Sara Blakely, Founder and CEO of shapewear firm Spanx, recently surprised her employees with gifts of two first-class Delta Airlines plane tickets and $10,000 in cash to spend on their trip. The company was celebrating its $1.2-billion deal with private equity firm Blackstone.

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“To celebrate this moment, I have bought each one of you two first-class tickets to anywhere in the world," Blakely told employees in a video posted on Instagram last week. Spanx has more than 500 employees.

Spanx is not the first company to shower its employees with expensive gifts.

More gifts

In 2019, St John Properties, a real estate company headquartered in Maryland, gave its 198 employees a shared bonus of $10 million during its annual holiday party. The bonuses averaged around $50,000 per employee.

The amount varied depending on the number of years the employee worked in the organisation, ranging from $100 to one who was just hired to $270,000. St John Properties was celebrating the milestone of developing 20 million square feet of real estate space in eight states.

Also read: American tech giant is giving employees Rs 1.12 lakh as pandemic bonus

Michigan family-owned business FloraCraft gave its 200 employees nearly $4 million in bonuses in Christmas 2018. The amount depended on the number of years the employee had worked, averaging about $20,000 per worker.

Festive bonus

In India, Surat-based diamond merchant Savji Dholakia gifted three employees Mercedes-Benz SUVs worth Rs 1 crore each in 2018 for completing 25 years of service in the company.

This is not the first time the promoter of Hari Krishna Exports gave his employees such expensive gifts. Dholakia had gifted 1,260 cars and 400 flats to employees in 2016 as Diwali bonus; and 500 flats, 525 pieces of diamond jewellery and 200 flats to his staff in 2014. Dholakia had also given expensive Diwali gifts to 1,268 employees in 2015.

This year, Saraf Furniture announced a 12-day festival break starting from Diwali for all its employees. Saraf Furniture has more than 1,500 employees.

(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee)

First Published:Oct 28, 2021 7:03 PM IST