Whole Foods' CEO has racked up more than a year in vacation time
YouTube/Whole FoodsWalter RobbIf Whole Food's CEO started using his vacation days, he could be making money while sunning on the beach for more than a year before he runs out of paid time off.
Walter Robb has accumulated 2,703 benefit hours since he joined Whole Foods in 1991, reports Bloomberg. That's $613,824 he could cash in, according to his 2014 pay rate of $227.09 per hour, should he choose to actually redeem years of unused vacation days.
Robb's stockpiled vacation days are unusually high because he has worked at the grocery chain for 24 years and because Whole Foods is a rare company that allows employees to roll over all vacation year after year. He and other Whole Foods employees can cash in their time out at 75% of accrued value once a year, or collect the full sum when they leave the company - a pretty impressive exit bonus for someone who has saved as much as Robb.
While Robb has saved up more than most, according to Bloomberg, he's not alone in building up significant cash in accrued vacation pay.
Apple reimbursed Tim Cook $56,923 in 2014 for unused time off. The same year, HCA Holdings' R. Milton Johnson had $152,308 in accrued vacation pay, while Steven Mollenkopf, the CEO of Qualcomm Inc., has accrued at least $121,000 every fiscal year since 2010.
While working long hours with few vacations is the norm for most CEOs, there are a few executives who haven't accrued a single dollar of paid vacation days.
Facebook/Reed HastingsNetflix CEO Reed Hastings
Companies including Netflix, Uber, and LinkedIn have adopted unlimited vacation policies, which can mean very different things at different businesses. While Netflix CEO Reed Hastings reports he takes about six weeks of vacation a year, many critics feel that unlimited vacation ironically encourages people to take less time off because they lack clear guidelines of what is acceptable.
Ultimately, most people say that even if their companies offered unlimited vacation days, they wouldn't use any more than they had been - which, looking at these CEOs' unused vacation days, isn't much at all.