Naive guy that I am, I figured that Circuit City’s board would need a little time to recover after firing more than three thousand of its employees for earning higher wages than the company decided it wanted to pay… and then inviting them to apply for their old jobs at a fraction of what they’d been paid.
But no. From USATODAY.com:
Even as Circuit City Stores (CC) pushed 3,400 purportedly overpaid employees out the door, the company went out of its way to make the departure of its outgoing chief financial officer a lot more pleasant.
What Circuit City did for Michael Foss last week says a lot about the haves-over-the-have-nots way executive compensation works.
By leaving, Foss would have abandoned thousands of unvested stock options. But Circuit City revised the terms of many of those options to make sure he could still exercise them after leaving the company — a move that would mean a profit of nearly $250,000 for Foss if he were to cash them in today.
Meanwhile, the employees laid off in March — because their pay was “well above the market-based salary range for their role” — are getting an average severance of maybe a few thousand dollars each.
I see my mistake. I’d been picturing a normal boardroom, where after that massive layoff, the members would be staring at each other in stunned disbelief at what they’d done. They’d maybe hug, trembling, reflecting on the fleeting nature of life and the tenuousness of the moral fabric that binds us – and how close to the surface the animal lurks in us all. A few would make blurted apologies and run for the bathrooms, then scrub their hands obsessively, trying to scrape the last few spots of decapitated headcount from their skin. Their muffled cries of “It won’t come off! It won’t come off!” would be drowned out only by the sobbing of a senior vice-president who had glimpsed, if only for a moment, the brittle, dessicated core of his own being.
But apparently that wasn’t the scene. Where I’d been picturing a normal boardroom, Circuit City’s is clearly far different. Think of the second half of that move – firing that many people to save money, and then showering a chunk of it (or, technically, reserving a chunk for later showering) on their departed CFO. That’s something you could only pull off in the kind of boardroom with a two-storey-high illuminated map of the world; a stainless-steel boardroom table the size of a coal barge; board members with thin moustaches, sinister signet rings and poison-tipped knife-shoes; and a guy at the head of the table stroking a white Persian cat.
And they’d refer to all the board members by number. And they’d all have poison-tipped… no, I mentioned that. Okay, point made.
For all you Canadian shoppers who might not relish the thought of enriching SPECTRE… er, Circuit City, bear in mind that their local face up here is The Source. My decision not to spend another dime there isn’t exactly shaken by this latest news.
