Something I've seen in quite a few organisations is a tendency to try and cut costs and penny-pinch in small areas that have very little impact on the overall P&L, but can have a huge impact on staff morale. I'm not talking about big stuff like outsourcing or understaffing - but sometimes it can be the little things like taking away milk or teabags in the kitchen that can have a disproportionate impact on how people feel about the working there.
What're the worst small acts of penny-pinching you've seen?
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We had Klix machines for free (low quality) hot drinks. Management wanted to charge 5p a drink. Management misjudged what they could get away with. People nearly rioted just on the rumour.
When I was a student, I worked as a lifeguard and personal trainer at an eye wateringly expensive gym / health club.
When I first started, all staff were allowed unlimited teas and coffees (including things like frappucinos etc) from the club's coffee shop. Nobody took advantage: most people had one per day, and it was rare that anyone had more than two.
Then a venture capitalist bought the chain and started cutting costs.
First, they limited the free teas and coffees to one small hot drink per person day. No iced drinks were allowed, and nothing more expensive than an Americano (so lattes, cappuccinos, flat whites etc were all out.
Then, they withdrew all free drinks. There was no kettle to make your own drinks. And they banned people from taking in their own thermos mugs.
There were plenty of other cost cutting measures introduced, but 4 members of staff cited the change in hot drink policy as the final straw that made them quit.
They lost 4 good members of staff because they withdrew a perk that was probably costing the business less than £1 per day per member of staff.
The venture capitalists continued their cost cutting measures throughout the business until their customers also started voting with their feet. I was pleased to read a few years later that they sold the business on again at a massive loss.
that's not just cost cutting that's trying to force minimum wage staff to spend an hours wages on their own coffees. glad they sank
David Lloyd?
Was thinking the same
My dad used to work for Klix.
At companies that had the vending machines set to "free" they had the problem where people would leave half empty drinks everywhere and just get a fresh one.
One company set the machine to be 2p a cup and put a bowl full of 2p coins on the other side of the break room. So the drinks were still free, but there was a small amount of extra effort required to get a new one, and it solved the issue completely.
We had free tea and coffee at one site only, every union dispute it was up there eventually, It was sorted out (after maybe 20 years) but I kind of miss the predictable ranting over something barely significant in the grand scheme of things.
We had that over the years it’s crept up to 40p and the cups got thinner and smaller (cheaper brand) literally only get two mouthfuls now
At least it sounds like they had the sense to back off from that after realising how unpopular it would be.
The most common "any questions?" at one-to-one meetings after that idea went public was about whether managers should get pay rises and bonuses if we (a major multinational) were so hard up for money.
Management put out an email saying the idea wasn't happening.
Used to work in retail and they were big on those "Tell us how we did today" in the back of the receipt. If you were mentioned by name, you would get a scratch card that would have between £5 to £60 (I guess) to spend in store. First they put a limit on how many you would get per week (only 1, even if you were given 5+ positive reviews). Then they removed it all together because "corporate said so". We used to get at least 40 reviews per week. It dropped to maybe 5-10 as people were not bothering on going "above and beyond" and adopted the "minimum wage, minimum effort"
That would be too easy to manipulate though. Anyone with half a brain would just get their family and friends to write positive reviews for them.
But that's like any business though, and it still bumps up the online rating
Sounds like M and S.
They cancelled the office plant maintenance contract, so the contractors came and took all the plants away making the office seem even bleaker. I hadn't particularly noticed the plants while they were there, but I noticed the grim less-faded circles on the carpet where the plants once stood. Depressing.
Renting office plants has always seemed strange to me. I wonder where the financial breakeven is for that.
But as you say, you wouldn't normally notice an absence of plants. But if you're used to them and they vanish, that's much more noticeable.
I was told that the plants make the air conditioning more efficient to run if you’re lucky enough to have an air conditioned office. I have no idea if that’s true or not.
They're good for air quality (especially with things like printers in the office), and just generally improve people's mood, which you'd think would increase productivity.
