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 think it’s ineffective with the psychology of most people of this type. Their fear isn’t death. It’s losing what they have.
They have made the amazing of material worth and power their primary goal In their life. They’ve probably had to screw over friends. They’ve probably had to ignore family. In a lot of ways they’ve sacrificed their “life” or their humanity to do this. They know they are are mortal, but if they go out with more than other people they’ve “won”.
To die with nothing… To have lost it all despite all the sacrifice. To end the game having “lost”. That’s what they fear, and it’s why so many of them cannot do what this guy did and share with employees. Even $1.2m is a really small amount. Five guys has 30,000 employees globally but is probably ⅔ US (20k). It’s no more that $100 each.
So I say, don’t kill them. Take their money and make them live like the rest of us.
You just keep killing enough people down the chain of inheritance of the money.
They use mob tactics, we use mob tactics.
How, how exactly are you going to ‘take their money’?
With a … law? A wealth tax?
They control the system that would implement such things.
Social power structures and incentive systems have always operated through more than just the plainly stated, officially emphasized mechanisms.
I would argue that actually the reason why more common people don’t act more ‘forcefully’ is the reasons you outline as applying to the billionaires.
Set it up as a modified game theoretic prisoners dilemma.
The average person, despite standing to lose absolutely much less, is much more afraid of losing what they have, because they determine that they much more likely to be caught and punished.
So, every common person thus ‘defects’ against every other common person, despite them all standing to gain massively if even a minute percentage of them learn to become Great Value Brand Agent 47.
Of course, there are a number of multi millionaires and even billionaires that already recognize that when enough common people do not fear death, we will just kill them.
Thats why a good deal of them are building bunker complexes… but also another subset of them choose the strategy of basically begging to be taxed.
Morality totally aside, trying to determine actual true beliefs vs outward actions aside … it would make strategic sense to reward those begging to be taxed for at least outwardly displaying more humane behavior, by not going after those ones.