IMHO, this incident takes the cake in my experience…
Several weeks prior to vehicle production launch, there is a protective cover on a critical component made of a particular blend of nylon-6 with <5% regrind (recycled nylon). Some bozo in purchasing department finds an alternate supplier who can supply the same component in nylon-6 for 3 pennies less per component but overlooks (or maybe doesn’t know better) that the material is 100% regrind nylon-6. Idiotic management applauds the change and signs off without proper validation testing.
A few weeks later, production has launched but this particular component fails to pass production validation due to moisture absorption and warping. A few thousand vehicles are parked. After a few days of chaos and panic, some heads roll and huge $$$ (I think $10 million+ in 1990s money) is spent to replace the bad components.
Mine is the constant low level cheapness with paper towel dispensers. These are made to dispense a tiny amount of towels per action, and then delays between cycles. When you are paying your employees big Bux, you are losing dollars by making them wait , and saving pennies.
Personal experience:
Worked for a very profitable company (multiple billions in revenue) that was in a market where quality was very important. CEO took the company from deep in debt to no debt and piles in the bank by focusing on quality and laser focus on the customer (high tech businesses in this case).
CEO leaves and new CEO brings in his Ivy League MBA buddies to run the company. Some of the dumb small things:
Locked some restrooms to save money on cleaning costs
Removed 1/3 of light bulbs in hallways to save energy (at places that spent hundreds of thousands a month on electricity)
Dumb medium things:
Delayed or removed preventative maintenance activities. Think save money on your car by not changing the oil.
Dumb big things:
Close down highest quality facility and try to move it to a third world county to save on labor. Lost all customers of that facility as they didn’t want the low quality junk.
All of these led to the once very profitable company to bankruptcy, broken apart, and sold piecemeal to former competitors.
This was a state agency. They Negotiated a lease for office space that would save them $5000 a year in rent. But since it would cost $10,000 to make the move, the lease wasn’t approved.
It made sense in one way: the money would have come in a lump sum in one year’s budget and the savings would show up over several years. People would attack the $10k as waste and ignore the long term.
I was going to a conference in Oakland, but because of corporate requirements to pick the cheapest flight that lands within x miles I had to fly into San Jose. The $140 cab ride more than made up the difference.
My personal favorite: fire employees and hire contractors. Comes out of a different part of the budget and is reported differently. Is it cheaper? No. Have we lost years of in-house history and experience? Yes. Is it faster? No. In fact, it’s much, much slower. But it looks great on the books.
I worked for a company who’s division president used to love to make symbolic gestures. One of them was preventing the supply room from buying pads of paper or pens for employee use. This lead to smart-asses (like me) writing memos with crayons on the back of discarded documents.
Stupid things that wasted labor. Outdated office equipment or equipment incompatible with other other equipment. Shortages of equipment to cut costs. All never showing up on the books but costing a ton in wasted labor.
Back in the 90s I had a client negotiate a promotion with Bass Pro Shops, the hunting, fishing and all-around outdoors giant. It was a great deal, and it would have given us access to the BPS mailing list.
The only thing Bass insisted on was that any mailings go first class, partly because they didn’t want to be associated with tacky bulk mailings, but also because they knew that third-class mail to rural areas could take forever to be delivered.
Our client didn’t want to first class postage. Given the size of the mailing the difference would have amounted to less than $1,000 overall. Everyone tried to tell the client that postage was not the place to go cheap, to no avail. Bass refused to budge and killed the deal. No cross-promotion, no getting to use the BPS name, no mailing list, nothing.
Our local branch…which composed of two Big bosses which sucked about 40 percent of the salary…but did almost nothing useful…two secretaries…and about half a dozen actual engineers doing the work “we” all got paid for…
Well, big corporate instituted plan to keep track of pen and paper costs…
So, you had to log in what you took from the supply cabinet. One smart ass took to taking out single pieces of paper at a time. Another one would log in “just looking”. The secretary had to type up all this shit.
I had a performance review. I was a bit peeved that we all did not have our own PC. And I ain’t talking state of the art at the time. I’m talking one step above a teletype machine. Our fucking JOB was writing and modifying code and sending to the “supercomputer” for a “job” to be done.
About a stupid as having full time janitors sharing a damn mop.
Well, they poo poo ed that idea.
Then they asked if I needed a new $500 dollar office chair.
I asked them which engineering account I should charge it to when I was sitting there thinking about X or Y while sitting there NOT being able to get onto the mainframe.
The owner’s mother counts out latex gloves from the box and bags them 10 to a Ziploc, “so the nurses don’t waste them”.
We have about 20 nurses who each see about 5 patients a day, and a lot of wound care cases that take 2-3 sets of gloves. Latex gloves are 6 cents each if you buy them in a single 100 glove box off Amazon. I can’t imagine how much cheaper they are bought in bulk. But still she spends her Friday evenings in the office, counting out 10 latex gloves and putting the pile in a sandwich sized Ziploc, and then writing the size on the front.
Good thing she isn’t paid hourly. So I suppose it only costs us the price of all those Ziploc bags, but jeez, does it seem stupid and petty!
(I stamped my feet, and the order supply guy orders me whole boxes of nitrile gloves. Seniority has its perks.)
That was all too common in the 80’s and 90’s. I was constantly amazed (and said as much) that companies didn’t seem to recognize the business knowledge of their own people.
When I was working as an hourly employee at a major corporation in the early '90s…
One particularly nasty winter I made it to work no matter what the weather was like. Even when we had an ice storm that covered the state with glare ice, I still made it in.
On a certain January day there was a heavy snowstorm in the morning, but being a Michigan boy I just took it slow and easy and made it to work. The security guards said that the facility was closed, but I still ran my card through the reader so there was a record I was there—that turned out to be important.
The next week the word came down from HQ that all exempt (salary) employees would be paid for the snow day, while nonexempt (hourly) employees would not be paid. They said that hourly employees should use a vacation day if they wanted to be paid. Anyone who showed up for work that day (me) was going to be paid for half a day.
This egregious combined act of penny pinching and classism managed to piss off every single hourly employee, as well as a surprising number of salary employees who were shocked at the injustice.
It was the running joke that spring whenever somebody was out sick on a particularly nice day for fishing: “Oh, Joe? He’s out sick today…you know…a snow day.”
I pretty sure that every single affected employee managed to balance the books one way or another, and it’s certain that the company did not come out ahead.
I worked for a chemical company that utilized several bulldozers to move materials stored in large steep piles. The dozers were very old and it cost nearly the price of a new dozer every year to maintain them. It took a serious accident with one of the dozers stalling on a mound of raw materials, flipping, and killing the driver to get the company to replace the dozers.
Back before the Great Recession, I worked for a game company that laid off all our internal devs and outsourced production to a company in China. Among the many other problems with these guys, the most glaring was they didn’t have a working Internet connection in their office.
The executive responsible for that particular business decision was later perp walked out of the building by security when accounting realized the guy had charged a vacation for him and his mistress to a resort in Mexico to his corporate credit card.
Shortly after the state agency where I (fortunately, used to) work took delivery of a pallet of 27" 4K monitors to be distributed to developers who had recently been issued top-of-the-line tablets in addition to their desktops, my infrastructure team — which had been beating its collective head against the wall trying to keep a turkey of a system, foisted on the agency by those selfsame developers, functional — got an email asking if the four of us really needed individual phones.