This Fast-Food Founder Bought $810 million Mega Millions Jackpot Tickets for all 50k employees

If you’ve gotten gas or gone grocery shopping recently, you’ve probably noticed that prices seem to be increasing for just about everything. In fact, in many cases, prices are increasing much faster than people are getting raises or bonuses at work. How is the average person living paycheck to paycheck supposed to pay the bills?

Some company owners and CEOs are very generous and do things like take salary cuts in order to afford to pay their employees more. This is exceptional, and we wish we saw it happen more often. Then there are the CEOs and company owners who think outside the box when they want to help their employees. Some think they’re being generous in creative ways, but others think it’s more of a publicity stunt.

We’re talking about fast food chain Raising Cane’s. The chicken restaurant’s founder, Todd Graves, recently bought 50,000 mega millions jackpot lottery tickets, one for every single one of his employees. Instead of passing out the tickets to each employee and chancing one employee striking it rich while the rest wish they’d been lucky enough to get a different ticket, Graves has a different approach. If any one of the tickets is a winner, he plans to split the winnings between the employees.

According to AJ Kumaran, Raising Cane’s CEO, the company decided to buy the lottery tickets as a fun way of hopefully helping their employees. He told CNN, “Things aren’t exactly easy these days, so when we saw there is a chance to not only have a little fun, but maybe win a little bit extra money for our people, we wanted to do it.” Kumaran added that if none of the tickets wins, they’ll buy more.

Graves took to Twitter to announce that he bought the lottery tickets for his employees. He joked, “Buying 50,000 lottery tickets is harder than you think!” 

The mega millions drawing Tuesday is at $810 million. The cash option would make it worth about $470.1 million. If you split that between 50,000 employees, you’re looking at $17,000 per person. Not a bad bonus.

Not everyone on Twitter thinks buying lottery tickets for your employees is a smart idea. Some commented on Graves’ tweet that they think it would be better to simply give each employee a bonus instead of wasting money on lottery tickets. Others feel that even if one of the tickets wins Graves wouldn’t stay true to his word and wouldn’t actually split the money between his employees.

Do you think it’s a good idea or a bad idea to buy employees lottery tickets?