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Five Guys CEO says he gave a $1.5m bonus to his workers so he wouldn’t get shot in the back
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2026
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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.
your numbers are a tad skewed.
only the us stores got the money, not globally. still a pittance though
Solid comment. Thank you for adding more context.
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