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.
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