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.
I say, good.
The tremendous and insatiable greed of American business leaders has necessitated making them afraid for their own asses, and that’s especially true in the health care sphere, but no less true elsewhere. It sounds like this motherfucker made a decision that severely negatively impacted franchisees and employees, and it shouldn’t take fear of a bullet to get him to adequately pay his workers for making their lives hell during the company’s 40-year promotion.
Also, Five Guys is a billion-dollar company. $1.5 million is nothing, and it should be an afterthought if that amount will make a material difference in their workers’ lives. (But of course, we know that these bastards will fight over literal pennies if it means getting more undeserved value for a person’s labor.)