Remember the rich young entrepreneur in Seattle who took a drastic pay cut so that all his employees could make at least $70K and then buy houses and start families and things like that?
Odds are good that you do. Now, do you remember how a ton of media outlets did stories on this guy and nearly all of them somehow never got around to mentioning that this benevolent entrepreneur is an evangelical Christian?
BBC just did an update on the man that was thorough and entertaining. But guess what part of the story the Beeb team barely mentioned?
In 2015, the boss of a card payments company in Seattle introduced a $70,000 minimum salary for all of his 120 staff — and personally took a pay cut of $1m. Five years later he's still on the minimum salary, and says the gamble has paid off…
Raised in deeply Christian, rural Idaho, Dan Price is upbeat and positive, generous in his praise of others and impeccably polite, but he has become a crusader against inequality in the US.
"People are starving or being laid off or being taken advantage of, so that somebody can have a penthouse at the top of a tower in New York with gold chairs.
"We're glorifying greed all the time as a society, in our culture. And, you know, the Forbes list is the worst example — 'Bill Gates has passed Jeff Bezos as the richest man.' Who cares!?"
It would help if this BBC reporter looked at a map.
Price attended a Christian high school in Nampa, Idaho, which is right on I-84. It’s right next to Boise and hardly a rural outpost like, say, places like Caldwell, Sandpoint or Stanley.
(I was just in central Idaho last week researching a story on how the stargazing there is the best in the country so yes, a lot of the Gem State -- garnet, jasper, opal, jade, topaz, zircon, and tourmaline for starters -- is sparsely populated. But Nampa isn’t one of those places).
He’s not from some ’ole holler somewhere.
Back in 2015, when this story broke, my colleague Bobby Ross noted there were tons of religion ghosts in the coverage. Examples: Price’s alma mater is Seattle Pacific University, which is an evangelical institution up here in my town. He graduated from a Christian high school in Nampa and his quotes in a lot of interviews sounded rather biblical.
But somehow, reporters in all sorts of media kind of missed the Christian implications of Price’s decision.
It is frustrating how the moment some evangelical Christian does something weird, many reporters are quite quick to attribute his or her craziness to their faith. But when an evangelical does something amazingly well, the religion angle goes out the window. #SIGH
The BBC story does have some other interesting stuff:
But there are other metrics that Price is more proud of.
"Before the $70,000 minimum wage, we were having between zero and two babies born per year amongst the team," he says.
"And since the announcement - and it's been only about four-and-a-half years - we've had more than 40 babies."…
Before taking a pay cut, Price was the cliché of a young white tech millionaire. He lived in a beautiful house overlooking Seattle's Puget Sound, he drank champagne in expensive restaurants.
Afterwards, he rented his house out on Airbnb to help stay afloat.
Doesn’t that sound kind of like a mirror image of the rich young ruler written up in three Gospels?
Price’s faith was dealt with in a somewhat better way five years ago in inc.com.
Being comfortable wasn't a goal in Price's family when he was growing up in rural southwest Idaho, near Nampa. He and his five siblings took turns waking at 5 a.m. to make breakfast before Bible readings and prayers led by their Evangelical Christian parents. On his own, Price spent hours reading Scripture and reached the finals of a national Bible-memorization competition in the fifth and sixth grades. Like his siblings, he was homeschooled until age 12. That's when he rebelled a bit, dying his hair with red and blue streaks and painting his nails like the punk rockers he listened to.
Price learned to play bass guitar and formed a Christian rock trio called Straightforword (spelling intentional), which was successful enough to tour and get national airplay. At 16, when the band broke up, he decided to help the struggling owners of bars and coffee shops where they had played by negotiating cheaper rates from the credit card processing companies, which offered little more than exorbitant prices and spotty service.
So we do have an idea of how Price started out in life as a Christian. But how did his faith influence his decisions to choose downward mobility? I am not saying that Price makes it easy for reporters to know this. Watch the Kelly Clarkson Show segment above this post and Price doesn’t mention his faith at all.
However, being that he attended SPU, he must have a church somewhere in town. But where is that? And where is that childhood faith today? Is he a major donor there? You know, follow the money.
This is where all the folks reporting on this guy have failed. Unless he’s dumped his beliefs, Price’s actions have got to be coming from his read of Scripture.
I’m just waiting for a writer who can draw that out of him.