One company I worked for had a bunch of layoffs back at HQ. So they let the admins go, including the ones who were assigned to the VPs of sales and marketing. Now guys making running divisions are having to create their own graphs for presentations. That’s an effective use of salary.
I am so stealing this.
Defense contractor I worked for decided to eliminate coffee as a perq despite the face that at least 25% of their workforce were ex-officers or -NCOs – you know the type with the mug grafted to their forefinger. At least they weren’t cruel enough to replace them with the vending machines, just took away the Bunn drip brewers, citing that it was running them $50,000 a month to supply the coffee.
Six months later they were back. I would imagine the drop in productivity was greater.
I don’t even like coffee, but if I’m ever in charge, the caffeinated coffee (as well as tea, soda and so forth) will be free but we’re going to charge for the decaf.
The dumbest thing my employer (the voters) did was to elect a dimbulb governor who made my life miserable as a state worker. So, I retired. I hear it took 3 people to replace me.
This doesn’t quite qualify, but is a business decision that seems extremely stupid that was presumably designed to get more revenue.
I worked in a cell phone refurbish shop. The ways that the owner pinched pennies are not going to be mentioned, because they weren’t all that dumb. However, he would like to buy accessories in bulk cheaply in hopes that one of his customers would eventually want them and could get a good price for them because no one else had them. So our warehouse area slowly became more and more full of pallets of crap that he hoped to sell eventually but wasn’t part of what got used up in the main line of business. Since he couldn’t bear throwing any of it away, as things got worse he needed more storage space than he had in that building. So he rented a moving truck. Employees loaded the inside of the truck with the crap he was never going to sell, and the truck sat there by the loading dock for months. I don’t know how long - I was laid off before it moved. The assistant manager who was responsible for renewing the lease on the truck each month, reporting that the mileage hadn’t changed, seemed to imply that the owner was absolutely nuts to do this, hoarding junk for no good reason, but when you’re just the guy who carries out the owner’s wishes, what are you going to do?
The stupidest thing ive ever heard of is a health system (something like Inova? Health System) banning plastic straws from all of their hospitals in order to be more environmentally conscious. This is despite the uproar from one of the most vulnerable groups who often depend on hospitals, disabled patients, who tried to communicate to these medical professionals that they depended on these straws in and out of the hospital in order to simply accomplish some of the most basic executive functions that are involed with day-to-day living.
So lets think about this: hospitals, institutions whose SOLE PURPOSE is to treat and/or heal the sick and injured and dying are placing the importance of promoting a self-image of environmental consciousness at the expense of/over the quality of life and wellness of one of the most vulnerable and in need groups of people who depend on hospitals?
This is insane to me. The suffering from the reduction in quality-of-life in disabled hospital patients that will be unquestionable and unavoidable as a result of this decision has been determined to be of less importance to these supposed places of healing than a token effort to contribute to environmental awareness in order to secure effective PR.
I am just gobsmacked. I know i didnt provide a link. If anyone wants me to add one i will. Im just lazy now.
Do they really notice a difference between paper and plastic straws?
Consolidating desk space repeatedly (including purchase of all-new desks and professional moving services after set-up) until they finally installed an expensive hoteling system. For people who are 95% on a customer site, hoteling is an OK solution. It is still much nicer to have a set shared desk where you can keep the items you need on the days you’re in office. But these numbskulls even made the daily HQ workers sign in for their desks every day.
The result, of course, was a near shutdown as 14 year employees with set jobs and requirements got up from their desks and walked down the hall for a form every time they needed one. They had no place to store a stack of the ones they used six times per week. I think the management was hoping we would all go buy wheelie briefcases and schlep all our needed supplies home every day.
And of course,multiple companies have insisted upon providing office space for employees who would much prefer to provide their own. Every one of these places has an apocryphal story of the lazy employee who sat around home doing next to nothing for years on end and ruined it for everyone.
There’s never any epilogue describing the manager who failed to notice no work was being accomplished and what may have happened to him/her. And there’s never any recognition of the many lazy employees who sit around the office doing next to nothing for years on end, but are kept on because they start doing nothing really early every morning.
"…depended on these straws in and out of the hospital in order to simply accomplish some of the most basic *executive *functions that are involed with day-to-day living. "
Executive? 
What functions? Why not stainless steel or paper straws?
Drinking? Taking medication? Neither paper nor steel straws are flexible, steel heats up when used with hot drinks and paper tend to collapse too quickly.
There’s been a lot of talk about it here too; I’m generally a bit sceptical about the backlash for cafes, as there’s no requirement for places like that to carry them, and people who genuinely need straws to drink tend to bring their own when they go out anyway (even if cafes do have straws, they may not be very good), but hospitals aren’t always somewhere people plan to go and it’s where people learn to deal with their new requirements.
At least you guys get pencils and paper, even if you have to walk down the hall to get it.
Deliveries of pens and notepads are so rare in my office that people now horde them and lock them in drawers.
Straws are left in drinking cups at hospitals for hours. Maybe times have changed, but I’ve never used a paper straw that completely sucked (or actually didn’t suck, didn’t work for shit).
I work for a very large technology firm.
I originally worked for another company that was eventually bought by said firm. They always had coffee / tea available.
When we were bought, there went the coffee etc.
Supposedly it had been a company policy forever not to provide coffee, so we were just being treated like everyone else had been always.
But still - how costly is it to provide coffee service? It’s a bonding / social thing and saves a certain amount of employee time (no need to go downstairs to the snack shop or whatever).
When we were at an offsite location, the project manager paid out of his own pocket (I think). When we were moved to a main office, there were these bizarre Keurig-like machines that people could use, for a fee (if you didn’t have change, too bad).
