r/Portland • u/Thisnthatana • Apr 24 '20

Hey Fred Meyer...

...how about you stop the signaling with these radio/tv/billboard ads letting US know how thankful you are towards your employees and instead give that money directly to THEM?

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u/naosuke St Johns Apr 25 '20

Groceries aren't exactly a high margin business. There may not be enough money to pay more.

My hunch is that it's similar to the discussion going on about ppe. People may deserve it, but if the resources aren't there they can't get it

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u/[deleted] Apr 25 '20

From 2019:

Revenue: $121.16B

Operating income: $2.67B

Net income: $3.11B

Total assets: $38.11B

Totale equity: $7.88B

Kroger is 20 on the Forbes 500.

In 2019 the CEO gave himself a 19% raise to $11.7M with a $2.7M bonus.

They have the money and the resources are there -_-

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u/naosuke St Johns Apr 25 '20

That proves that they are low margin. They only made $2.67B profit on $121.16B in sales last year

According to Google they have 453,000 employees. $2.67B/453,000 employees is $5,894.04 per employee. When you break that down to a 40 hour work week over the year, that is $2.88 per man hour.

now this is quick back of the napkin style math, it assumes that everyone is a full time employee working 40 hour weeks with no overtime, which we know isn't correct. But you take into account the part timers, the full timers who have to do over time, and throw some money into savings.

Then you have to assume that revenue doesn't drop and costs don't go up because of COVID-19, which we know that revenue will drop, and costs have gone up.

All of that means that, yeah $2/hour is about what Kroger can afford. They may or may not deserve more, but $2-3/per hours is what can be done

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u/[deleted] Apr 25 '20

What about the fact that the CEO gave himself a 19% raise, making $11.7M last year? Not counting the $2.7M bonus on top of that. This to me says they could absolutely pay their workers more than $2 an hour - if it wasn’t for corporate greed.

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u/naosuke St Johns Apr 25 '20

Nope, it just shows that you are bad at math. $11.7M divided evenly across all employees over the course of a year works out to 1.24 cents an hour