You know what? You are absolutely correct. There only two possible reasons; a low inventory situation or the owner is just plain stupid. Since you say it was not a low inventory situation, then the owner must be stupid. Glad we settled that.
Tell me, do you know if this the case with the restaurant Jackmannii went to?
No, do you? Seriously, it being a cost cutting measure, in a thread about stupid cost cutting measures, makes perfect sense. Why you feel a need to defend stupid cost cutting measures as most likely being about something else is beyond me. But so be it, everyone’s a rational actor, no business owner ever tried to save a few bucks here and there, an extra $30 or $10 a night in your pocket is meaningless to a Croesus such as yourself.
Isn’t that illegal?
It’s a state by state matter.
Nolo
Back in the mid 90’s, we were an engineering development team for a fairly small company which was growing by leaps and bounds, signing new products with major OEMs left and right. Our test group was in a different city… We had heard rumors of a major new project coming our way but, strangely, we weren’t getting any specifics or detailed requirements. We found out (via one of our customers) that to save money, a VP in the other city had decided the test team would take over all development activities and our site would be reduced or eliminated. So they gave a huge project to a team with no experience, no starting base, and no programming skills outside of simple test scripts.
Needless to say, the last I heard was that the product would literally catch on fire if operated for more than a few hours.
It depends on the state.
This is an absolutely awesome story! Thank you.
Decades ago I worked for a Gulf Coast Hotel. The hotel is a thin tower, rooms and suites on south, facing the water and rooms, elevators and utilities on the north face. The rooms have floor to ceiling glass with sheers and black-out drapes. The south facing drapes were baked for years by the Gulf Coast sun and were dry rotting and would occasionally tear. After years of requesting some budget for drapes, corporate decided that we need to repair these drapes not replace them.
So we hired a seamstress, bought equipment for the seamstress, blocked out rooms so drapes could be “repaired”. The idea was to use one set to repair several others. Well, the seamstress did what she was hired to do and we re-installed the drapes. Within days every “repaired” set of drapes were torn off the rods because the new hems in the dry rotted material was a fantastic perforation. If the guest used their hand instead of the drapery cords to open or close the drapes, the drape would tear right along the new hems and fall to the floor. We had to find a new position for the seamstress and had tell corporate, we need new drapes NOW.
Well, that’s another kind of stupidity entirely (storing backups in the same place as the main).
But it was a safe place.
flees
This one isn’t too bad in the long run, but I am amused by the printing and effort it took for the sustainability team to make labels to stick on every dispenser: “Need less? Pull sooner”
And yeah, coffee. We were asked to find ways to cut costs. We basically have us and our computers. We’re essentially paperless except for maybe a notepad and occasionally printouts for meetings. We get minimal professional development. The only thing we could cut was coffee/tea/hot chocolate. So the per-cup cost of each was calculated and someone had to spend time collecting and depositing the proceeds. Luckily they dropped this after things levelled off because of bigger cuts in other areas.
I once worked in a place where everything we wrote had to be in four copies, so we had a stack of pull-out carbon books, with four sheets, each interspersed with cheap carbon paper. When collating them, you rip out the carbons and put the pages in four stacks. which would all be discarded after single use. (Mechanical Underwood typewriters, in those days.)
One day the boss walked through and saw that somebody has grabbed one and written a phone message for an absent colleague and left it on his typewriter. The boss had a fit and demanded that people stop wasting those expensive pull-out carbon books.
In the boss’s office, his secretary has a little pad of those pink “while you were out” memo notes. One sheet from that pad was costing more than an entire four-part carbon book. Single Post-its cost even more. So it would have been cheaper for his secretary to come and get a stack of our carbon books to leave notes for the boss.
That it took this long to mention the start-up I worked at in 2011, and that they cut costs by not paying their employees, illustrates what an unpleasant experience that must have been. I really liked the people I worked with, but when another job came up, I took it.
I did get paid because I was working for a temp agency, but yeah, I heard plenty of stories from the regular employees about all the delays in payroll, in addition to the chief pharmacist buying paper towels, trash bags, etc. himself and not getting reimbursed for them.
