Adversarial customer service. They can be fine as long as all goes well, but question a misfilled order or a small overcharge and they stonewall, blame you for their mistakes, or outright go postal on you. The message over all is “We’re happy to lose a customer to gain a few bucks.”
There’s always this tidbit from Wikipedia:
Charming. Gotta love that sort of commitment to their customer base.
Another one from personal experience. A long time ago when I was working 3rd shift at a factory, our bosses wouldn’t let us plug in radios at our work station because the electricity used would cost them too much money.
Because, yeah, when you’re running a plant the size of a city block to run 20 or 30 enormous plastic injection machines, a dozen plug-in radios are really going to make a dent in your electric bills. Cheap dumbasses.
A very large discount airline, operating out of Dublin, will not allow their employees to charge their cell phones using company electricity.
My former employer did this all the time. Of course, they paid embarassingly low and there were few perks to speak of, but they were incredibly cheap.
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Office supplies were a legendary commodity. We would tell employees that they didn’t need pens and paper; they could take notes in Notepad.
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Funds given from the client intended for the employees were discussed with management under hush-hush conditions. They were never released, just held long enough that the client apparently forgot about it, including funds specifically earmarked by the client for one outstanding employee (who later quit due to morale issues).
We had chronic morale problems and turnover. Due to the tiny budget, we made some attempts at morale improvement that just looked pathetic:
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We bought a helium tank to give people balloons if they did well. In lieu of, you know, raises or bonuses.
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When we no longer wanted to spend the money on $5 gift cards, we were given a variety of cheap children’s toys, like that ball-on-a-string-with-a-paddle toy, to give out as recognition for employees, which was received very poorly.
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To recognize a good employee, we were sent to blow kazoos and shout “Wow!”, “Good Job!” at their cubicle en masse. This was done when they and their cubicle neighbors were on the phone with customers! This succeeded admirably, in that it embarassed both the management staff and the recognized employees. Also, the manager refused to accept that we stop when we had numerous complaints, and would continue to recognize even people who expressly asked that we stop. We actually drove one girl to tears from embarassment before it was put to a stop.
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We had an employee lunch. We told everyone not to bring anything. It turned out to be store-brand bread and meat, with ketchup (?) and mustard. No mayo, cheese, pickles, chips, or anything else. Nothing for vegetarians. Also, the management staff was forced to stand in the room and make sure nobody took more than one sandwich.
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We gave out candy that was about 6 months past stale because we got it for free.
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We had an employee “sundae day”. This amounted to store-brand ice cream. No toppings, and one scoop was duly given to each employee.
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We would usually give out cookies (one per employee) until someone complained of the lack of healthy options. So, next time, we gave out little packs of carrots and dip that were intended for children. They also were bought on clearance from some local grocery and many were bad.
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The management-only Christmas “party” (which was over our lunch breaks) was: casseroles and Jello desserts prepared by one of the managers’ wives, sodas (the company did spring for a couple of 24 packs) and a white elephant gift exchange. This was apparently considered a big perk for the overworked supervisor staff by the upper management (!).
At a previous company:
The “not allowed to buy paper clips” mentioned above reminded me of this. Our CEO made that the rule: he apparently decided that it was wasteful having all of these bundles of pages going into folders and filing cabinets with reusable paper clips holding them together. So paper clips were removed from the office supply order list, and we were expected, when filing bundled sheets held with clips, to remove said clip and staple the bundle together, and then file it.
There very quickly arose a black market. One guy with a later shift wandered the office collecting discarded paper clips from copy rooms or anywhere they weren’t obviously being hoarded by someone else. The people in the mail room removed paper clips from incoming mail and stashed them. It was chaos.
And this happened at approximately the same time I, a lowly HR drone, performed some headcount analysis demonstrating that the low morale and lack of training was leading to high turnover in major departments (exceeding 200% a year, and this was a white-collar technology company, not fast food) that cost the company millions of dollars annually.
This was the same company where the CEO sent out a memo announcing that blue pens would be banned from everyone’s desks because he’d read they “didn’t photocopy very well.”
In my exit interview, I told the director of HR the company had eighteen months of viable life yet. I was laughed at. They went Chapter 11 seventeen months later, and was eventually liquidated.
At my current company:
Employees’ one-year anniversary used to be marked with a small plastic keepsake reminiscent of the company’s line of business. (For illustration, imagine Planters employees getting a peanut toy.) Not expensive. Just cute and specific. Also, it was accompanied by a card signed by the CEO.
