There’s not necessarily any funny business going on with the mileage reimbursement. Although the IRS gives businesses the option of taking the standard deduction for mileage, businesses can reimburse any amount they like. A business is free to reimburse its employees .17/mile, but then it could only deduct .17/mile on its taxes.
However, it’s still cheap of the business for only reimbursing $.17/mile instead of the standard rate.
We weren’t allowed to have wall calendars or planners or anything like that - at least, they’d never pay for them. I was there from 2002-2006, but I wasn’t a manager until late 2003. The only way we got calendars or that sort of thing is if our “vendors” (temp agencies) gave them to management, which happened a couple of times. I also got other normal office supplies from them. They were basically bribes. Our temp agencies were smart (at least in that regard, they couldn’t keep us staffed though, but I tend to believe that might have been just a wee bit due to our company).
One thing that made me crack up from the temp agencies - they too were kinda cheap. One time, another supervisor and I were given a pie by one of them “to take home for our family for the holidays”. Except, we weren’t related and it was just the one pie. I didn’t think it was worth the trouble to try to split a cheap grocery apple pie.
I’m sure that does happen, but at my company, it was pretty much just a complete lack of knowledge about management at nearly every level, driven by our incredible turnover. When I became a supervisor, I had no management experience, and was trained by someone on the job for eight days. As you can imagine, in that kind of environment, the people that they keep for long careers tend not to be the cream of the crop.
I don’t get it. Is it that you want to “borrow” on next year’s time? Most organizations have a set number of benefit days per year.
I worked for a coffee chain which was not Starbucks, because Starbucks, as I understand it, rewards their employees meaningfully, including giving them a free pound of coffee every month. (Or something.)
So our chain’s holiday party one year was in the restaurant at the CN Tower, which is pretty posh - this is their dinner menu, for example. We made minimum wage, which at the time was slightly less than the price of a drink or an order of fries at the CN Tower restaurant.
Upon arrival at the party we were greeted by beaming management types who presented us with our holiday bonus on the way in - a pound of coffee! Yum! Not a drink ticket, not a free meal, not a day off, not any sort of meaningful recognition. A pound of crappy Christmas Blend, which we were all sick of after drinking it every day for a month, so most of those pounds of coffee got re-gifted anyway.
So we drank water and hovered over the free appetizer table. Management got drunk and harassed us good-naturedly for not being “fun” enough.
If there’s no separate vacation and sick time, you’re taking a big gamble if you want to take a vacation early in the year. Since you can’t plan if and when you get sick, you could use up five of your seven* days on a summer trip, then get reamed for going over your limit when you wind up getting two bouts of bronchitis during the fall and early winter, or whatever. The only safe thing to do was squirrel away days off in case you got sick or injured, and then use up whatever remained as vacation days during the last month of the year.
*I don’t remember the actual number of days. It wasn’t overly generous.
I worked for a company once that:
It was a publishing/printing company, typically they make money by selling advertising in their publications. Not them, if the company wasn’t making money it was the art dept.'s fault for not working fast enough.
Continuously moved our paycheck ‘schedule’ back a few days until by the end of the year we were missing a paycheck.
On payday, everyone received their check, and stampeded over to the company’s bank to cash it. No one wanted to be the last in line because the check might bounce. When I got pissed off enough about it, I held on to the negatives for that month’s publications until the check had cleared.
One employee found out that we were no longer covered for health insurance, because they hadn’t paid our premium, despite having deducted it from our paychecks.
See above, change health insurance to IRS.
They would collect money for postage for a direct mail piece, and not mail anything. I found out after I left that the dumpster out back had a nickname. “Post office”
They changed their name several times, I’m guessing to hide shady practices. The bookkeeper told me that one of the times, the daughter of the owner came by to sign her tax papers (the bookkeeper had done them for her), and she was instructed to have the daughter sign papers that would put the business in her name (without her being aware, she thought she was signing her tax return). The bookkeeper was out of there after that.
No, they’re not in business anymore, why do you ask?
There’s a locally owned pizza restaurant here that’s always been on the cheapish side but the last time I went in there took the cake.
They charge for refills of course but as I don’t drink much with lunch, this never bothered me. Nor did the fact that they charged $2 if you wanted to watch television on the 5 inch black and white portable televisions on each of the tables. I wasn’t even bothered too much by the fact that the food is served on flimsy paper plates. The 10 year old arcade games that cost $1 to play just make me laugh.
No, what bothered about my last trip was the fact that they no longer take debit cards. You’re free to use the ATM machine over in the corner though and it’s only a $5 fee! I balked but my wife really likes the place so we ponied up.
