It’s a tightrope Wal-Mart is trying to walk. It wants to keep prices low and earnings up while spending $1 billion to raise employees’ wages to at least $9 an hour. So far, not so good. Wal-Mart missed analysts’ expectations last quarter, and now it is cutting the hours of some workers during the busy back-to-school season, Bloomberg reports. This may be little surprise to business people, who have long warned that higher wages leads to fewer hours for workers.