A couple of years ago, they switched that to an even cheaper small banner thingie, like the rally flags handed out at ball games, with the company logo. No CEO card.
And recently, they switched again, to a $5 Starbucks gift card.
Feel the inspiration.
Gotta say guys, I am really enjoying this thread. Wish I had something to offer here but I really can’t. None of my workplaces have ever been so miserly!
I just remembered that at my first office job out of college, the company was willing to pay for half of a ham for the office christmas party - and even after we had a collection to pay for the other half, they provided a shrinkwrapped/processed ham, like what would be carved for lunchmeat, instead of a real ham on the bone. Horrific.
At a bartending job, the restaurant owner routinely poured the cheapest plastic-bottled vodka he could find, Popov I think, into the Absolut and Grey Goose bottles.
A couple years before that I worked in an office environment as a temp. One day I came in and looked in my mail slot to find a nearly blank sheet of printer paper with the following notice at the top:
It has come to our attention that employees are wasting a significant amount of printer paper. Therefore, incoming faxes are forbidden unless approved by the Business Manager. Also, printer paper must be signed out from [Business Manager’s assistant] on an as-needed basis.
OK, fine, cheapo etc. But this notice was printed at the top of a sheet of otherwise empty paper, and one was placed into the mail slot of every employee in the company. When I read it and looked at the mail boxes, I burst out laughing and assumed it was a joke. The Business Manager’s assistant saw me laughing, and assured me (to her own embarrassment and eye-rolling) that it was real. I knocked on the BM’s door and asked him if he was aware of the irony in getting the message across that way rather than, say, posting it once on the company bulletin board or something. He was not amused.
Here’s a few more:
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We hired a company to run a cafeteria on-site. They also were extremely cheap. They would charge you for plastic silverware and for cups unless you were making an associated purchase. Yogurt and two spoons? Get charged 15 cents for a spoon.
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We had so many broken microwaves in the cafeteria that people would spend nearly all of their half hour lunchbreak waiting in line to heat their food.
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We advertised “free parking” as a job perk… despite being in the middle of nowhere, where a cornfield used to be.
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We would buy construction paper and have employees make holiday decorations rather than buying them. Also, they wanted motivational posters, but they made me draw them on posterboard. The place looked like an elementary school.
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Nearly all of the items we gave as gifts to employees were from the Oriental Trader Company.
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We finally updated to Windows XP in 2006. From Windows 98.
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When I travelled once to train at another location, I got so sick I couldn’t really go to a restaurant, so I headed in to a grocery store and bought food. They got upset at the 60 cent cough drops on the bill and accused me of trying to scam the company.
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An employee was fired for fighting (like physically beating someone up) and managed to get rehired. We caught this while he was 3 or 4 days into training. When we attempted to fire him, we were informed that it would cost too much to hire and retrain for the position.
I wonder what you were supposed to do when you ran out of paper half-way through your business?? I’d open the door and yell out "MORE SHIT PAPER NEEDED IN THE MEN’S ROOM!!
Better yet hike up my pants gripping the front, and making sure there was a stringer of TP coming out the back of my draws dragging along the floor, and going up to the register for more “supplies.” 
The piquancy of these posts is only increased when you realize that all this penny-pinching occurred against a backdrop of a tremendous, unprecedented rise in CEO compensation, with CEOs earning millions while their employees had to struggle for paper clips. It’s just mind-boggling greed.
Actually, from what I’ve seen, it tends to be the contrary - when the business is struggling, the MBAs will cut corners and tie down spending in stupid ways, while still throwing lots of money away. All of what I posted occurred in an account that was hemhorraging money, but hiring lots of consultants to “fix” it.
Of course, we were losing money because of turnover/morale problems. So, it was pretty self-defeating. That’s what was so sad about it - we were losing money to constantly train and rehire, but once someone was in the door, the best they could muster was a cheap toy as “incentive”. Of course, we’d lose a lot of people because the “incentives” were stupid or downright insulting… so the cycle repeats.
My previous employer, a very, very large telecommunications company, had employees sign their pens out at the beginning of the day, and in at the end of the day. Not a great way to create a climate of trust between employees and managers…
Several years ago I cooked at a breakfast/lunch diner where:
— Based on one or two persnickity regular customers requesting “no garnish” on their plates, the owner decided that doing away with garnish altogether would be a great way to save money.
