Menard Makes Big Money, Others Not So Much

Up until today I had never heard of Slashgear.com, an online publication founded in 2005 that covers technology and automotive news, with stories on consumer electronics, gaming, science, entertainment and “how fast, far, and fun the newest electric cars can be driven.”

And sometimes Slashgear digs for dirt. This week the publication ran a story entitled “MENARDS LAWSUITS EXPLAINED: HOW THE HARDWARE CHAIN CONTINUES TO FIND LEGAL TROUBLE.”

Menards, of course, is the chain of some 300 big-box hardware stores, whose home office is in Eau Claire, and whose owner John Menard is the 44th richest American, with a net worth of $20.5 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

Menard didn’t just get rich by building the company, but by paying everyone but him as little as possible. “Employees describe a system that feels built to extract extra labor at no cost,” Slashgear reports.

“In two multi-state class actions, hourly workers alleged they had to attend mandatory meetings and complete ‘In-Home Training’ off the clock — including passing required tests — without pay, violating federal and state wage laws. Those lawsuits also allege Menards made hourly workers clock out for sub-twenty-minute breaks and miscalculated the regular rate used to calculate overtime wages.

“In 2024, the Minnesota Department of Labor found Menards had deducted wages from an employee 103 times for pumping breast milk on the clock, then suspended her for speaking up. The agency issued a consent order requiring Menards to pay back wages and damages, implement policy overhauls, conduct a statewide audit, and pay a $15,000 penalty.”

In 2018, a class action suit by more than 100 current and former Menard employees claimed they were deprived of proper wages due to company policies that included not paying employees for rest breaks and requiring them to attend off-the-clock staff meetings and job training sessions without getting paid.

A 2013 Urban Milwaukee story, “The Strange Life of John Menard,” described him as aggressively anti-union, with a policy that cut managers’ pay by 60% if their store became unionized. A 2007 story by Milwaukee Magazine noted that all managers had to sign an agreement requiring them to go to arbitration – not the courts – if they had a dispute with the company. “Moreover, they’d have to pay their own attorney’s fees and half the cost of the arbitrator, even if Menards was found at fault,” the story reported.

A columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune once described Menards’ manner of handling an employee as “something exhumed from the Bronze Age with all its primitive logic intact.”

That contract for managers was still in place in 2015 and was leaked to The Progressive magazine, which did a story on this. The National Labor Relations Board, in response to the Progressive story, found Menards committed multiple violations of federal labor law. The NLRB found merit to five of the eight complaints. It determined that the clause threatening a 60 percent cut in pay for a manager who lets a union be established was a violation, but took no action, as Menard’s had by then removed this language from the agreements. But the NLRB also found Menards was violating labor law by requiring employees to sign arbitration agreements that preclude them from engaging in class action suits.

Menard has been just as tightfisted with managers and executives. “Average Menards Manager yearly pay in Wisconsin is approximately $58,973, which is 22% below the national average,” indeed.com estimated.

As a Forbes profile of Menard once revealed, as of 1998, Menard’s chief financial officer earned $55,700 and Menard’s younger brother Lawrence, who ran store operations and had worked for him for 40 years, rated a $45,000 salary and $180,000 bonus. Menard himself was paid $20.6 million under a 30-year-old formula awarding him 5% of pretax profits as a bonus.

A 2009 federal tax court decision questioned the fact that Menard’s pay was far higher than for CEOs at competitor companies like Home Depot and Lowe’s CEOs, who earned $2.8 million and $6.1 million respectively.

The Slashgear story suggests Menard is also tightfisted about safety. “In 2017, a 27-year-old worker at a Minnesota store was killed when his forklift tipped over, trapping him underneath. Four years later, another tragedy struck when a 19-year-old trainee at a different Minnesota location was crushed by a collapsing stack of lumber during a forklift operation. His family’s wrongful death lawsuit claims he was left unsupervised to manage a load far beyond what his forklift could handle. Minnesota OSHA later fined Menards $25,000 after the 2021 case.”

Customers have also sued over safety, the story noted. “In Illinois, a shopper struck by a forklift received a six-million-dollar jury verdict… In Michigan, a St. Joseph County jury found Menards negligent after an employee attempted to retrieve large plastic bins from a high shelf, which fell and struck 79-year-old Bill McBride, who later died from a brain bleed. The jury awarded $4.58 million to McBride’s estate… As of October 2025, the company’s appeal is still pending.”

Ironically, for all his efforts to cut costs, Menard has in recent years seen the growth of his net worth slow. In the past year it actually declined by 10%. Perhaps all those court cases are catching up to him.