Restaurant Dive's analysis of 2025 proxy disclosures from ten restaurant groups found several chief-executive-to-median-worker pay ratios above one thousand, including 1,794 to one at Starbucks, 1,369 to one at Restaurant Brands International, and 1,274 to one at Brinker. [1]

Those are issuer disclosures rather than normalized hourly comparisons: Starbucks selected a part-time United States barista within a global workforce, Restaurant Brands International selected a part-time company-store employee, and Brinker selected a restaurant host working fewer than 40 hours. [1]

The ratios can reveal extraordinary vertical distance while still mixing one-time executive awards, annual hours, geography, role, benefits, corporate and franchised labor, and workforce composition, so ranking them as interchangeable measures would conceal the denominator that produces each number.

No verified X status was recovered, leaving platform outrage and defense unobserved; Restaurant Dive foregrounds inequality but also supplies methodology details that make the piece more useful than a viral ratio stripped of who counts as the median employee.

The next accountable comparison should reconstruct all ten proxies, separate cash from grant-date compensation, isolate one-time awards, normalize hours and benefits where possible, identify geography, franchise exclusions, job mix, workforce size, wage distributions, scheduling patterns, employee tenure, promotion paths, and benefit eligibility, and then test turnover, prices, profit, and welfare independently, because these disclosed ratios do not themselves establish any of those operating consequences.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco