By Daniel Rigney
There’s good money to be made in businesses that serve those unfortunate multitudes who live toward the load-bearing base of the financial pyramid. Just ask the Waltons (the Wal-Mart family, not the nostalgia-TV family), whose total wealth now exceeds the assets of the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined, as confirmed by Politifact.
The key to making profits from downmarket people is simple. Volume. Volume. Volume. Wal-Mart’s success is an MBA case study in point.
But making money off the poor may sometimes result in gross economic injustices. Consider, for instance, CEO salaries among the nation’s leading dollar stores, which serve the tens of millions of customers who have little to spend, but whose shallowness of pocket is offset by the staggering size of their demographic.
Dollar stores, like traditional hedge funds, do best when the economy tanks. No surprise, then, that dollar store business has been booming in these hard times. Nothing gladdens the heart of an investor in countercyclical businesses like an ailing economy.
In good conscience, though, is it fair that Dollar General’s Richard Dreiling drew $23.2 million in executive compensation in 2012, while Dollar Tree CEO Bob Sasser earned only $16.9 million dollars, and Family Dollar’s Howard Levine an almost embarrassing $5.3 million?
When the Market, whose wisdom is beyond question, produces results this painfully inequitable, tender-minded economic theologians may begin to doubt its omniscient infallibility. Some may even come to suspect that this higher economic Being is, in truth, nothing more than a heartless, bloodless mathematical machine.
How, they may ask themselves in the dark night of the soul, can a wise and just Market permit such gross inequities among top executives in the business of getting rich off the poor? Is there no justice in the world?
Let’s hope that in coming years the Market, acting through its divinely appointed boards of directors, will adjust and correct these vast disparities in dollar store executive compensation to reflect the very real value of the industry's corporate leadership in these times of mass hardship. The future of our nation’s poor may depend on it.
Thus endeth the reading. Let us prey.
Danagram
There’s good money to be made in businesses that serve those unfortunate multitudes who live toward the load-bearing base of the financial pyramid. Just ask the Waltons (the Wal-Mart family, not the nostalgia-TV family), whose total wealth now exceeds the assets of the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined, as confirmed by Politifact.
The key to making profits from downmarket people is simple. Volume. Volume. Volume. Wal-Mart’s success is an MBA case study in point.
But making money off the poor may sometimes result in gross economic injustices. Consider, for instance, CEO salaries among the nation’s leading dollar stores, which serve the tens of millions of customers who have little to spend, but whose shallowness of pocket is offset by the staggering size of their demographic.
Dollar stores, like traditional hedge funds, do best when the economy tanks. No surprise, then, that dollar store business has been booming in these hard times. Nothing gladdens the heart of an investor in countercyclical businesses like an ailing economy.
In good conscience, though, is it fair that Dollar General’s Richard Dreiling drew $23.2 million in executive compensation in 2012, while Dollar Tree CEO Bob Sasser earned only $16.9 million dollars, and Family Dollar’s Howard Levine an almost embarrassing $5.3 million?
When the Market, whose wisdom is beyond question, produces results this painfully inequitable, tender-minded economic theologians may begin to doubt its omniscient infallibility. Some may even come to suspect that this higher economic Being is, in truth, nothing more than a heartless, bloodless mathematical machine.
How, they may ask themselves in the dark night of the soul, can a wise and just Market permit such gross inequities among top executives in the business of getting rich off the poor? Is there no justice in the world?
Let’s hope that in coming years the Market, acting through its divinely appointed boards of directors, will adjust and correct these vast disparities in dollar store executive compensation to reflect the very real value of the industry's corporate leadership in these times of mass hardship. The future of our nation’s poor may depend on it.
Thus endeth the reading. Let us prey.
Danagram
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