Publix to raise employees’ pay and sees its stock price surge
Publix announced it plans to raise the pay of its hourly employees and some managers.
The Lakeland-based supermarket chain didn’t say how much it intended to add to its employees’ paychecks — that’s proprietary info, the company said — but it did have one immediate public impact Thursday, The Orlando Sentinel reported. Publix’s stock price surged by nearly 13 percent, to $41.40, ahead of its fourth-quarter earnings announcement scheduled for Thursday.
The hourly mean wage for the grocery store industry was $10.72 per hour, as of May 2016, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
Publix employs more than 188,000 people at 1,172 stores in the seven states it operates in, including 781 stores in Florida, as well as stores in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, according to its website.
Publix was recently ranked No. 47 on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list.
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This story was originally published March 1, 2018 at 9:59 PM with the headline "Publix to raise employees’ pay and sees its stock price surge."