Pay gap between CEO, other employees widens as Ingles’ median worker salary in ‘23 was $22,708

From Staff Reports

BLACK MOUNTAIN —  Total compensation for Ingles Chief Executive Officer and President James W. Lanning increased 55 percent, to $3.3 million in 2023 from $2.1 million in fiscal year 2021, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing in January, the Asheville Watchdog reported on Feb. 5.

Lanning received a 31 percent pay increase last year from his 2022 compensation of $2.5 million, the Watchdog noted.

Meanwhile, Ingles board Chairman Robert P. Ingle II more than doubled his compensation since 2021, to nearly $8 million in 2023 from $3.7 million. His pay last year included a salary of $1.2 million and a bonus of $6.6 million, the Watchdog reported, adding that Lanning’s bonus in 2023 was $2.1 million.

All other Ingles employees — part-time, full-time and temporary workers — earned a median salary of $22,708 in 2023, the company reported.

“Soaring food prices have put a significant dent in consumers’ wallets, but for executives of the Black Mountain-based Ingles Markets corporation the past three years have been a banquet,” the Watchdog story stated, noting that ‘the gap between Lanning’s compensation and that of other Ingles employees, known in the SEC filings as the CEO pay ratio, widened significantly, to 145 to 1 in 2023 from 100 to 1 in 2021.”

The Daily Planet called Ingles for comment on the pay situation and eventually was referred to the human resources department, where a man who identified himself only as “Bo,” said he would pass along the request. No response was received from Ingles by the newspaper’s deadline.  

The Watchdog story added, “Put another way, at the current CEO pay ratio, the average Ingles worker who joins the company as a teen-ager and works until the current Social Security retirement age of 67 will earn as much in their lifetime as Lanning earns in a little over four months”.

Meanwhile, the Watchdog quoted Irit Tamir, senior director of the private sector department at Oxfam America (which is a Boston-based nonprofit that describes its mission as “ fighting inequality to end poverty and injustice”), as saying those kinds of increases are not unusual among food companies. 

“CEO pay has increased exorbitantly,” widening the gap between shareholders and executives “who tend to be wealthy, white, and male, and the lowest wage workers in our country who tend to be people of color and women, especially in the retail sector,” she was quoted as telling the Watchdog, which noted in its story that “research by Oxfam, a global charity, focuses primarily on Fortune 500 companies much larger than Ingles.” 

Tamir also was quoted by the Watchdog as saying that “it’s disturbing to see that even among the more medium-sized companies, you are also seeing this trend.”

What’s more, Tamir told the Watchdog that many of the price increases consumers saw in food costs over the past three years were “fueled by profits, and not by what I think they would like you to believe, which is costs and labor” — a phenomenon Oxfam and others dubbed “greedflation.”

Asheville Watchdog noted that it had sought comment from Ingles for more than a week, but no response had been received by its deadline. 

Ingles was founded by Robert Ingle, who opened the first Ingles in Asheville in 1963. Today, the company operates nearly 200 stores in six Southeastern states. 

“Ingles shoppers interviewed by the Watchdog said they were dismayed, but not surprised, to learn of the pay gap between company executives and workers,” the website noted.