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Circuit City Rewards Execs As Stock Tanks
jamie tipped us to Dean Baker's Beat the Press blog, where Baker comments on a followup to Circuit City's firing of all its highest-paid salespeople last March (Slashdot discussion here). Circuit City's stock has cratered in the meanwhile, and their response has been to offer $1 million retention bonuses to executive VPs. Baker points out that each one of these bonuses represents 35 years' salary for one of the fired salespeople.
Years ago, I used to work for CompUSA corporate in Atlanta, GA. When they got bought out by the holding company that recently liquidated the company (took years longer than I thought it would), CompUSA fired all their corporate, education, and government sales staff. Oddly enough, I kept my job along with a few others in the southeast, albeit with more responsibilities and better pay. The vast majority of folks working for them weren't so lucky. They got their pink slips on a Monday morning, if I recall correctly, with no advance warning.
Essentially, it's like you put it: let's lay off everybody in the company who had anything to do with generating sales out of three huge markets, and who cares about the personal relationships they had built with customers (especially with respect to public sector folks)? Oh, I forgot to mention... lots of people were offered a "chance" to keep their job if they felt like relocating to Dallas, TX where CompUSA was building a multimillion dollar call center to centralize all their corp/gov/edu sales operations. What a bargain, right?
On the many occasions I visited that new call center on business, I got the distinct impression that things were, well, about as fucked up as a football bat. They had it all; an entire hotel rented out for six months housing only CompUSA employees, a new SAP rollout that kept mysteriously screwing up orders large and small (while sucking up untold amounts of contractor labor and prompting Microsoft execs to hold fun-filled meetings about revoking CompUSA's large account reseller status), midlevel managers running around trying to figure out whether their charges were coming or going.
Let's be fair in Circuit City's case, though... the old expressions goes: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Think of how much *more* money they could save if they fired
all the Executives, the ones who make the decisions that are
obviously quite poor! It runs to millions!
emt 377 emt 4
The alternative is to reward great employees with fat options, and then have shareholders complain that employees are benefiting at their expense!
Take a look at Apple, where shareholders are suing despite its stock outperforming the industry by a huge margin, because they're worried that company employees might have received awards for their efforts.
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Save a whale - harpoon a bind-torture-kill NeoCon
I think a bankrupt company like CompUSA should be able to recover funds from the executives whose decisions tanked the company.
Instead of bonuses, they would pay for the damages they caused.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
I used to think the same, but was explained recently how the "injustice" of the gold parachute thing is actually a misconception, and that it actually makes perfect business sense.
Let's use Merrill Lynch, which you brought up, as example. According to Wikipedia, they reported a net income of $7.49 Billion in 2006 (all further numbers are derived from simple arithmetic or taken from this same article). That's about $625M a month. Or $146M every week. Keep that number in mind.
Now, imagine you're in the board for a big high-stakes company (banking, insurance, that sort of stuff). If you have an incompetent CEO (hey, if Merrill Lynch had one, almost anyone is liable to get one at some point). You want to get rid of him, but, since being CEO for this sort of company is an intrinsically high-paying job, he obviously resists getting the boot. Assuming you don't have anything strong enough to outright fire the CEO, how much money can he make your company lose between now and you actually getting him sacked? That's the monetary value of getting him to leave of his own free will right now.
Stanley O'Neal got about $161M in stock options and retirement benefits as "severance pay". Based on my earlier math, that's just over 1 week of net income, which is, simply put, peanuts, seeing as he reportedly lost Merrill Lynch some $2.24 Billion (over 3 months' worth of net income) in how he was handling the sub prime crisis. How much would the company stand to lose by keeping him on-board any longer?