The last straw though was when the owner sat down in the middle of the very small dining room (15 tables) with one of his vendors. They began having an argument over an unpaid invoice with the vendor only asking to see a canceled check where he’d paid the bill. I’m guessing that he’s too cheap to have an office or back room set up for such discussions.
Guess who won’t be going back.
Ryanair crew also pay for their own training, uniform and pens. :eek:
I came in to post about Ryanair’s pens 
They get told to use the free ones the get from banks etc.n :dubious:
Just a note… Nandos have free refills of soft drinks in their restaurants.
I honestly don’t know how Ryanair stay in business. Their take-no-prisoners attitude to customer care is notorious. It seems people will put up with anything from them. Not even all that cheap anymore.
That’s odd… Ryanair is kind of like the European equivalent of Southwest Airlines here in the US, and Southwest is renowned for having excellent customer service; to the point where I get irritated flying other airlines because the desk and gate staff aren’t nearly so helpful or cheery as the Southwest people invariably are.
Ryanair aren’t really comparable to Southwest. The initial low-cost principle was the same, but it’s been taken in a whole different direction now. Some other European budget airlines do make customer service a high priority.
The fact is, Ryanair are still dirt cheap if you get in there fast enough. I just picked a random flight on a route I’ve used plenty of times, to Glasgow and back two weeks from today. £26, including checked in baggage and all fees. That’s pretty much as cheap as that route ever has been. And it’s earning Ryanair a lot more than flying half-empty planes midweek would do.
As a Christmas bonus, Wal-Mart gives its employees (oops, they’re associates, pardon me) 20% off of any one item not on the excluded list, between December 15 and December 24. Being that most items have a markup of more than 20%, Wal-Mart is still making a profit off of their annual “gifts.” I never used the discount – I wasn’t paid enough to afford an item where 20% would have made a difference worth having to wait forever to have a member of management come to the register to approve my “Christmas bonus” purchase.
Legend has it that any Wal-Mart employee with five or more years receives a nominal cash bonus, but since my store had a 70% turnover rate I can’t imagine that they lost much money on this one.
This probably dates me, but I just had to contribute. Some years ago, I played a computer game called “Eye of the Beholder”. Lovely game, came on 3.5" disks. I played for bloody weeks, killing monsters, drawing maps, solving puzzles, quite a lot of work actually.
Finally, I faced the dreaded Beholder. Lots of fighting, lots of adrenaline. I was severely weakened, but I persisted. Yes! A final blow, and the horrible Beholder bit the dust. Phew! I leaned back in my chair, and watched as the final cinematic … wasn’t there! :eek:
“Play again? Yes/no”
C:>
Apparently, since the final game’s size weighed in at 5 3.5" disks, the game publisher decided to cut the ending cinematic, figuring very few players would see it anyway, and it was not worth the extra cost of the sixth disk.
Man, what a total letdown :mad:
I think I know that place.
I was doing hospitality for a convention, calling pizza places late at night to get a bunch of pizza for our hungry Japanese guests. After several attempts, I get ahold of this place and blurt, “oh, you guys are open?” and get a snarky “No, we’re not. What would you like.” Nice way to treat a guy that had been on his feet, without food, for 16 hours.
Sadly, it was the only place open and close by, so I headed out on foot to pick up six pizzas.
When I get there, they say, “did you walk here?” Sure, why? “The pizzas are covered in paper, you can’t stack them and walk them back.” There’s no way you can help? “No.” Ok, so they can’t spring for pizza boxes. Whatever, I’ll take my chances. “No, you can’t do it. The cheese is gonna stick to the paper and then you’re gonna come back and complain.” :rolleyes:
So I call two friends to come and help me walk the pizzas back. They begin closing down 30 minutes before closing, and I get asked, “Are you friends here yet?” at least 3 times. They arrive 10 minutes before closing and I leave the place sad that I’d left a nice tip.
I guess that’s more of a service thing than a cost thing, but the lack of actual pizza boxes and being paranoid about complaints and remaking pizza was really annoying.
These have been so fascinating to read. Fiveroptic’s post reminded me of my the job I had when I was in college. I worked for a company that owned a few small discount chain stores in the Southeast and was notoriously miserly.
Apart from things like making us reuse nails for building displays, they’d do things like waiting until customers started complaining about the lack of heat or A/C before they’d send out repairmen. (No A/C in Alabama during July bites.) I guess they didn’t believe the manager when she’d tell them it was broken and we’d often have to go over a month without heat or A/C.
