Our gross profit is plummeting. We give out thousands of dollars per week in gift cards. My employer is slashing hours for pharmacists and technicians. All signs indicate that we're losing money. Therefore, you can imagine my surprise when I opened up my most recent pay check and found a nice fat bonus in it.
The bonus wasn't along the lines of those handed out to those AIG executives. However, it was pretty sizable for a staff pharmacist working in my company. Put it this way: The bonus was larger than the previous 2 years combined. In fact, it was about three times as large.
Now I like money as much as the next person. However, the fact that I'm not a greedy bastard makes me object to this bonus. The company is hemorrhaging money with all it's new programs and promotions. They're cutting hours all across the chain in order to deal with this loss of revenue. However, they still manage to find money to give pharmacists a bonus.
I make well over $100,000/yr. I don't need a fucking bonus. If any of my fellow pharmacists can't live comfortably on our salaries, then they (like seemingly everyone else in this country) are spending way too much money. I would much rather the company not give us bonuses and use that money to better fund the pharmacy department. Maybe if they weren't giving these bonuses, they wouldn't have to cut the hours of full-time technicians who don't make 6-figures and depend on every dime they can get to support themselves.
My way of thinking seems to be frowned upon in this country though. It makes sense to me that if there's some cash to spare then it should go to the people who need cash the most. Apparently, that's "spreading the wealth around," and that kind of philosophy leads to the evils of socialism. It's against the "American Dream," which from what I can tell, is to take whatever you can get your hands on, always want more, and demolish anyone or anything that gets in your way of getting more.
We should all be thankful people like me aren't running this country though. Things might be a little fairer, and who would want that?
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9 comments:
My friend and I were just talking about this subject yesterday. Why is it that all the major chains are cutting hours left and right, yet they are still putting out huge amounts of coupons for gift cards, and (even worse) taking the competitor's cards??
So I guess the obvious question is...Why don't you return it??
How do you give back a paycheck?
Ummm... take it back to your manager maybe? Or if it was direct deposit write a check back to your payroll division. Or how about giving to charity? I would also suggest asking for a salary decrease since you seem to have an aversion to money.
I'm with you on this Mike. I got a pretty sizable bonus, while my employer, which happens to have 3 letters cuts tech hours across the board even though we are murdering budget. So what I did instead, was take half of my bonus and divided it evenly among my 10 technicians. Not much when you divide it by 10, but they appreciated it.
Giving my check back doesn't solve the problem. What's a few thousand dollars from one pharmacist mean to the company? Now, if every pharmacist didn't get that bonus, that could equal a lot of money.
Moreover, since I only take home about 50% of that bonus, I couldn't pay it back even if I wanted to.
In addition, I'd GLADLY take a pay cut if the money saved got put to good use. I'd volunteer for it. What difference will it make if I take a pay cut and the company goes on doing the same things it did before?
You have to think of the big picture. One person doesn't make a difference. It needs to be a company-wide policy.
My preceptor splits his post-tax bonus with his technicians or throws a nice party for the pharmacy staff. The techs at my pharmacy are all hard workers, so he likes doing it.
My old PIC did the "divide and share" as well. Every bonus he got, we as techs got some of. He'd always say that without us- he would not have gotten the bonus soooo.....
Of course, I've worked for the company 26 years, and he's the only pharmacist that I ever heard of that did that. But I tell you this- we techs would have done the world for that man- money or not. But it sure made us feel like we were an important part of the job.
i want a bonus
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