Never underestimate the psychological aspect of the appearance of your workplace. There is an enormous benefit to people when they show up to a place that "looks the part". If it looks old and worn out and everything is covered in scraches, this often translates into people's attitudes towards the work they are doing. If what they're doing is so valuable and important, why does the workplace look like a dump? Likewise, if you walk into an office and everything is bright and shiny, it just instantly puts you in the mindset of this being a serious workplace that does quality work. I have literally seen real world examples of where an office refurbish led to a drastic reduction in staff turnover. People want to be proud of where they work and feel like they could show it off to their friends and family if they wanted to.
When I was a young secretary, the consultancy company I worked for decided to "empower" the admin team by setting us in charge of a cost cutting project. We saved 8 grand on stationery and printing costs - about half of one of our salaries in the 90s.
"More" said the company, so we looked at travel costs - many consultants flew all over, frequently. We suggested short haul (under 4 h) flights should be economy, and no-one flies first class any more, business is fine. This was not popular with anyone except Finance, the consultants sulked, it got pushed through though because no-one suggested changing any of the expenses policy. Saved tens of thousands.
"OK" said the company, "that was great, you're supposed to be cutting admin costs though." Unfortunately, they had created a monster: we looked at the expenses policy instead because admin = any overhead, right? wink We discovered that so many consultants failed to get their expenses done on time i.e. BEFORE final bill to client and project closure that the company was losing in excess of 100K a year. We suggested enforcing what was already in the policy in terms of submission timelines. Company decided to not piss off prima donna consultants, and that was the end of asking the admin team to look at cost savings. They were happy with 8 grand ...
It sounds like spending extra budget to hire an admin person whose sole job was chasing expenses would have saved a chunk of that 100k AND made the consultants happier because they didn't have to go out of their way to do paperwork, someone else would come to them.
And there lies the problem. Admin people who don’t actually do the front line job making decisions to the detriment of the guys doing the front line work. I get it in my seagoing role, shoreside shiny arses deciding that those of us putting ourselves at risk going to sea in shitty conditions should get our travel expenses reduced, all the while sitting safely in a nice warm office, safe and sound, and going home to their families at night unlike us.
Shit like that is generally driven by jealousy by those incapable, or unwilling, to do the front line job and who have no concept of the impact it has on those whose decisions affect.
We weren't trying to reduce expenses - as you rightly say, not for us to judge. The suggestion was that the consultants should actually claim them in reasonable time - it would usually be 4-6 weeks for final reporting to be done, they had time to hand over receipts to us to do the paperwork for signature :p
Honestly this feels like you're talking about a really different situation though, when in reality it's not going to be this particular level of admin making those kind of decisions - I don't really see how the example of asking consultants to fly equally cushy Business rather than First Class is really comparable to the risks and hardships of working at sea?
From my experience working in admin, it sounded like the post was about lower paid admin workers correctly identifying unnecessary flight expenses generated by business travellers who earn a lot more than them (and also identifying the higher paid execs aren't bothering to put their expenses through before deadlines, creating additional costs).
I think it's not just additional costs, sounds like they couldnt then bill the client for the expenses incurred as they'd already billed the client by the time the expenses come in. I presume they don't have a system of knowing these costs before they are expensed directly from the consultant (unless that's what you meant).
I used to work somewhere where the sponges were rationed. You know those that cost £1 for 10.
Oh that happens at my work too! They get cut into 4 each.
Similar, but the "Carex" bottles of hand wash in our loos are
A. Definitely watered down & 2. Not Carex.
My colleague waters down the dish soap, I keep having a go at him pointing out that if we use less dish soap, it’s not like we’ll get those pennies they save in our paychecks so let’s just wash with full concentrate soap.
I used to work for Vodafone who had a £36 evening meal allowance (which at that time 15 years ago was difficult to spend).
When I was down in Newbury on business, I used to enjoy buying just a chicken chow mein and a can of coke for £7 and sitting in the Chinese takeaway reading the Sun newspaper: I'm a cheap date.
One time at a client site, I had a killer headache, so bought a bottle of water and a packet of paracetamol (£2). Put it through expenses as I was out on business trip, and my penny pincher boss disallowed the claim.
For the next few trips to Newbury, my evening meal became 3 courses with a steak main, and a couple of beers; whatever I could do to absolutely rinse the £36 allowance.
...Karma
As soon as you annoy people who have an expenses cap, they'll start seeing it as a target and it'll cost you a fortune.
