Ma Yanli didn’t think twice. One early morning last winter, she saw her employee Li Jie arrive with a red face, purple ears, and hands so stiff she could barely move them. She had made the trip to work on an electric scooter, like almost the entire team.
Ma owns a beef hotpot restaurant chain in Jiaozuo, in China’s Henan province. That image stayed with her, and months later she decided her best employees shouldn’t have to keep enduring the cold or bad weather to get to their shifts.
On September 24, she took them to a BMW dealership and told them it was for a meeting. Some of them discovered there that the cars were theirs. Each cost 300.000 yuan, about 45.000 dollars, and Ma had paid for them in full two weeks earlier. That same day, a white BMW was registered in Li Jie’s name, without her paying a single cent.
Ma didn’t ask them to sign any agreement in return, either. She said her business’s success was the result of everyone’s hard work and that she believed they should share in it directly. Li Jie summed it up this way: “I’m so excited! I never even dared to imagine something like this before”.
