Our blame but you pay

Retail giant Target recently announced it was closing all its stores in Canada with 17,600 job losses. The severance pay for all those workers who would now have to look for a new job totals US$56.3m (£37.5m) which only totals about $3,198 for each worker.

CEO Gregg Steinhafel was fired last May got a total severance of $61m (£40.6m) – all for himself. Although Steinhafel’s public severance was only $15.9m, he also received a “non-qualified deferred compensation” package, a pension plan that he doesn’t have to pay back and equity worth about $10m. All in all, he walked away with a reported $61m.

Or about 18,000 times more than the average employee who is being made redundant because the company’s senior management, as it admits itself, “tried to do too much, much too fast”.