There are also places that will give you a receipt for a £36 steak dinner, which is actually a burger and load of credit behind the bar for when policies don't allow alcohol...
I used this trick on per diems when I was doing site-work with a coworker, one of us would sub the meal, the other would get just a card receipt at the local off-licence so we could get more beer for cheaper for the hotel room.😂
I was on a business trip many years back and stuck in my expenses claim, including a couple of bacon rolls for breakfast. (the hotel didn't have a restaurant - cheapass hotel should have rung alarm bells).
About 30 minutes after submitting the claim, I was asked to head to my boss' office whereupon he asked: "Why did you have 2 bacon rolls for breakfast".
My response: "I couldn't manage 3 of them".
Yeah... one pissed off boss, a denied claim which resulted in me refusing to travel for work any longer.
Fucking cheap pricks.
Shattering goodwill with employees is a classic sign of incompetent management. All companies have layers of incompetent managers that do stupid stuff like was done her.e
…our evening meal allowance is still only £22… and it’s only a few years since it went up from £16!
My old warehouse they changed the packing tape to shit that was brittle as hell and my job became significantly harder through it, however they had enough money to install cameras all focusing at our desks
And it becomes a cycle. They switch to cheap tape, you throw away nearly complete rolls because of crap it is and then ‘Wow, look at all this tape we’re getting through we better get cheaper tape.’
Not to mention the time you waste on trying to get the boxes to stay closed.
Cheap parcel tape is bizarre, so much gets wasted. That's a decision made by someone who doesn't use it.
This is Big Corporate across the board. “We need a consistent policy for XYZ. Let’s get someone who doesn’t do XYZ, or use XYZ, or need XYZ, to come up with our policy.”
Had a wall-mounted boiler for hot drinks that developed a drip. The caretaker looked at it and said it needed some new parts that would cost about £10. Instead, management removed it and said that if we wanted hot water we could use the tiny, filthy microwave or buy our own kettle. We bought a small kettle and kept it hidden in a cupboard so the manager couldn't use it. They were not impressed but it felt good to piss the tight-arse off.
For the sake of £10 too. What an idiot.
I wonder how much more time people wasted waiting for a kettle to boil, and what the cost of that adds up to...
Also, suggesting you boil water in a microwave for drinks?! wtf
Heat water in a microwave?? Jesus wept, we’re not Americans!
😂
Best way to embarrass a tight arse, when a visitor comes, offer the guests tea etc. bring the guest mediocre tea/ coffee, especially for the boss.
We used to have a little tea trolley with all kinds of weird and wonderful things on and it used to be a weekly ritual that you’d visit the tea trolley and the shared ‘oh look at this’ would eventually lead to someone pulling it round and handing things out.
Now it’s just basics. No-one visits the tea trolley. No-one brings it round. Now suddenly no-one bothers to interact with anyone outside their immediate vicinity. The entire office vibe has shifted, cliques have formed, everyone moans more, it’s kind of fascinating.
I've got a morbid fascination with office social structures and politics, stuff like this interests me as well. People being made redundant and the structure of the hierarchy shifting, along with desk layouts and in-office days (we're hybrid) makes for some great people watching.
Years ago the company I worked for got bought by a larger business, who decided at one point that providing free milk for tea and coffee was an unneeded expense. One of the analysts put together a report showing the cost of milk as a percentage of the CEO's bonus.
I bet the CEO also used the report to show how underpaid they were.
My work tried to stop people using the Free milk for cereal... didn't last.
We used to get 60pts of milk delivered in 1pt bottles every day, people took the piss out of it (one shift in particular - the early, early starts) meaning that there was none left for the late shift start. Cereal, chugging straight out the bottle and observed more than once, take 3 pints 1for tea and coffee, 1 to chug on break and 1 to take home.
Work got sick of the constant complaining that there was never any milk for the late shift so they just stopped ordering it so now no one had any.
This is why we can't have nice things.
It’s not exactly penny pinching but in the grand scheme of the company turnover and profit, their refusal to have a Christmas party this year left many in our place gobsmacked and confused. We have had a Christmas party every year since I started in 2009. The company is now more profitable than ever. I thought it was absolutely shocking.
