I read the last word wrong at first glance. 
:smack:
I work for one of those Government Corporations. We’re completely self-sufficient but rely on Congress to allocate funds. One year, rather than lift a hiring freeze, somebody on Capitol Hill decided that all existing employees should have two monitors, thereby doubling workload capacity.
They finally authorized hiring some new employees when they realized throwing monitors at the problem didn’t help.
IOW, Congress tried to save at least $30 million/year for new hires by ensuring everyone had two Samsung SyncMasters.
A few…
[ul]
[li]Several years ago the order came in to instruct our electricians to remove all of the fluorescent lights out of the vending machines in order to save electricity costs. These are highly compensated skilled trades who should have been using their time for production equipment maintenance, i.e., it’s not like they had nothing else to do.[/li][li]The new expense reporting system that saves all of the auditors’ time. Great cost save for the company by reducing the number of auditors. But no one considered the lost productivity of the highly paid engineers who have to take an hour for expense reporting versus the 10 minutes it took before.[/li][li]Like others, in the Army we used up our leftover budgets on stupid stuff, too, so that funding would be available next year again, too. I still have my Thermos and my Gerber.[/li][li]The company took away our car allowance and cash-out rights from the balance of our foreign worker housing allowances (complex situation). As a result, nearly everyone’s rent increased to the maximum allowance the following year! There was no prohibition in the rules against rent rebates for cash expenses such as health club memberships, domestic help, etc.[/li][/ul]
Ice isn’t free, that’s true, but the cost of the electricity for running an ice machine isn’t a separate item the way the costs of the C02 and syrup are for a soda machine. So even if there is an increase in the electric bill, that’s not immediately obvious as being due to increased ice usage, while the decrease in the syrup & C02 bill makes the owner think he’s saving money.
A small IT company I worked with bought a safe to store the blank CDs because everybody was stealing a couple once in a while. This was when blank CDs cost something like 5 bucks apiece.
That safe, however, ran them over a thousand.
Now, to be perfectly fair, it also doubled as a space to store the weekly/monthly back-up tapes. But here’s the kicker : there was an electrical fire in the room a few months later. The engineers working that evening had the good idea to dash in there while the fire was still manageable and gather the important stuff that could be reached quickly (like the external drives, the big expensive router, the rolls of Microsoft CD keys…) but they didn’t have the combination to the safe.
So all the backups melted along with the main server. Good show !
This illustrates what I believe is behind much of what is being called “Idiotic Corporate Penny Pinching”. I doubt the the decision to fill the glasses to the brim with ice had anything to do with management being fed-up with the cost of soft drink refills. Soft drinks are cheap. Dirt cheap. Why do you think they offer “free refills”? For about $5 of syrup and CO2, you can pour about 20 drinks. Even if you only charge $1 per drink (and usually, it’s $1.75 or more), you can give everyone 4 refills and stay ahead. I’d guess that on the average, most people get fewer than two refills.
I suspect that management, instead of trying to save money, was trying to make their inventory last until their next shipment. That is, they were running low and figured they would disappoint fewer customers by giving them more ice than would be disappointed by running out.
People are so conditioned to believe that all management decisions are based only on cost, regardless on how small, that they fail to realize that management decisions are more likely based on other factors, ones they are not aware of. Sure, cost is a big factor. Nobody is going to go to a restaurant whose prices are 50% higher than their competition, but they are less likely return to a restaurant they feel is poorly run. When they are told that they can’t have their favorite drink because “we ran out”, many will feel the place is poorly run.
FWIW, the restaurant I worked at instructed us to fill glasses all the way with ice all the time, not just when “inventory was running low”. And they never ran low on syrup or CO2 anyway - the pepsi guys were there every week checking on things.
Taking the coffee pots and coffee, including the privately purchased coffee belonging to the guards, out of the 24 hour truck gate because one of the guards stole a box of creamer from the executive conference room.
We got the pot and coffee back when I marched into the big boss’s office and demanded my people’s privately purchased coffee back. When he said no, I offered to call the police and have him explain this THEFT to them.
