I’d say, the whole practice of replacing live phone operators with automated voice-mail trees. Adds to the customers’ annoyance and eliminates jobs!
Personally, it’s a tie.
Between a local super super store charging 3p or 5p for carrier bags (two different sizes). They are never ever quiet. People drive up to an hour to visit this store so unless something is really wrong they can afford to give free bags.
And the general practice of moving call centre jobs to India et al. In the main they’re competent but communication is challenging. But that’s a whole other rant.
Nope, City Tech. The Harvard of the west side of Jay Street. (Polytechnic is on the east.)
My favourite example of this is often cited as an example of good business sense, so YMMV. I always found ridiculous that American Airlines bragged about saving thousands of dollars by eliminating on olive from their salad. It seems to me than in the perspective of how this is a godzillion dollars a year operation, this is a terrible way to go down in history as a cheapskate.
I reckon this is more complex than you make out. After all, everyone knows that Asda is cheap, and Waitrose is expensive, but only a minority of people ever actually pay attention to the prices of individual items. And even if they do, they’re so tied up with working out whether the Two For £4 on brand X works out cheaper than 20% Off Y that there’s no possibly way they can remember what the other store charged last week.
So how do you make yourself look inexpensive? Look like you don’t waste money. Appear to be cutting every possible corner to lower prices that you can’t even spare a few pence for bags.
After posting: it’s exactly the philosophy that AA opted for in a far more obvious way.
Another airline-related cutback is that some US carriers have eliminated the free magazines they used to provide onboard (not the inflight magazine, but the copies of general interest magazines). I remember reading that one justification was the fuel savings. The pile of magazines can’t weigh more than ten pounds or so, so how much fuel could they possibly be saving? And don’t they get those magazines for free anyhow?
And then there’s the elimination of free meals in coach class.
Some places here use this as a way to encourage people to reuse bags or bring their own reusable shopping bags made of cloth, etc., for environmental reasons. It might not just be penny-pinching.
An Indian restaurant that I’ve been to a couple of times and my friends frequent often tried to save money by stopping providing free popadoms at the start of the meal. Lots of the Indian restaurants around here don’t provide them free but have never provided them free.
Anyway, we went in one day, no free popadoms (meal came to about $80 in total) so my friend went spare, complained to the manager and got her free popadoms.
Next time I was in town I saw a big sign outside the same restaurant “NOW WITH FREE POPADOMS!!!”
They’d rather tell you it’s for a good reason (‘use less fuel’=‘save the planet’) than admit it’s a simple saving. And I don’t think they ever got the magazines for free, didn’t they always print them themselves?
Huge savings made here. Big money. Seriously.
They probably technically breached laws regarding pricing. Promotional items must have been displayed at the higher price for x days, etc.
But hey, you can’t help but admire them!
I’m not talking about the official inflight magazines (like Hemispheres on United) but the general interest magazines, like Time, People, the Economist, etc. I assume that the publishers provide these magazines at low or no cost, for the exposure. As for the elimination of the free meals, the problem now is that everyone brings their own food on board, so you wind up with all of this random smelly stuff and additional garbage to deal with on board. (And this is complicated by the ban on bringing liquids through the security checkpoint.)
What’s a popadom? Is it like a fortune cookie?
I nominate hotels that make a huge show of asking you to reuse towels for environmental reasons, when it’s pretty obvious from the rest of their operation what kind of “green” causes they are committed to.
Lowballing employees’ salaries while expecting said employees to work overtime.
Robin
Along those lines, hiring more adjunct faculty to keep us under half-time so they don’t have to offer benefits (which I wouldn’t take anyway, because they suck, and I have much better benefits through my wife. I could use the extra hours, though.).
I would suspect not. I suspect they’re getting at least a flat fee. Easier to court producers of free newspapers? Or, on the other hand, to reduce the amount of clutter to be cleared away onboard…
And of course this all is now the cabin crew’s responsibility. Thing is, they’re expendible, because no matter how many quit, there’s applicants waiting.
They are an absolute requirement of a British/Irish curry. With dips, to cover the time between arriving and getting food.
Quite why they have taken this role is one for academics to ponder. It’s just expected that from sitting down, you’ll have a fried item to nibble on.
(Actually, the ones in that link look rubbish.)
I’ve only seen hotels asking that we request for our bed linens to be changed daily, if we so desire, to save on energy. That’s no big deal to me, as long as there are clean linens on when I arrive. Heck, I don’t change my own sheets daily.
Towels? No way. I want plenty of clean towels in my hotel room, and no, I’m not reusing them. My kids are gross and messy, and those little hotel towels are too small anyway.
I worked in an office where we were required to use both sides of every sheet of A4 paper - any printed output (including printed paper coming in as correspondence) that was no longer required was to be stacked face down in a special tray and was loaded into the laser printers and copiers - if you wanted to use new paper (and could justify it), you had to put it in the bypass tray of the printer/copier.
This often caused paper jams in the machines - sometimes requiring hours of wasted time carefully dismantling them to remove some little torn nugget of scrunched up paper that had worked its way into some vital working component.
it also caused confusion - if your page got turned over, it just looked like a different one and more time was wasted trying to work out which side of the paper you should really be reading.
In a couple of cases, it just chanced to happen that a report came out on the back of paper that had been used once for the same report, but a couple of months ago - causing more wasted time generating a purchase order or sales analysis based on the wrong data.
In fact that should have been the breaking point where common sense prevailed, but alas, no. The solution to this problem was not to just use fresh paper, but instead, before putting paper into the scrap tray, to sit and strike through every page with a pencil - so that there would no longer be any confusion over which side was the older printing.
We should have just used it once and sold it for recycling - this was back in the days when you could get people to pay you to collect your scrap office paper.
I was thinking this when I was in my hotel in Las Vegas, where they used compact fluorescents and asked that you don’t expect all towels to be washed. In Las Vegas – where most hotels use more light that some small cities.
Though, to be fair, this was the Mandalay Bay, which is somewhat restrained in their lighting. And they only said they wouldn’t wash any towels hung up; dirty towels could be left on the floor. It doesn’t make muce sense to wash the clean ones.
But the ultimate in cheap was years ago when I worked at OTB, where they refused to pay anyone for Christmas day because everyone had the day off.