This meme banks on the viewer not knowing the context behind Chipotle CEO Brian Niccol’s compensation, the economics of price inflation and basic finance. Which is a safe bet in today’s world, so here’s the breakdown:
▪️First, this “$24M raise” occurred in 2020. The viewer would assume “last year” means 2021, when rising prices became big news, but in fact was a year earlier when prices weren’t yet spiking.
https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/chipotle-mexican-grill-ceo-brian-niccol-made-38-million-2020-2898-times-more-median
▪️For context, Niccol’s 2018 compensation was $33.5M, which went down by over half to $16.1M in 2019 (remember all the memes bemoaning his $17M paycut?). It then went up to $38M in 2020.
https://www.salary.com/tools/executive-compensation-calculator/brian-niccol-salary-bonus-stock-options-for-chipotle-mexican-grill-inc?year=2020
▪️Niccol’s salary was initially set to be $14.8M in 2020, but because of the company’s stellar performance that year, he qualified for large financial bonuses. That’s where the “$24M raise” comes from. With Covid lockdowns and mandates, fast food places like Chipotle benefited & flourished.
▪️Of the CEO’s $38M earnings, just $1.2M was base pay, while $33M was stock awards and options. Keep in mind, stock awards aren’t paid out like a salary by Chipotle, pressuring their bottom line to raise burrito prices. They are borne by shareholders diluting their own stock, in hopes that these rewards incentivize the CEO to increase the value of the company.
▪️Which it did. Chipotle’s stock went up more than 65% in 2020 alone, and since Niccol joined the company in 2018, its market cap has increased by $30.6B, a 475% increase. In this context, $30M in stock grants are a rounding error to the company, and a winning one at that.
https://www.qsrmagazine.com/fast-casual/chipotle-ceos-pay-increased-137-percent-38-million-2020
▪️Chipotle also gave $40M in bonuses and assistance to employees during the pandemic, as well as another $13M in tuition assistance. But while this was more than CEO compensation, even this would pale in comparison to giving each employee a $1/hr raise.
https://www.qsrmagazine.com/news/chipotle-paid-out-over-40-million-bonuses-and-assistance-pay-employees-during-covid-19
▪️Chipotle has 88,000 employees. Assuming they work even just 25 hrs/week, a $1hr raise is an extra $114.4M per year (not including benefits). A $2/hr raise, probably more in line with restaurant worker salaries over the pandemic, would be an extra $228.8M.
▪️And, of course, this is just one component of burrito prices. All of the meat, rice, beans and produce got more expensive, which gets passed on with higher menu prices. The economic reality is that the Chipotle’s CEO pay has very little to do with burrito prices.
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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