Growing Cane’s pays managers up to $175,000

The shift in industry wages is not the product of sudden generosity or the visiting ghost of Christmas Eve. Instead, it’s because of a new California law that implements a $20-an-hour minimum wage for fast-food workers, higher than the state’s $16-an-hour minimum wage in other sectors.

It all means that some high-level workers are set for six figures, as 27-year-old Monique Pizano explains. i The Wall Street Journal. Depending on potential bonuses and branch location, a general manager at a franchise can make up to $174,000 per year.

Pizano, who has been a manager at the chain for three years now, saw his salary increase from $79,000 to $85,000 last March, according to the report. Journal. He is also eligible for monthly bonuses of up to $7,500 for meeting certain goals—making $175,000 a year under the best conditions.

Although Cane’s salary increase is in compliance with the California FAST Act, “we were already investing in Crew salaries prior to this change,” Raising Cane’s CEO and COO, AJ Kumaran, said in a statement. Good luck, adding that workers’ hourly wages have increased by $4 over the past few years. Kumaran recently noted that the most overlooked part of the law is raising salaries for full-time executives to at least $83,200 a year (at Cane, the bar is $84,000 plus bonus, Kumaran said).

“Through this move, all of our Payroll Managers received a 10% – 20% raise depending on their current Management level,” he said, calling it a “huge win” for employees that helped the company attract future employees. While the law has a “significant impact” on the chain, Kumaran said, Cane did it for himself by raising prices by nearly 7%, he told CNBC.

The salary “changed my family’s life,” Pizano said, adding that he was able to go to Japan for his honeymoon and the money to pay for the small house. It’s no easy task, as Pizano roams non-stop, putting in 15,000 steps an average of 10 hours a day, in a $9 million-a-year food delivery facility. Journal.

A wave of change in the fast food industry has been a long time coming. Even though the cost of living has increased in recent years, the state’s minimum wage has not increased since 2009, remaining at a low of $7.25 an hour. Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage hasn’t been this low since the mid-1950s, according to one statistic. Fast-food workers, who often earn very little, have recently been hit with cash due to labor shortages as the restaurant and hospitality industry struggles to recover from the pandemic. Right after the Lockdown came, the restaurant industry was hemorrhaging – it lost 6 million workers between the months of March and April 2020. Recovery has been a years-long process that has finally empowered workers.

The chains scrambled to eventually pay, giving executives $100,000 a year at Taco Bell or Chipotle and $180,000 a year at In-N-Out. It represents a major change in the way these workers are compensated since as recently as a decade ago. Another 2014 report found that one in five households with a fast food worker had an income below the poverty line.

Of course, hourly workers in states other than California are still often earned below the living wage. But California’s new law has set the stage for a new era for workers.

“What’s happening to fast-casual restaurants in California probably won’t stop there,” Bloomberg economists Anna Wong and Estelle Ou noted.

As for Raising Cane’s, its CEO Kumaran told CNBC that the business is doing well with the mandated wage change, bolstered by a cult following willing to pay less for its product. Last year, the franchise raised wages to $19.50 an hour, Kumaran told Yahoo Finance. “If you take care of people, the business will pay for itself,” he said. And Kumaran’s words resonate today, as he notes that the franchise has seen almost as good a retention rate and a “10% improvement in profits” since the wage hike.