SALARIES & WAGES: No Ceiling for Bracy

SALARIES & WAGES

In a list of high salaries made public last week by the Securities & Exchange Commission, the name of Harry W. Bracy led all the rest. As a branch manager in Carbondale, Ill. (pop. 10,400) for Kroger Co. grocery chain, Bracy’s pay for 1946 was $380,000, including a bonus of $355,733. Farther down on the list were his bosses: Charles M. Robertson, chairman of the board, $100,000; Joseph B. Hall, president, $72,308. Kroger Co. stated that Bracy’s bonus was due in part to “his ability as a branch manager and in part to unusual circumstances. . . .” This was vast understatement.

In 1929, tall, middle-aged Harry Bracy sold Kroger his chain of some 30 Thrift Stores for $1,000,000. He took a vacation trip to New York, where his chief dissipation was a ride on a rubberneck bus. Then he went back to his one room and bath in Carbondale’s Roberts Hotel. Kroger soon found that business in the former Thrift Stores territory was dropping off. The company called in Bracy, by then bored at separation from his beloved stores. He told Kroger: “Give me a salary plus percentage of sales and no limit.” Kroger agreed and put Bracy in charge of the Carbondale territory, which included the southern tip (Egypt) of Illinois, slices of Kentucky and Missouri.

It was a poor territory, but Bracy knew what its oil men, coal miners, farmers and railroaders wanted, stocked it for them. Sales, helped by the war boom, went up; so did Bracy’s bonus. By 1944 Bracy was getting a bonus of $196,394 plus $25,000 salary. Stockholders began asking questions; so did other branch managers, cramped in straight salaries. Bracy was rocking the Kroger boat.

Early this year Kroger officials went to see Bracy about putting a ceiling on his earnings. Bracy said no. When Kroger insisted, he quit. He retired to his hotel room. Since then, Kroger officials have refused to issue for comparison the sales, or pay, of the man who took over Bracy’s job in Carbondale. Bracy was a subject Kroger would just as soon forget.