Bonus Onion Rings

    In January 2025, Home Bargains founder Tom Morris paid himself 1 billion pounds after the company reported record-setting profits the previous year. As a Home Bargains employee for more than three years who has worked four consecutive holiday seasons with the company, I want to congratulate Mr. Morris for his astonishing achievement. 

     Naysayers may naysay, "A billion quid. Isn't that a bit obnoxious?" This illustrates how little naysayers know about business. Prior to Mr. Morris' somewhat generous payment to himself, he was merely a single digit billionaire, not even worth 10 billion.  Moreover, even the additional £1bn hasn't pushed him into that category in his native currency, although it may have put him over the hump in US Dollars and/or Euros. Most people simply cannot fathom the discipline required, the incremental patience necessary, to reach these levels currency by currency. Imagine yourself in possession of 7 sterling, a fiver and two pound coins, knowing you're still £1.20 short of $10US, as of January 14 2025, having to toil and scrape for that extra dough, and you'll have a pretty fair idea of the difficulty Mr Morris faces. 

    Home Bargains employees earn a little less than £12 per hour, apart from those aged 22 and under, who can be paid approximately 2-3 quid an hour less due to an inventive and wholly brilliant policy courtesy of the UK government. Since no 21 year olds in history have ever had children, their own homes and cars, bills or other financial burdens, they can happily accept a lower wage in exchange for learning complex and invaluable skills such as placing items on shelves, and being polite to strangers, abilities they can't acquire anywhere else.  

    Employees old enough to receive slightly above the legal minimum wage enjoy other great benefits, such as a 10% discount on in-store purchases, and a contract guaranteeing a minimum number of working hours each week. In January, and occasionally other months, Home Bargains engages in what is widely known as "the cheap out." This involves the employee's contracted hours temporarily transforming into their "kinda sorta almost" contracted hours (please accept the author's apology for using niche corporate jargon in the previous sentence). Sometimes employees must wrangle and bargain--get it?!--to reach their minimum hours, but this is good for them because they learn what it is like to negotiate while at a substantial disadvantage. Unless there's a specific billion pound milestone at stake, people don't need money in January anyway. For what, Christmas shopping?

    As a side note, Home Bargains doesn't bother paying time and a half rates when employees exceed 40 hours since, after all, workers generally don't operate at maximum efficiency after 40 work hours. If anything, half their hourly wage after 40 would make more sense, and if this practice had been in place since the company's founding nearly 50 years ago, Mr. Morris might long ago have attained his rightful place as a double digit pound billionaire. 

    Team Leaders and Managers at Home Bargains need not worry about whether they receive overtime pay since they work on salary. They are contracted for 44 hours per week, although typically scheduled for 5 ten hour shifts, sometimes with a generous 30 minute break. Travailing for at least 47.5 hours while getting paid for 44 builds character. If one is not willing to sacrifice 3 and a half unpaid hours a week so that someone else can get a billion pounds, what's the point of living? 

    Those above store level at Home Bargains, such as Area and Regional Managers, tend to fall into two categories. The first is SAWDs, Socially Awkward White Dudes, and that is, in reality, the only category. The second category is, like Loop Quantum Gravity, mostly theoretical. SAWDs often say they'll make an appearance at a particular location when there's actually no way they intend to be present. Again, this is rooted in science, similar to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Store Managers can know when a SAWD is lying or know where a SAWD is at a given moment, but Store Managers cannot know both. These prevarications are absolutely essential for the growth and development of the staff, enhancing low morale, learning never to take anybody's word for anything ever, and practicing the crucial habit of going "into a tizzy" when SAWDs say they're coming, but don't. 

    People who can do math and form opinions might observe that if Mr. Morris had given Mr. Morris only 970 million pounds, the remaining 30 million could have provided £1000 each to the company's roughly 30,000 employees as a thank you for a spectacular year. This reminds us what job creators who look to accomplish big things run up against. It requires a great deal of fortitude to sacrifice the efforts of others for one's own personal glory. In addition, that apparently meager 3% reduction in his windfall could have ballooned to as high as 4 or 4.2% once the administrative costs of providing 30,000 people with £1000 pounds get factored in. Did Michael Phelps share 3% of his gold medals? Did Marie Curie give anybody 3% of her Nobel Prizes? No. Start distributing windfalls among employees once, and they'll expect bonus onion rings every year. 

    In closing, it is an honor to work for a company that gives little credence to mere rhetoric, but instead reveals itself through deeds. Any organization can claim it values employee contributions to profits, cleanliness, and quality, but it takes guts to do the opposite. After all, actions speak louder than words. 

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