Investing

24/7 Wall St. Most Overpaid CEO Of The Day: Pier 1 (PIR) CEO Alex Smith

Pier 1 Imports (PIR) shareholders have been through a painful quarter. Stock in the company have dropped over 40% in the last 90 days. That got worse today. PIR said its same-store sales for the second quarter fell 1.7 percent.…

By Douglas A. McIntyre
Published September 3, 2008, 10:03am ET · 1 min read

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HousePier 1 Imports (PIR) shareholders have been through a painful quarter. Stock in the company have dropped over 40% in the last 90 days.

That got worse today. PIR said its same-store sales for the second quarter fell 1.7 percent.

Pier 1 CEO Alex Smith has not participated in too much of the company’s pain. He made a base salary of $1 million last year and got a $750,000 bonus. His total compensation was over $7.7 million. Mr. Smith even got a car allowance of over $19,000.

Pier 1 has lost over $300 million in market cap in a few short months, about half the company’s total value. Mr. Smith probably has not taken a 50% pay cut.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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Douglas A. McIntyre

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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