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Gravity Payments Case Statement

Good Essays

Gravity Payments is a private credit card processing and financial services company founded by Dan and Lucas Price. Dan Price, the CEO, created the company because he believed that credit card companies were overcharging small businesses. Gravity Payments became the largest credit card processor in the state of Washington, while charging less than half of the industry average processing rate. Dan Price has a philanthropic operating model, as Gravity Payments is heavily involved in donating to charities, and in April 2015, Price set a new minimum salary of $70,000 for all of his 120 employees. While initially received with overwhelming support, some people expressed their concerns about the decision and questioned the feasibility of the wage increase, including Lucas Price who decided to sue Dan. Other options that Dan Price could have pursued are doing nothing, adding a set amount to each employee’s wage, increasing employee compensation using shares, or restructuring internal operations by adding incentives and increasing employee empowerment. The criteria that will be used to evaluate each decision are employee satisfaction, employee motivation, profit maximization, and brand image.
The option to do nothing would benefit Gravity Payments because the company would not incur a massive increase in wage expenses, making it a good option for profit maximization. Secondly, the lawsuit filed by Lucas Price, Dan’s older brother, would not happen, which would not only increase Dan’s happiness but also reduce bad press facing the company. Thirdly, Gravity Payments would retain its two most important employees who left directly because of the minimum wage decision as they believed that it was unfair to the more valuable workers. A disadvantage of this option is that Price’s moral concerns about socioeconomic inequality would be completely ignored. Another disadvantage is that Gravity Payments would miss out on the massive, positive, media coverage that resulted because of the wage increase, leaving its brand image the same as before. Lastly, both employee motivation and satisfaction would remain unchanged, and this is an issue because the lowest and average salary at the firm is $34,000 and $48,000 respectively, which

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