I feel kind of bad for Metro CEO Eric Lafleche. Yes, it’s true, he did snag a 6.8% raise in 2022, which would be pretty impressive for rank and file workers, but to the boss-man it only resulted in a measley salary of $5.8 million a year. A tough year for Eric to be sure.
As far a grocery executives go though, Lafleche has been left behind. His counterpart over at Empire Foods, the guys who own Sobeys, doesn’t have salary figures from 2022, but the year before, CEO Michael Medline raked in a cool $8.65 million a year, and you have to think he didn’t take a pay cut for this past year.
And then there’s multi-billionaire Galen G Weston, who is always the cutest guy in the room, head of the Loblaws empire. It seems Loblaws hired a compensation consultant from south of the border who studied executive salaries broadly and discovered that Weston was not making a competitive salary. So they recommended a change. After a 10% raise, Galen is now king of the grocery hill, making a salary of $11.79 million a year.
That’s twice as much as Eric over at Metro!
For some perspective, Galen makes 431 times the salary of the average Loblaws worker. Unions representing those workers have taken note and are considering coming in with a 10% wage demand during next year’s contract talks between the company and its workers. Let’s see how that goes when Loblaws cries poor.
Doing some rather rough and imperfect math, Weston makes around $5,679 an hour. It’s good work if you can find it. And I mentioned he’s a billionaire, right?
I guess it’s his company and he can pay himself whatever the hell he wants, but there does appear to be a major disconnect between those in the ivory towers of corporate wealth and those of us who live somewhere downwind in the long shadows of those towers. Maybe this is an example of “trickle-down” economics, although to me it has more the look of scraps of food falling from the table to be scrambled for by the dogs below.
As much as the disconnect is obvious, it’s not unnecessarily worried about at Grocery HQ, where they just wanted to be treated as any other major CEO would be treated, except for poor Eric over at Metro who, when you think about it, should hire a compensation consulting firm from south of the border to start nosing around the cash pile.
So when the underpaid cashier rings up your next grocery purchase, just think of Galen and Mike and wish them well. As for Eric, maybe somebody can set up an Executive GoFundMe effort to bring his compensation into alignment with the rest of the money vacuums.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 