One Seattle company just set its minimum wage at $70,000 a year

Seattle's Gravity Payments will pay each of its employees $70,000 a year, minimum
(Image credit: Facebook/GravityPayments)

On Monday, Dan Price gave his entire staff at credit-card processing company Gravity Payments a raise. Even the most junior of his 120 employees will soon earn $70,000 a year, minimum, Price told his staff, to loud cheers. "Is anyone else freaking out right now?" Price said after dropping that bombshell, according to The New York Times. "I'm kind of freaking out." Currently, the average salary at Gravity, located in Seattle, is $48,000.

Price says he will pay for raising most everyone else's salary by cutting his own to $70,000 a year, from almost $1 million, and by plowing company profits into company paychecks. Why $70,000? Science. Five years ago, Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman published a study showing that a person's emotional well-being rises with income up to about $75,000, and suffers the lower down from that number you get. Read more about Price's thinking at The New York Times, or read about the underlying research at the journal PNAS.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Peter Weber, The Week US

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.