:smack:
Incredibly, the company is still in operation.
I travel for work. I and the other road employees have a company car. To save on fuel costs we got a major gas company credit card. We already had company Visa cards. The fleet gas cards give a 1.5% reduction in the pump price at payment. I regularly pay much more than 1.5% more to use the gas card. We also have drive out of the way to get the right brand gas. At the station nearest the office, The company loses about five cents a gallon compared to the station across the street.
I didn’t experience this myself, so it is a second hand tale. Guy who told it to me worked for a major engineering firm, which I will not name. They had various divisions and some hot-shot accountant decided that each department had to turn a profit.
The engineers liked to consult books and in early days, they would buy any book they wanted to consult. Management decided–quite reasonably–that that was wasteful and set an internal engineering library, which anyone could come and consult and they discouraged book buying by others. Then the aforesaid accountant decreed that the library had to turn a profit. The only way they could was by charging a fee for consulting a book. The department of the consulting engineer was charged the fee. Fewer people consulted books. The library was in a death spiral and ended up charging $15 to see a book. At that point, it became cheaper for each department t buy whatever books they looked at all regularly and set up their informal library. Eventually, thje library folded and they were back to status quo ante.
These stories make me feel better. I knew my place couldn’t be the ONLY place out there that does stuff like this!
2.Another job, a board member who was trying to save money, took out one of the two small bulbs in all the exit lights as well as placed lower wattage lights into a bunch of fixtures. The Fire Inspector dinged us on the exit lights so we had to buy a bunch of bulbs to replace the missing ones, (Board member was later mad with us because we didn’t go to his desk drawer and get all the bulbs he took out, even though we didn’t know about them).
The lower wattage bulbs wreaked havoc with some of the fixtures for some reason. The lights would turn off and back on randomly. The randomness made other board members think something was wrong with the wiring and had three different electricians come out and inspect everything. Each one came out, said everything was fine and sent in their bill. A short time after everyone got used to the random lights, an HVAC guy is there looking at something else, witnesses the light go out that everyone else had grown accustomed to. He moves his ladder over and reads a sticker on the fixture that says “use X watt or higher bulb” and sees that the bulb in the fixture is half of what it should be. He mentions it to someone, who finds a proper bulb, replaces it and suddenly, no more random blinking!
We never tried to do the math, but we were all sure that the three electrician bills and the bulk purchase of light bulbs HAD to cost more than the money saved,
This didn’t happen to me; another Doper posted about it years ago.
He worked at a McDonald’s. The manager noticed that customers would take more of those little pop-top creamer containers than they needed, and toss the unused ones into the trash. He blew a fuse and demanded that the employees dig through the trash and retrieve the unused creamers. The employees refused, so he dug through the trash himself and found a bunch, only they were filthy with grease and ketchup. So he put them all through the industrial dishwasher - only to find that the heat had cooked and curdled the half-and-half inside.
The manager shut up about the creamers after that.
Plus, maintenance is an operating expense, while purchase of new equipment is a capital expense. IANA CPA, but I’m pretty sure that the operating expense is 100% deductible that year, but the cost of the new equipment has to be depreciated over time.
Yeah, I know – the depreciation expense helps you in future years (and I suspect that the old equipment was fully depreciated, so they were seeing no benefit from that), but all too often management’s bonuses are based on this year’s results with little or no income dependent on long-term results.
Don’t think this has been mentioned yet, but it surely must be fairly common: when revenues are down and budgets are tight, declare temporary restrictions on travel! Basically something like: travel is banned except by approval from a senior VP based on a solid business case.
Brilliant! The basic assumption is that most business travel to meetings and conferences is a boondoggle that employees do just for fun, and now that money is tight, you can only do it if there is a valid reason for it! Either the organization has to admit that it’s been throwing money away frivolously for years, or it has to admit that it’s now prohibiting attendance at meetings and conferences that bring tangible benefits.
Yes, for certain theoretical values of “has to.” In practice, my bet is they don’t admit to anything.