is a narrow distribution. $37,330 is a reliable number to plan around, which is worth something — but so is knowing that outperforming the field will not be paid for.

Put in money rather than ratios: $34,450 at the 25th percentile, $37,330 at the midpoint, $44,650 at the 75th. $10,200 separates the quarter of Stockers and Order Fillers at the bottom from the quarter at the top.

Between $34,450 and $44,650 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $37,330. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $7,320; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $10,200.

The upper half of the middle range — $37,330 to $44,650, or $7,320 — is far longer than the lower half at $2,880. In a shape like this an average would flatter Stockers and Order Fillers considerably, and would describe nobody.

On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Stockers and Order Fillers is $17.94 an hour. The quarters sit at $16.56 and $21.46, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.