Do they get a commission for participating in the credit card program?
I was working for Hallmark Cards back in the late 90s.
The building campus had grown, building by building so that the oldest part, where the Crown Room cafeteria is, is a quarter mile walk from the newest part. I worked in the new part, the “Rice Innovation Center.” This place was were we came up with new products and businesses for Hallmark to get into - basically, a whole bunch of bright and well paid people, and a whole bunch of consultants. The Rice center was located over the parking garage. It also had a big airy central atrium.
Since our area was so far from the dining room, they would bring hot and cold food carts to the atrium so the bright and well paid people could get a tray of lunch to take back to their desks and continue working.
Towards the end of my time there, some chucklehead decided that the company shouldn’t pay to have two cafeteria workers take food to the Rice Center, that everyone could just walk to the Crown Room.
At that point, faced with the half-mile walk to and from the Crown Room, or taking the elevator down one floor to their car, chose to do the latter. And suddenly, every one of these well-paid people started leaving to drive to a restaurant and took a lunch hour.
But two cafeteria workers were no longer on chucklehead’s budget.
Thank you for Shoebox.
That is all.
Limiting the number of copies we can make on our department’s copier to 10. We now have to fill out a triplicate copy request, walk it over to the print dept, where they use the same copier we have, then pickup our order two days later.
I’d say this costs the college about 400% more in money and lost time. (Don’t tell anyone, but I wait until the clerk who hawks over the copier to go to lunch then make three gazabillion defiant copies).
Ditto when I worked for the DoD. Most years we had $800k- a million to spend the last fiscal quarter. It’s actually kind of difficult to spend this much for a small graphics/printing dept. One year I bought a wholly unessary printing press, other times I ordered enough fancy paper to last a decade (if paper actually lasted that long - paper doesn’t store well).
There used to be a very cool alternative card shop in Kansas City just north of the Country Club Plaza called Middle Class Values. They had a sign on their door relevant to Shoebox:
Because they admittedly copy
independent artists and
small card companies
HALLMARK RESEARCHERS
and other Hallmark departments
ARE NO LONGER
APPRECIATED
IN THIS STORE
Chicago Public Schools privatized all of their custodial needs to Aramark and principals often had to refill paper towel dispensers or mop spills as well as buy custodial items out of their own pocket.
Perhaps this isn’t a penny pinching decision so much as its a method for Rahm to give some buddies money.
The store currently in that location is called Perfect Scents. While it specializes in perfume oils, they still carry a great selection of hard-to-find-elsewhere cards.
I’ve never been in either store - I just see it walking past after a visit to The Peanut. They no longer have the sign, but I remember an ABC 20/20 report about Hallmark “researchers” buying one of every card in the shop to duplicate.
How was a cab ride of that fare authorized? It makes no sense. You could have taken CalTrain and BART (it would have taken along time but if the company wants to save money…)
My Philly employers would have freaked out at the idea of telling someone to take CalTrain and BART, or at least the travel people would have.
One time I had to fly to Sao Paulo, then take a 5h taxi (actually a van) ride, then jump directly into a meeting. Friday, the reverse: grab a sandwich after a meeting, get on the van, take a plane. I asked for the direct flight from Newark, business class; they said “no, travel expenses policy indicates you must travel from your nearest airport”, which meant changing planes in Dallas. I put on my best “oh gosh” email voice and pointed out that according to company policy I was entitled to fly first class, as I’d be going directly to and from meetings, and doesn’t it make more sense to fly direct for a lower cost and several hours less travel time? The travel office lady provided cost estimations including cab from the office to Amtrak in Philly, train, then cab from NYC to Newark airport…
The subway from Philly to Trenton and Trenton to Newark was $12, less than either of those cabs. Eventually I got my direct flight, but… public transportation, what’s that?
It’s almost like it never occurred to anyone to bring a lunch. Or even order in. 
Be careful what you wish for. It’s possible to construct a real nightmare itinerary using public busses in most any US city. Once they realize it saves money from their budget, regardless of what it does to your productivity and morale, it’ll be Katy bar the door.
I’ve found that there are some “sales guy business travel” norms that are rarely every violated, no matter how much cost cutting there is. One of them is “intra-city travel is done in cabs, not public transit”.
Also, “one beer per airport stop is expensible” and “you get the airline points for your air travel”.
Do companies actually micro-manage types of transit (cabs versus public)? I haven’t had that experience. I used to travel extensively for business and would use whatever made the most sense: public transit in San Francisco or urban Sweden, rental cars for multi-week trips to small Oklahoma towns, cabs sometimes too. Even those minibus public taxis on the Cayman Islands got a $2 line item in my expense reports. It would be weird if they refused a cheaper public transit expense over a cab ride.
This may be apocryphal, but I read somewhere that several years ago American Airlines reduced the number of pimento olives in their first class salads and saved $1.5 million in one year. My guess is nobody noticed they were an olive short, but it is rather petty given the price of tickets.
I worked at a place whose CFO decided that, no, the company got all the airline points for a few years.
By “company” he meant himself, as it turned out, and he was also helping himself to quite a lot of the company’s money. He was perp-walked out by the police after a few years of this and spend some time in the klink.
What’s surprising about all this is… well, do you remember in “Goodfellas,” after they pull off the Lufthansa heist, Robert De Niro tells all the conspirators not to buy anything expensive for a long time, and some idiot shows up with his wife wearing a $10,000 fur coat? This guy was like that guy. He was the most brazen thief ever. He was working in a job that could never have paid for than $100,000 USD a year, and yet he drove a new Mercedes replaced every year, wore $600 bespoke shirts from Savile Row tailors and had original, valuable art all over the office with little tags reminding everyone they were his, he was just lending them to the workplace.
But he cancelled the fresh fruit for the employees that had usually been offered up in the cafeteria.
A co-worker at a previous job was able to game the travel policy by showing that it saved the company $1200 for him to fly from Chicago to Tokyo with a 3 day layover in Hawaii vs flying direct.
:D:D:D
I recall once a more expensive hotel in San Francisco was within per diem (for SF) but a cheaper one across the bay was not (for Oakland or wherever). They cared where the bed was, not where the meeting was.
I once was dealing with some feds who started having to fly in the night before because of a change in rental car policies. Instead of using one of the companies that allow you to bypass the counter, they had to get the cheapest car, even if it meant an off-airport shuttle and waiting in line for an hour. So there wasn’t enough time to fly in that morning and pick up a shared car. But it was ok to bill two hotel rooms.