Thus is what leaves me gobsmacked. It costs fuck all to have a Christmas party in the geand scene of things, but if you stop people notice. You might as well send out a company wide wmail saying that you don’t give a shit about your employees.
Same here! Even though they’d paid deposits for the parties - corporate said no so they’ve lost the money
The company my dad worked for really clamped down on colour printing.
The new contract for a multi-million pound marine wind farm went to the contract readers, and they marked everything they disagreed with in red font.
You can see where this is going, and yes - they ended up accidentally agreeing to horrendous terms which bankrupted the business. They had to divide it and cut that bit off to avoid complete bankruptcy.
Oh Christ. What an error.
I work in a marine electrical company, our colour printing costs are high, but given it's a lot of technical drawings with colour coding, it's inevitable. I'd be laughed out of the meeting room for suggesting such an idiotic cost saving.
Our IT set our printer settings to black and white automatically... Just means everyone prints things twice when they forget to change the setting (and either forget to change the default if we have permission or just don't know how).
Ooof....that's an expensive mistake to make.
Also a lesson in using proper tracked changes, but there we go.
You've reminded me. I work for my local council and stopping colour printing was enforced as a money saving exercise. The commercial electricians really struggled with black and white wiring diagrams
You could tell the company I was at was in trouble (back in the day) when they went from colour brochures for internal company literature to B&W photocopies.
Not UK but EU country. They changed our holidays. It used to be 1 day holiday was equivalent to 1 day work, however long it was. I'm in transport & days can be 7-9hours long. Now a holiday day is worth 7.38hrs so, so many times one comes from holiday having to do a day back due to the hours of work allocated during that time was more than the holiday hours. Damned union guy who signed that contract for us needs a kick in the ass lol.
My Dads work in the UK used to do four 8 hours and one 6 hours every week for a 38 hour week. If you had a day off you just got paid for that day, then they made it that every day off paid 7.6 hours [5/38]
Most people took a week off at a time but there were often odd days left behind, so everyone just started taking the six hour Fridays off to get paid for 7.6 hours.
They tried to change it back but to do so under the contract they came up with they would need everyone in the company to sign off on it.
My work has always done annual leave in hours rather than days, if they did it based on days people on 12h shifts would get loads more off time than people on 8h shifts I.e. On 8h shifts you work a 4 on 2 off rotation so you'd get 8 days off the clock, where 12h shifts work 4 on 4 off so you'd get 12 days off for the same amount of leave.
Where this falls down is the sick policy, you can self certify for 5 days and you trigger for a sickness absence review after 10 missed work days. When I had a bad back I was off work for 3 blocks of shifts so had 12 days off work so 18 days away from work. If I'd have been on a 12h rotation I'd have only needed 8 days off work for the same period so wouldn't have been put on review for attendance and would have gotten another 2 days off work.
One of the other offices in my organisation have been told they can't charge their phones at work.
Ha! Unfortunately if normal room lights are left on accidentally, it will wipe out any trivial savings made...
I had this in a retail shop fit. Was asked to not fit USB plug sockets as we don’t want to ‘encourage staff to charge their phones’ while on their breaks.
I pointed out one of the half dozen air conditioning units being installed will use more power than charging a hundred phones, it’s totally negligible power draw. Plus we have young staff who get public transport, often late at night so if he wants to be the one to sign off on a member of staff not having charge in an emergency he can be my guest.
Looking at this thread it seems pretty consistent that people coming up with ideas to save money often have no idea what is actually using up the most money.
I know some organisations, including one I used to work for, have banned charging any lithium ion battery devices due to fire risk. This now includes phones as some chargers aren't great.
I work in the TV and Film industry, so you can imagine it went down splendidly when the line producer decided that the Accounts department shouldn't be entitled to the customary £5 lunch allowance that we're pretty much always given on account of the fact that all of the on-set crew get Catering for free, and we don't. When you're working on a job on which the execs and producers are consistently putting in lunch receipts for upwards of £100, and the main cast are getting perks worth £££ every single week on top of their seven figure salaries, it went down like a lead balloon, not helped by the fact that Accounts are also the only department that don't get paid any overtime, and routinely work anywhere from 11-15 hour days for no extra pay. For the sake of trying to save about £120 per week total, across a budget of around £10mil, all of the goodwill on that job was completely soured. Not great when you've cheesed off the department responsible for paying everyone on time.
