Five Guys CEO Gives $1.5m In Employee Bonuses After BOGO Disaster

Five Guys celebrated its 40th birthday on February 17, 2026, by offering a buy-one-get-one-burger free promotion. The offer sounds pretty enticing, and it certainly was. Some stores had to close down early because they simply ran out of product to sell. "I thought maybe increased sales like 20% or something," Five Guys CEO Jerry Murrell told Fortune, discussing the promotion. "That was like 130%. So I felt I screwed up."

As a way to make it up to Five Guys employees for dropping the ball, he wrote 1,500 checks for $1,000 dollars each, which were sent to various stores and distributed as bonuses to the employees who'd been working that day. It's a generous offer from the fast food brand that gives customers an enormous number of fries with each order and also hands out free peanuts. The money isn't exactly life-changing, but compared to fast food wages, it's a significant bonus and way more than what most CEOs would have done — namely, say sorry and move on with little more than a rhetorical pat on the back. Maybe that's really all that's needed in a situation like this, which makes Murrell's professed rationale for distributing the bonuses even more strange.

In the same conversation with Fortune, Murrell made a strange sort of confession: "I didn't want anybody shooting me in the back or anything after the first day, because we really screwed it up." There's only so much context one can acquire from black and white text, so Murrell may have been being a bit more coy than what's coming across, but in every joke there's a kernel of truth, they say, and the statement comes in the wake of multiple high-profile murders.

Luigi Mangione, who went on to become something of a public icon, is accused of murdering the CEO of United Healthcare in December 2024 on the streets of Manhattan. Some seven months later, a Blackstone executive, Wesley LePatner, was one of four killed in a Manhattan office tower. Although the French Revolution 2.0 seems hardly underway, it's certainly a sign of the times that the managerial class is not only thinking about the animosity that members of the public have toward them but actively engaging in behavior that they believe will appease the metaphorical mob; even if half-jokingly.

Five Guys boasts some of the highest prices in the fast food industry, so the $1.5 million that was distributed wouldn't have made much of a dent in the company's pocketbook, but it seems the CEO distributed the money from his own funds. "I was gonna buy my wife a new fur coat, and I spent it on [the bonus] instead," Murrell said. "She still looks at me like I'm stupid. But I thought it was worth it."