The CEO of Target Got A 23 Million Dollar Bonus, And I Got A Five Cent Raise

~A short time ago, like many displaced workers/recent grads/desperate people, I had to take a crap job while trying to find something better (I did find something better). That crap job turned out to be the overnight shift at Target. The comically extreme numbers used in this post have not been embellished, or in the case of my coworkers and I, reduced. This is something that people should know. The following is from my experience at the Apple Valley store, so if the “raise” policies are localized to this location, or used companywide, I do not know.~

Earlier this year, one of my then-coworkers approached me, looking like he had just been touched in his bathing suit area by a stranger in a windowless van. Little did I know that I too was about to have my junk roughly jostled around as well. Here is the convo we had:

Coworker: You get your review yet?

Me: No, you?

CW: Yeah, the review was positive, but the raise was……….pretty insulting.

Me: What, like a dime?

CW: A nickel.

Me: Shut up. How much really?

CW: A nickel.

A few days later, I got called down to the HR office for my review, which was given to me by a “Team Leader” (TL) that I didn’t regularly work with. I was told things like “You’re so valuable to the team,” “We couldn’t do it without you,” and “Thanks for all your hard work.” The entire report was prepared for him by someone else (most likely another TL being told what to type by the “Executive Team Leader” (ETL) who was being told what to tell the TL to type by the “Store Team Leader” (STL)). It was very flattering to have a report written about me by someone who didn’t know my full name after six months of employment (the ETL told me that she didn’t want to know any of our last names, because we were all quote “numbers on her grid.“). When we got to the last page of the review (it takes five pages to tell someone that they are adequate, but could somehow be better at, taking things out of a box and putting them on a shelf), the TL quickly hid the type on the page with another piece of paper.

TL: “And here is your raise,” (Slowly lifting the sheet of paper to reveal my new wage, which was exactly five cents more than before.) “And don’t worry, that’s prorated, you’ve only been here six months, so next year it will be even bigger.”

So, if I had worked there another year, I would have gotten ten cents?

Another man who had worked there for about four years went and got himself a nine cent “raise.” Someone actually sat down, calculated what this man’s efforts of the past year were worth, and came up with nine cents.

Now, nine cents may sound pretty small, but he nearly doubled up on me, that bastard.

The STL, who is averaging 100k+ per year (the overnight workers, assuming a 40 hour work week (although we were rarely allowed 40 hours a week, because Target couldn’t risk letting anyone get near overtime) and no taxes, would be lucky to crack 20k), overheard him complaining about his “raise” one day. She took him aside. He brought up the fact that a nine cent raise is not good. He told her how he was trying to support his family, how he’d been with the company for so long. All he got from the swine-faced wench was a look that said “Yeah? So? Are you done talking yet?”

As you could assume, productivity plummeted in the period after everyone got their “raises.” Not because we were bitter, but because we had all developed debilitating limps from the ruthless pounding our buttholes took from the cold, unfeeling corporate phallus of Target.

Right around that same time, it was announced that Gregg Steinhafel, the CEO of Target, had received a bonus package worth somewhere around 23 million dollars. If my math is correct, and it could be wrong, that is a cosmonautical 460 million times larger than the raise I got.

I’ll be the first to tell you that the overnight shift is far from being the most important facet of the Target Corporation. But had Steinhafel really been working 460 million times harder than me (or if I had stuck around another year to cash in on my full “prorated raise,” 230 million times harder)?

Think about that for a little bit. In the meantime, here’s the Blong (Blog Song). Rage Against the Machine – Sleep Now in the Fire. It was filmed down by the NYSE, over ten years ago.