Now, I don’t do coffee and almost never drink tea, so it affected me personally not at all. But really, it seems chintzy. It’s the only private-sector employer I’ve ever been at that did not have at least a Mister Coffee available.
Public sector is different: when I’m at a client location, there’s none provided. At one such, there was a “coffee club” where you chipped in 3 bucks a month and shared the task of making coffee etc.
We had paper straws when I was in kindergarten. The straw would collapse before the half-pint was empty. The trick was to smush the collapsed mouth end completely flat, then smush it again at a right angle to the first smush. That made a square cylinder at the end.
It was going to collapse again, real soon, but you could get a few more swallows. After that, you had to rip the mouth end off to expose a dry end further down. If you’ve got problems with fine motor control, these may not be techniques you can use.
This was also back when, as a kindergartner, you didn’t want to just drink out of your little carton. Back then the cartons were made of heavily waxed paper and there were often little hunks or flakes of wax in the milk. You wanted the protection of that straw. The tops opened differently, too.
In first grade, non-waxed milk cartons were developed. They were harder to open, but straws were less necessary.
Ha! When I was in kindergarten, our milk czame in small, half-pint glass bottles with foil tops. You just too the foil top off, and drank directly from the bottle. (Roll the removed foil into a tight ball, and it was better than a spitball to throw.)
Out fine motor skills were developed by inverting the unopened bottle of milk on the lunchroom table, then carefully peeling down the edges of the foil cap, and then quickly sliding the flat foil out from under the bottle without disturbing it. That left a full half-pint bottle inverted on the lunch room table, with no cap – so when the surly janitor removed it, the milk spilled all over the table & floor. (Gee, I wonder why that janitor was so surly, anyway?)
One food wholesaler company I worked at had a good method of doing this, Besides the coffee station, they had vending machines for cold cans of soda pop. Priced way below standard – in early 2000’s, it was priced at 15¢ a can.
But they stocked it only with the company house brand of soft drinks. A cost savings, and a way to get people to try the company house brand. Every few months, they would distribute Employee Discount Coupons, which you could use at any of their stores for cartons of soda – but only the house brand. Many of us employees soon decided that the house brand cola tasted just as good as Coke or Pepsi. Same with the house brand coffee.
One of the most dominant hardware/tool/small appliance corporations in the US shut down the packing plant close to where I grew up. All employees were laid off, and all pensions evaporated. Some years later the plant was reopened (surprisingly, the lost pensions never reappeared.) Some employees were rehired, but most of the plant was staffed by a temp agency. I worked there as a temp for an entire summer break in college. Every time I couldn’t come in, for whatever reason, I was “let go” only to be rehired my next available day. I learned dozens of different jobs there because I was never sent back to the same line.
Lots of stupidity here. But I could write a book about education.
One elementary school I worked for decided to buy only one copy of each workbook for each subject (math, reading, language arts, science, social studies) per classroom. Teachers were told to make copies. (Copyright? Who cares about the law?!) Then we were told we could only make 2 copies per student per week. The school was also rather stingy about construction paper, and the very low-income community did not buy notebooks and paper for primary students. Principal of said school was not an educator, but a political appointee. There was a new coat of paint on the exterior of the buildings every summer but a class of 22 6th graders had to share 9 social studies books. A parent complained that I would not let students take the books home, so the principal blamed me for the shortage of books. But, because he wanted to look like the hero, he found that there were surplus copies of the book in the warehouse. He never considered getting more until parents complained. I confess, I learned from that. If I can’t get administration to solve a problem, let parents know. They will get admin to do something.
Copyright laws are meaningless to penny pinchers. A principal told a band director to buy only 1 copy of a score and copy it for the whole band (very illegal). Principal knew so little about music that he was outraged that different instruments play different parts in different keys, and told band director he needed to change the entire system.
Where we are now, I am virtually unemployable. Because I’m bad? No, because I have more than 12 years of experience and a Master’s degree. They don’t want to pay me what the union-negotiated contract demands. I would take less, but they can’t offer that to me. The schools around here hire teachers who just graduated. One district won’t renew most contracts so few people move up the pay scale. Another hires teachers before they finish student teaching and hire long-term subs to fill the position until the new hire can start.
I don’t know if this was done for cost-saving reasons, but given the organization and how it looked, I think it was. Years ago I was a computer support person for a county 911 agency. We were in the basement of the county administrative building. Our computer room was in the basement also, but on the other side of the floor (think east wing, west wing kind of thing). The computer room had the appropriately large battery backup system and generator in case of city power failures.
The room where the dispatchers were was not. So yeah, the servers would be merrily chugging away with no users to bother them!
The way we discovered this was another apparent cost-saving trick: we were in hot central California where it’s common for PG&E to cut power to “non-essential” homes and businesses on the hottest days of the summer so that the whole grid wouldn’t collapse. I don’t know if the county admin/supervisors volunteered this, or if PG&E made the decision, but our building was on the list of places to have their power cut.
You know what happens when a 911 dispatch room goes blackout? You witness a breathtaking level of professionalism with flashlights and personal cell phones. (And that’s not sarcasm.)
That, at least, is the idea of eating your own dog food. The company stocked what it sold and made it available for free or dirt cheap to employees. I worked somewhere where the coffee was done by an outside vendor. In an attempt to cut costs, they went from an okay but not great vendor (something like Aramark) to a local vendor about 1000 feet away that actually did their own roasting right on that site. Somehow that local place always managed to do a terrible job roasting beans (or perhaps they bought the cheapest ones possible or a combination) to the point where that company had a reputation in town for being the absolutely worst coffee available. The stuff was only drinkable as a brand new pot and ideally brewed with the water from the water cooler instead of the sink.