re: #145 lawhawk

Actually the justification is that other companies in the same industry have similar salaries/compensation, so we wont be able to attract someone to our company without pushing a similar compensation plan. And when there’s companies that do well without paying out, the boards will shift their industry stats to exclude the companies that aren’t paying obscene compensation to their CEOs to retain the high-paying companies.

That’s how you get a whole bunch of companies that are sucking wind employing CEOs with obscene salaries and justifying it because the others are doing the same. Results aren’t included.

Yet, you’ve got outlier companies (Costco immediately comes to mind) that are very profitable, and yet the salary scale is far more reasonable than say at Sam’s Club (Walmart) - also profitable, but which treats employees like crap.

You also have the example of other countries, where the compensation for CEOs is much, much lower, and yet those companies compete with ours successfully. So it’s really, really obviously just a cultural thing here in the US.