There’s nothing fun about this week’s post but it’ll likely get your blood boiling. A recent MetaFilter post explained how Circuit City was losing too much money so their brilliant idea to improve the bottom line was to fire their top earning employees (3400 of them) and then offer to re-hire them at a lower wage.

As always, some great discussion ensued including a link to a Fast Company story about how Wal-Mart is like the tiger that eats its own tale. By always demanding price cuts from suppliers, they end up eventually putting the suppliers out of business completely.

There was a happy note in the discussion though - the John Lewis store group in the UK who list maximizing employee “happiness” as the company goal, announced that they were sharing 155 million pounds in profit among all 68 000 of their staff from the back room to the board room. That means an average bonus equivalent to nine weeks’ pay for most.

(via MetaFilter)