Five Guys’ chief executive officer, Jerry Murrell, said he gave a $1.5m bonus to employees of his US-based burger restaurant chain because “I didn’t want anybody shooting me” after the company recently “screwed … up” a buy-one-get-one-free promotion.
Murrell did not elaborate on the comment, which he gave to Fortune in an interview published on Wednesday – but it came a little more than a year after the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead on a midtown Manhattan street in what was widely considered a murderous rebuke of the US health insurance industry’s profit-driven practices.
Fortune’s conversation with Murrell revisited a two-for-one promotion that Five Guys organized in February to celebrate its 40th anniversary that proved to be much more popular than the chain expected. Five Guys’ app crashed as customers sought to take advantage of the promotion, and many overwhelmed chain locations discontinued the offer early, inviting backlash on social media.
That criticism was intense enough that Five Guys apologized in a statement on 18 February and then a follow-up note on 9 March, when it restarted the promotion for four days.
“We let you down, and we’re sorry,” read the first of those apologies, which also expressed regret for having placed the chain’s “hardworking crews … in a difficult situation”.
The second statement told customers: “You visited our restaurants in overwhelming numbers, and we weren’t ready for you. We didn’t meet our own standards, and that’s not something we take lightly. So we’re asking for a do-over.”
In the conversation with Fortune, Murrell added that he gave a $1.5m bonus to employees of Five Guys’ 1,500 US stores to try to make up for the chaos unleashed by the promotion at various locations.
“I didn’t want anybody shooting me in the back or anything … because we really screwed it up,” Murrell said to the publication. “We had no idea that we were going to get that kind of response.”
Murrell joked that he preferred the employees receiving the bonus over his wife getting “a new fur coat”.
“She still looks at me like I’m stupid, but I thought it was worth it,” Murrell was quoted as saying by Fortune. “They worked so hard. They were so overwhelmed.”
Luigi Mangione is charged with murdering Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, who was shot in the back and killed on 4 December 2024. Mangione has been awaiting trial in both state and federal courthouses after a manhunt in connection with Thompson’s killing led to his arrest at a McDonald’s restaurant in Pennsylvania.
Five Guys did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Murrell’s remarks to Fortune.
Globally, Five Guys has 1,900 locations and 30,000 employees in 28 countries, according to the chain’s website. Murrell founded the company in 1986 in Arlington, Virginia, and has led it since.