Yeah, someone walked into a conference room and took a box of creamer and took it out to the gate after the box in the cafeteria was empty. It isn’t like you didn’t provide this stuff free. You don’t get to ‘confiscate’ a pound and a half of premium coffee as part of petulantly taking their coffee pot away from them.
Was this a cost-saving measure? I truly doubt it, or if it was, it was initiated by someone who didn’t know what the costs were, or the restaurant you worked in made a large percentage of its income from drinks (that is, it was in the days before free refills).
Think about it. If it costs $0.25 for a drink that you sell for $1.75. If you sell 60 per hour, that’s $90/hr. (not counting the overhead). If you cut that cost by half and sell the same number of drinks, that would be $0.125 a drink or $97.50/hr. or a difference of $7.50/hr. So, on a good night, such a practice might bring in an extra $30?
I’m not saying that running low on stock is the only reason for Jackmannii’s experience. There are likely many. Saving on cost (the assumption made) would be low on that list, however.
First, very good point in the latter half of your post.
Second…even small stupidity stories are entertianing…so feel free to share 
I don’t know I have heard that one…so please share
PS…if it involves star gate travel keep it short…
You know what, let’s keep that online application process that’s so outdated it “requires” Internet Explorer (it’s a feature, not a bug!) and so glitchy it randomly sends people rejection notes, sometimes even before they’ve finished applying. Think of all the people it weeds out! It’s not like those people wanted to work anyway. If they did, they would have kept trying. <later> You know, we’re just not attracting quality applicants. Let’s try changing the company name. Maybe we can dazzle them with words.
Gahhh!
You know, we have rules here against posting in foreign languages. :p:p:p:D
You’re probably right…
**Most Idiotic Corporate Penny Pinching Decisions You’ve Encountered
**The company I work for took away the shop employee’s 10 minute break. (They get a half hour unpaid lunch, but no other break.) Some corporate genius multiplied 10 minutes by 5 workdays by 52 or so weeks by the number of shop employees and their average pay and discovered some huge number of dollars. This same genius probably believes that the employees aren’t finding 10 minutes in a day to slip in a break.
Well, I don’t speak Swahili, but I speak enough of that to have gotten my blood pressure up…
It was the owner of the restaurant, who was a cheap SOB in many ways. So say using your math, it’s “saving” him $10/night on average. That’s $3650/year. I guarantee this guy would have sold his children to the circus for an extra $3650/year.
Can you come up with another explanation? You say there are “likely many”. If it’s not a low inventory situation, what else could it have been?
Early 1980’s, working as a developer for a radar system for a major Navy contractor.
We had our own full radar building on site for testing and development. Radar signals were fed into a Radar Data Processor (RDP), which was a 6 ft. tall, about 3 feet on a side cabinet containing hundreds of circuit boards. These boards were custom made at another company building about 45 minutes away. When a board went bad, we ordered another board from the board plant, they’d pull a new test board from stock, and it would be driven over. The techs would open the box, insert the new board, fire up the RDP, run some basic test, and away we’d go.
So one day we get a new board, it’s put in, the RDP is fired up, and the new board doesn’t work. Call up the board plant, send the card back, they test it and say it’s all shorted out, they send another new one (all the while complaining). New one fails. Cards fail in no consistent pattern. This goes on for a while, techs going crazy, looking over the pinouts on the card sockets, anything anyone can think of, no one can find anything wrong. Finally (after a couple of weeks of this facility being shut down and thousands of dollars of cards ruined) the tech takes delivery of a new card, slits the box open, and then sends the card back without taking it out of the box. Card goes back, tested, it’s ruined.
Head tech goes to board plant and wants to see how the boards are tested. Tester explains they are gotten from manufacturing, run through a circuit emulation box, tested, stamped as OK, and sent over to us. Head tech watches this being done, hands the board back to the test guy, tells him to test it again. It fails.
Someone had decided to save a few pennies by buying a cheaper inkpad for the OK stamp, ignoring the requirement that it was non-conductive ink. As soon as the tester stamped the card as passed, the ink randomly shorted connections on the back of the card.