This CEO had a huge pay-off

Retail giant Target, famous for its red polo shirts and stone-coloured chinos and a teenage bag packer called Alex, recently announced it was closing all its stores in Canada.

Cue 17,600 job losses. The severance pay for all those workers who would now have to look for a new job totals US$56.3m (£37.5m) - according to a blog post by Target's new CEO Brian Cornell - which seems quite healthy all things considered.

Apart from the fact that only totals about $3,198 for each worker, CEO Gregg Steinhafel, who was fired last May, also got a total severance of $61m (£40.6m) - which seems quite healthy all things considered.

Steinhafel was asked to leave after a data breach which affected 70m customers happened under his watch.

Fortune reports that although Steinhafel's public severance was only $15.9m, he also received a "non-qualified deferred compensation" package, a pension plan that he doesn't have to pay back and equity worth about $10m.

All in all, he walked away with a reported $61m. Or about 18,000 times more than the average employee who is being made redundant because the company's senior management, as it admits itself, "tried to do too much, much too fast".

More: Global inequality is so bad it's almost impossible to visualise it

More: World's richest one per cent will soon own same as poorest 99 per cent

More: Is this why the rich get rich and the poor stay poor?