Five Guys’ chief executive officer, Jerry Murrell, said he gave a $1.5m bonus to employees of his US-based burger restaurant chain because “I didn’t want anybody shooting me” after the company recently “screwed … up” a buy-one-get-one-free promotion.
Murrell did not elaborate on the comment, which he gave to Fortune in an interview published on Wednesday – but it came a little more than a year after the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead on a midtown Manhattan street in what was widely considered a murderous rebuke of the US health insurance industry’s profit-driven practices.
Fortune’s conversation with Murrell revisited a two-for-one promotion that Five Guys organized in February to celebrate its 40th anniversary that proved to be much more popular than the chain expected. Five Guys’ app crashed as customers sought to take advantage of the promotion, and many overwhelmed chain locations discontinued the offer early, inviting backlash on social media.
So let me get this straight. This fucking moron dreamed up a dumbass promotion that made 30,000 employees lives miserable as angry customers demanded free burgers and most likely hurled vitriol and hate at them.
His big brain protection was to give every store $1000. $1.5M spread out amongst 30k employees is $50 per employee.
You think one of these employees could be mad enough to shoot you and then go “hmm… $50 ought to do it”
I sorta hope someone spend their $50 on ammo
Edit: fiveguys made $3.5B in revenue last year or about $10M per day and this guy wants a slap on the back for handing out 1/10th of 1 days revenue to the people that actually make that money for the self serving reason of not getting shot.
Edit: for those that would prefer I rerun these numbers for just the US employees
From the fiveguys website
So let’s take the $1000 per location (which I calculated with the number of locations in the US) and divide that by 25 employees per location and we arrive at… $40.
For those upset that I used revenue instead of profits, five guys doesn’t publish annual profit figures so I’d have to guess and I can’t imagine that would make you any happier. At a 10% profit margin it’s 1 days worth of profits.
Solid comment. Thank you for adding more context.
your numbers are a tad skewed.
only the us stores got the money, not globally. still a pittance though
Revenue is not a particularly useful number for this comparison. Net income would be much more useful a number. Plus, your math obviously assumes that every one of the 30,000 employees got an equal bonus, which is not at all necessarily true.
Edited to add, even in the quotes you chose, the bonus was given to US stores, and the 30,000 employees is global. So your analysis is not accurate.
I updated my comment to rerun the numbers for just us employees and it comes out to $40 per employee. So good catch, they screwed them over even worse than I originally thought