— Upon discovering that sugar-free pancake syrup cost her more than the regular syrup (the regular stuff came in 1-gallon jugs, but the sugar-free stuff was only available in small squeeze bottles, for some reason), the owner started charging customers an extra 10 cents if they wanted sugar-free syrup (I was hoping that some diabetic customer would file a discrimination suit against her).
— When we had an electrical problem in the kitchen that was causing us cooks to receive electric shocks if we happened to simultaneously touch two different metal fixtures (the prep counter/cooler and the grill), instead of immediately calling an electrician to fix the problem the owner waited a week until she could get one of her friends to come fix it for free.
— When I stopped in there a few months ago to have breakfast and chat with my best friend (who still works there), I asked for A1 sauce (I like it on my eggs and hashbrowns). I didn’t get a bottle of A1. Instead I got a little plastic portion cup, with a lid, into which had been poured 1.5 ounces of A1 sauce.
This last one falls more under “simple idiotic business practices”, I suppose:
— The previous owner (who I originally went to work for, and who knew what the hell she was doing) always made sure she paid her cooks a certain percentage more than minimum wage. The current owner apologetically told us she “couldn’t afford” to raise our pay when minimum wage went up the first January after she bought the place. Of course, since the waitresses were paid minimum wage, their pay went up. The result was that the cooks were now making only approximately 12 cents/hour more than the waitresses, and of course without the substantial tips that the waitresses earned. At the same time, the owner elected not to raise menu prices. The previous owner had always raised prices by 5 or 10 cents every January to reflect increased costs, and the customers were accustomed to that. But the current owner was afraid that she would run off customers if she raised prices. So instead, she waited until the following January, and then tacked on two years worth of price increases all at once :rolleyes:
Not having Splenda at a restaurant.
High price hotels seem to charge for Internet access, but the cheap places manage to throw it in for free.
This is explained in this Slate magazine article. Basically, those who can afford the expensive hotels can afford the $14.95 or whatever for internet access (many are on an expense account anyhow) while the rest of us are more price-sensitive.
Dunno if it’s right, but I’ve heard the figure of $100 in fuel savings per year per pound saved.
I worked at a fast food place where the owners told us to use lots of ice in the drinks so they didn’t go through the syrup as fast (which they were already getting at a discount since their son worked for a Pepsi distributor). Some people started asking for “no ice” but we were told to use ice anyway. Aren’t drinks some of the most profitable things a fast food restaurant sells?
This one doesn’t fall under saving money, but it sure is a lame way to make some…
The guy who ran the bowling alley in the town I grew up in used to charge people $1 if they accidentally knocked a ball off one of the pool tables. Yeah, I know you’re not supposed to knock them off, but I’ve seen it happen many times, and I’ve never seen any other places charge people money for it.
I’m not sure that your average teller, or even the branch manager, has the kind of access to ATMs needed to verify a transaction error for someone with an account at a different bank. It’s not necessarily evidence of cheapskatery.
BofA is pretty cheap in other ways though. I had a job a few years ago with an outside IT firm that did PC installs at branch offices, and occasional work at operations centers and other central locations too. The computers I replaced were Pentium IIs, which at the time were around 5 or 6 years out of date. That’s OK for a home user who’s just surfing the web, but they ran horribly slowly under the weight of all the bank applications and network security protocols. Booting some computers took up to 20 minutes.
On top of that, their network hardware was ancient. One time I was handed a FedEx package onsite that contained an adapter, so that the new PC I was installing could plug into the token ring network. Token ring technology is about 25 years old. Most sites had Ethernet, but even with that the network was extremely slow.
The cheapest thing was on the day I was told to report to a warehouse. There I discovered stacks of Pentium IIs, perhaps some of the very ones I had previously replaced. I was told to run a deletion program on the hard drives, clean the cases, swap out any bad parts, and box them up so they could be reused at other offices.
On a Security position that included a 24 hour truck gate, the company decided that the guards were drinking too much coffee and it was somehow costing the company too much money.
So the dickwad Asset Protection Manager went out, confiscated the coffee pot and all of the coffee present, most of which had been privately purchased.
This happened while I (the lowest level supervisor) was on vacation. The gate guards had managed to re-acquire the coffee pot before I returned.
At which point I informed the APM that if he had done that while I had been present, I would have given him the option of returning all the coffee or having me call the police and report the theft.
Yeah, laugh jackass. I quit…you got fired several months later. Who is laughing now?