The Stop & Shop strike

The Stop & Shop grocery stores around me have been striking, asking for higher pay. Inspired by a Vox story, which wondered what would happen if Walmart's CEO gave his entire salary to his employees, I decided to do something similar.

First, I Googled "CEO of Stop and Shop" and found a dude named Kevin Holt who is CEO of Ahold Delhaize USA, which manages several grocery chains, including Stop & Shop, Giant Food, Food Lion, Hannaford, and others.

So I went bigger. Ahold Delhaize a Dutch company owned by president and CEO Frans Muller. According to Bloomberg, his net worth is €4,989,000. Acoording to Google's currency converter, that is $5,585,335.

Then I found Ahold Delhaize's total employees, which is 375,000 associates across 11 countries. So if we split Muller's entire salary among all his employees, that would give them each a whopping ... $14. (I found another site that puts Muller's total compensation at around $9 million, which seems more accurate. That would give each employee $24.)

According to this statement from their union rep, there are 31,000 Stop and Shop employees in New England. What if Holt, who manages these specific workers, split his total compensation of $4,025,500 among just those employees, ignoring the fact that the other grocery chains he oversees would probably not be happy with that? That would net each Stop and Shop worker ... $129.95.

Okay, so let's ignore CEO compensation and just look at profits. According to the union rep, Ahold Delhaize had profits of $2 billion last year.

Where does that money go? Someone on Quora used Walmart as an example. Of their $14.694 billion in net income (revenue minus expenses), $6.294 billion was returned to shareholders. That's 42%. Assuming Ahold Delhaize uses the same ratio, that would return $840 million to its shareholders, leaving $1.16 billion. If they took half of that it, $580 million, divided it by their 375,000 employees worldwide, it would equal $1,546 per employee, or an extra $128 a month.

Maybe they decide to be super progressive and split all of the $1.16 billion in net profits that don't go to shareholders among their 375,000 employees. That would equal $3,093 per employee, or $275 a month.

Can we figure out how to just address Stop & Shop employees? The 31,000 workers represent 8.26% of Ahold's 375,000 total work force. So what if we take 8.26% of the leftover $1.16 billion and divide that by the 31,000 employees? $3090 per employee, not much different than our figure above.

Not a bad raise, especially for someone on minimum wage, which is about $25,000 a year in Massachusetts (about a 12% increase). But I don't know if it's enough to cover increased wages, benefits, and a pension that the union demanded. Not to mention that this assumes every single profit not returned to shareholders goes to employees.

So who's paying for the increased compensation? Probably the consumers, many of whom are poor and minorities. That is, until robots who can stack shelves and check out items for a cheaper cost and replace all those jobs. Might as well fight for your wages now while you can.