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 love this, the REAL Free Market at work. This douchebag must have been getting some serious threatening messages for him to panic like this. It almost sounds like he’s paying a ransom.
When a Health Care CEO’s policies got so abusive to his customers, it spawned a customer so angry, they literally gunned him down in the street. As a result, his company loosened their policies, and people started getting care that had been previously refused. Even better, OTHER health care companies did the same thing.
That is a perfect example of the unfettered Free Market at work, the industry goes to far, and the market reacts with a harsh correction, and the Five Guys CEO understands this. At least he is self-aware enough to know that he might be pushing the boundaries of his own personal safety, and he’s trying to do something about it the only way a Sociopathic Oligarch can conceive - throwing money at it.
Eh, it’s a start.