What took the cake though were their employee ‘incentives’. On December first, the Christmas bonuses showed up. If you had a year’s service, you got a $5 gift certificate to your own store that you could use any time as long as it was before December 15th. Every year of service after that got you $5 more up to a maximum of $50. Later, they decided that this was costing them too much so they changed bonus requirements so that you had to have at least 2 years of service before you got the first $5 certificate. The manager was instructed to write up any merchandise that we selected as though it had been damaged so that the company could claim it as a tax write off.
Another thing they used to do was to tell us to have an “employee appreciation night”. Employees only got a discount on this night of the year and never any other time. The kicker was that we couldn’t do it during normal business hours. We were instructed to hand out invitations to our family and friends and keep the store open an extra two hours for this event. We could only give discounts to employees and those with invitations. Other than that, it was exactly like staying open two hours later.
That job gave me quite a lot of incentive to do well in college.
Years ago, I ate at a restaurant in Hollywood. It was one of those “faded glory” places, that was probably THE place to be seen in the '50s, but was now a little seedy. Anyway, they served rolls with the meal, but no butter. Turns out, they charged 2¢ for each pat of butter.
To this day, that is the cheapest thing I’ve ever seen.
I used to work for a non-profit organization. For a long time we were treated really well. We got huge Christmas bonuses, nearly equal to some folks’ monthly pay. Eventually they nixed that and just quit giving bonuses entirely–no weaning. One year they handed out the bonus checks and literally said “enjoy, this is the last Christmas bonus you’ll ever get.” The next year, not even an extra $20.
They did, however, continue to throw a fairly nice Christmas party, usually a catered dinner with a no host bar but you’d get two drink tickets, and there were appetizers and some extremely mediocre but generally enjoyable entertainment. In lieu of cash bonuses, we’d each get a really nice organization shirt which were honestly liked and happily worn, and everyone got a “raffle” ticket. One person and a guest won a trip to the national convention, really cool.
After a couple years of that they stopped doing dinner, switched to a brunch and held it so far away that many people who didn’t drive or couldn’t afford the gas didn’t go. The same year they stopped giving away the shirts and instead of the trip to the convention raffled off ten el-cheapo prizes, including a box of discount tulip bulbs, a desk fan, and a Chia Pet.
The year after that we had the same brunch in the same place but were all given one of those big Hershey’s bars gift-wrapped. Five of the gift-wrapped bars contained “golden tickets”. The big ticket winners each got a $5 Starbucks gift card.
Did I mention that all this time our CEO was making well over a half a million dollars a year with periodic bonuses of tens of thousands of dollars? This is a local CEO overseeing the branches in the county. Annual reports praised him for increasing our “cash reserves” (important to ease us through periods of low public funding during the Bush Administration) and investment income into tens of millions annually.
Working for a non-profit we accepted that the financial payoff wasn’t great, but that we did it because we firmly believed in what we were doing. All along the Christmas party was the one time of the year that the admin folks really told us how much they appreciated the work that we did. That all stopped, too.
Our benefits got cut drastically every single year until I could no longer afford to get sick. We used to get a 5% raise every January 1st to meet changes in cost-of-living. The year I quit the board debated until mid-February whether or not to give the staff an extra twenty five cents an hour. Instead of giving merit raises, they implemented a system wherein we had to apply for a new position they’d created which was the same job description but with vague stipulations of “demonstrating leadership skills” and such. We all had to apply and interview and take written and role-playing tests administered by a vindictive nutcase who used to be an elementary school teacher. The pay increase if you passed all the tests and were “promoted”? A dollar an hour. And extra responsibilities.
The Christmas party the last year I was there was a pot-luck. Held in the clinic after hours. We weren’t allowed to bring a guest. As far as I can tell, no one actually showed up.
I quit two weeks later.
Man that was cathartic.
You know, I just want to show the opposite. I was sent to a Convention/Seminar in my speciality a few weeks back. This cost “the company” almost $1000, not to mention airfare, hotel etc. But the Convention/Seminar and their host hotel was anything but cheap. They had a snack hut" with everfull soft drinks, coffee, juice, fruit, cereal, candy, food-bars, nuts, icecream (and the good stuff- B&J), and so forth. You didn’t need to run out for coffee or snacks, or even breakfast or lunch. They also had a sponsored cocktail meeting and a sponsored luncheon.
We were all very very happy with this. No “cheap out” here.
Thirty or so years ago, in my old industry there was a guy who refused to supply toilet paper or paper towels in his employee’s bathrooms. The company I was with hired several people who quit him and they all told the same tale.