Laid-Off Workers Get Employment Tips And Free Botox Treatments (Photo : Getty Images)
Yahoo shareholders are getting impatient with the way that CEO Marissa Mayer has been running the company. Besides the slow turnaround that she promised when she moved from Google, the company's expenses are ballooning.
Mashable reports that on free food alone, one of the many employee perks, Yahoo spent $108 million a year. A Yahoo employee complains of the culture of entitlement in the company, especially the officers.
The employee cites as examples Botox injections that were charged by an editor to the company and an $8,000 sleigh bed used for a photo shoot that the editor eventually brought home. However, that editor was reminded in an email not to charge again expenses that do not benefit the whole company, although she was nevertheless reimbursed.
These lavish expenses were often approved by Kathy Savitt, former chief marketing officer and head of media, to build up Yahoo's media presence. Over the past four years, those lavish spending cost Yahoo $450 million, estimates SpringOwl, an asset management company. SpringOwl's managing director, Eric Jackson, sent a 99-page proposal to the Yahoo board to turn around the company.
The proposal included firing 9,000 employees, selling the main campus and getting new leaders, a hint at firing Mayer whom a New York university professor said was saved from the chopping board only because she was then pregnant with twins. Last week, Mayer gave birth to twin girls. She will take three weeks off as her maternity and holiday leave.
Mayer has also been criticized for hiring executives with enormous compensation packages such as former Time executive Martha Nelson as editor in chief with an annual pay of $5 million. In contrast, Vogue editor Anna Wintour earns only $2 million a year.
Another one is star journalist Katie Kouric, paid $10 million a year. When she was hired in 2013, she was reportedly offers $6 million a year pay to help boost Yahoo news' readership. For Mayer, Kouric is a good investment for Yahoo because her videos had been streamed 140 million times.
Despite those big hires, Yahoo traffic, at 209.6 million visitors as of May, was down 6 percent compared to 12 months ago.
