Funny you mention this. I worked at Costco in the data and analytics department for five years. Walmart is lightyears ahead of Costco in the data crunching space. I think Walmart employs 10-12k IT type people. Costco has 2.5k which shows how backwards their IT department is and why I left. But I will tell you that even Costco and Walmart expect their IT professionals to have four year degrees and you are right, they do pay usually in excess of six figures. Walmart benefits are far better than Costco's and Walmart does offer stock options (aka RSUs) and bonuses to their tech employees.

I am a product of this data revolution. I had a general purpose computer science degreee in the late 80s and around 1995 started moving into corporate data work. I've been full time data type work since around 2000 and the amount of people that know SQL has ballooned over the decades from a handful to now it's expected that every full stack developer know the basics of data and analytics. There were now data scientists or data engineers or business intelligence analysts back 20 years ago. Now it's all the rage.

While there is a lot of these jobs, automation has killed so many jobs over the years. I remember sadly one day when we automated a job of an HR person. This person had been manually putting spreadsheets together for years and we came along in a matter of a couple of months automated her out of a job. This stuff happens more than you could know. Many of these people end up working at Walmart at $16/hour because their good corporate jobs have been automated away...