Kip Tindell and The Container Store
by Miki Saxon
The hourly base wage for fast-food workers in Denmark is $20USD, yet McDonald’s, Burger King, etc., are still profitable.
Try to sell a minimum wage increase to just $15 and you’ll be told that it would destroy jobs and close businesses.
But, as the song goes, it ain’t necessarily so.
Despite starting out with just a $35,000 investment in 1978, The Container Store founder and CEO Kip Tindell has grown his business to one that has 67 US locations and rings up annual sales of nearly $800 million.
Equally impressive is the fact that he’s done all that while paying his retail employees nearly twice the industry average.
So what does Tindell know that other bosses of retail businesses don’t? You get what you pay for…
- “The 1=3 rule,” i.e., one great employee is as productive as three OK employees, so he gets three times the productivity of an average worker at only two times the cost.
- Turnover is lower substantially reducing hiring and training costs.
- Annual raises up to 8% of their salaries, based on performance, but
- encourages managers to evaluate employees based on their value to the company.
The result is the average Container Store retail salesperson makes nearly $50,000; about double the national average for retail.
When it comes to wages, Kip Tindell is the Twenty-first Century’s Henry Ford.
Ford astonished the world in 1914 by offering a $5 per day wage ($110 today), which more than doubled the rate of most of his workers. (…) The move proved extremely profitable…
The minimum wage war should become a lot more interesting when Tindell takes over as chair of the National Retail Federation.
It’s a lot harder to argue with success.
Flickr image credit: Tomer Gabel
