Business Owner Explains How She Pays Everyone Who Works For Her The Same Salary Of $73K
According to her, it all comes down to not being "a selfish a--hole."
TikTok Many politicians and people in the business world like to say that paying people a livable wage is simply economically impossible, and many people believe this to be true despite all of the evidence against it.
Evidence, of course, in the form of one business owner that would like to prove them all wrong. She's not only paying a livable wage, but she also pays everyone the same salary and one that's considered downright handsome in much of the country to boot.
A clothing store owner pays everyone the same salary of $73K regardless of experience.
We hear what you're asking — how does she do it and also how do I get a job with her immediately I am literally dying. We can't speak to the latter, but as for the former, it turns out it's actually pretty simple.
Madeline Pendleton owns the clothing shop Tunnel Vision in Los Angeles, and she shared on TikTok exactly how she pays everyone the same salary and how it can work for other businesses too.
Pendleton says any business can pay their employees an equal and livable wage without it costing them more money.
Sounds too good to be true, right? But Pendleton says, "It's just income redistribution, really." The problem, she says, is that companies in America end up paying their CEOs exorbitant sums of money. This forces the rank-and-file to essentially subsidize the C-suite.
Pendleton has put an end to that. Granted, her company is far smaller than corporations with CEOs, but typically a business owner like her would be making orders of magnitude more than the people running the cash register in her boutique, for example.
Instead, Pendleton pays everyone the same salary by simply refusing to play the game where "your boss [is] making $24 million a year, which is the average for the top 350 firms in the US to pay their CEO in 2020, while you make like $30k or whatever for work in the same business."
Instead, Pendleton averages her employees' pay and awards everyone the same amount.
Rather than pay herself like a queen and let everyone else make do with minimum wage, Pendleton instead says to take "everybody's salary in the whole place, then average them out amongst the number of workers you have. Boom, [the] company has a universal wage."
She then broke down exactly how she does it at Tunnel Vision. "We have 10 full-time employees, including me, and we just got our quarterly raises. So we all make around $73,000 a year," she said. "That means our company's annual payroll expenses for our full-time employees is $730,000."
"It doesn't cost my business any more money annually for us to pay ourselves this way," she went on to say. All it takes is a willingness to pay fairly. She also suggested that for businesses where some positions require a specialized degree, companies could further balance things out by helping those employees pay their student debt.
"That would be an awesome way to handle those specific careers that did, unfortunately, incur a f--k ton of student debt, and it would still keep everybody's overall salary and take-home pay the same," she said.
The business owner says ultimately equal pay comes down to her and other business owners and CEOs choosing not to be 'selfish a--holes.'
Pendleton explained how her business would work if she did things the usual, good ol' capitalistic way. "Let's say I wanted to be a total a--hole and I wanted to pay everyone at my company minimum wage except for me," she said. The minimum wage in Los Angeles was $15.96 per hour at the time she made her video.
"Let's say I'm super benevolent, actually, and I round that up to a cool $16 an hour for all of my 'lowly' employees," Pendleton said. "That would mean their annual salaries would be $33,280 a year each. So there's nine of them, meaning that all of those salaries would make up a total of $299,520."
Using her previous figure of $730,000 in total payroll, she explained, "This means that...even at my small business with just 13 employees, my annual salary would be $430,000. It's ridiculous. This is what those CEOs are doing so they can make that $24 million a year while you guys make like $30k or whatever, and your company's got a lot more revenue than my little dinky business does."
She went on to stress that "any company" could be doing things this way. The only key to why she pays everyone the same salary while other businesses and corporations don't is she is simply "choosing not to be a selfish a--hole."
The TikToker drew major praise from people who applauded the way she is running her business.
"Please run for president I beg," one person wrote. "Stats like this make me reconsider the people I know who 'own their own business,'" another commented. Others wanted to tell their managers about Pendleton's plan. "How does one send this to their small business boss… without sending it to our small business boss…," a user joked.
Of course, as you might guess, not everyone was on board with all this equality. Some people scoffed that Pendleton is "living in a dream world," but others had more tangible concerns, like how to fairly compensate those who are more qualified or whose jobs are deemed more important. But Pendleton rejects these differentiations.
"So a 23-year employee with all that knowledge gets paid as much as the new kid out of high school?" one person asked. "Forgive me for not jumping on board." But Pendleton sees things differently. "I've owned my business for 10 years, been working for 21. My youngest employee brings fresh perspective and instinct with tech. Super valuable." Or, put more simply, as she told another commenter with similar concerns, "if your job is necessary, it's just as valuable."
Nobody should hold their breath for corporations — or even small businesses for that matter — to be adopting Pendleton's method en masse. This is America, after all. Still, you can't deny that Pendleton is making some sense, and creating a stable workforce able to participate in the market economy while doing it. I'm with that other guy — Pendleton 2024!
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers social media, social justice and human interest topics.