Cheap ass toilet paper. Straight to jail.
John Wayne toilet roll. Takes shit off no man.
This needs a trophy
It's so rough you walk like John Wayne after using it
I keeped my own toilet paper and soap in my locker, for when work ran out.
I made sure they were nothing like the kind work got. I got brand-name ones still in the wrapper, better than I get for home, so they could not say I took theirs.
But I got told it was not fair on every one when [Note it's "when" and not "if"!] they ran out. They did not like it when I pointed out "Don't run out".
What's even odder we where 70 feet from a warehouse selling them in bulk and within 150 of two shops selling them.
I recently listened to a podcast about Dungeons and Dragons. When business was particularly bad, employees had to provide their own toilet paper.
Remember at my old place we went from 3 ply Andrex to that shitty bigass commercial 1 ply toilet roll.
Removal of bins from 1/2 person offices, replaced with a single bin on each floor.
Great way to make the office look professional when rubbish just gets left on desks instead..
Wow!
A boss of mine wanted me to write a full business case for a piece of software I wanted for my job that cost £80! Wtf!! It would have cost more in time writing the business case. Meanwhile thousands are spent on projects that end up having insignificant impact. I bought the software myself in the end. I was so angry at the time.
My old boss made me write a business case for a wireless mouse for my laptop. I did write it, 1.5 pages long. He rejected it.
I then bought it on a company credit card he didn't know I had and kept it when I left the company out of spite.
Nicely played!
My old boss used to make me do this just to satisfy his bosses but he was pretty cool about it and mostly just wanted a powerpoint equivalent / slide deck sort of explanation.
More often than not he wanted it too but needed a justification (and was trying to mentor me) - but I've had just as many bosses who asked for this just to be petty.
At Christmas all staff would get a bottle of Red/White and a £20 M&S voucher with the majority (non exec) of full time staff a £500 bonus.
This was slowly phased out to a single ‘ethical’ hessian tote bag that contained tea bags, fair trade chocolate and some other hippy tat nonsense etc. That you had to queue up like a lemming to receive this gift made it all the more depressing.
This was an American owned multinational corporate who made lots of money year on year.
Last few years we've had a Xmas gift each, one of those where you select one from a selection. Not massive cost, £50-100 per person. Prob 300 people in the company. This year, having been bought by a HUGE multinational but kept our name and autonomy, no presents. Parent company is worth many many many billions. Arseholes.
I work for university. First was the removal of overtime ( at 1.5 normally or double time on sundays and bank holidays) for the support staff, on minium wage, and replacing it with lieu time. Which was followed by mass confusion by senoir management when they couldn't get cleaners, porters and grounds teams to work weekends and evenings anymore.
The second was the desicion to stop getting the grounds staff machinery serviced regularly which ende up with constant breakages and breakdowns of quipment which cost more in repair and replacement of equipment than getting it serviced properly in the first place.
Beancounters often see cost centres rather than force multipliers...
Proactive versus reactive
Shelf stacking at Safeway back in the day. All 4hr shifts included a paid 15min break so they changed all these shifts to 3hrs45mins to avoid their legal requirement.
Cunts.
A bunch of us handed in our notice immediately, and several years later Safeway was taken over by Morrisons. Victory.
And Morrisons were even bigger cunts to ex-Safeway employees. Contracts ignored, pensions stolen. Sad state we live in.
That was universal across all of retail
There were loads of changes when I worked in the NHS- they brought in steristrips that were awful and didn’t stick but the worst thing they did was get rid of colour printing. I used to print personalised name banners for kids in ICU and this little gesture made the world of difference to them. Black and white doesn’t quite have the same affect!
10 year loyalty gift from huge uk retail chain.
Box of malteesers
I laughed my ass off when they showed me
10 year loyalty gift from a private business (former public service) was a clear plastic paperweight, with a card in the middle, saying it's the 10 year award.
Oh, when I joined, any announcements or presentations were done by calling a quick floor meeting. When I got the award, it was quietly and casually handed to me, by a manger, about 10 minutes before everyone was going to do the outdoor portion of our duties. I've never taken it out of its cardboard sleeve and, writing this, nearly 10 years (and 3 employers later) I realise my contempt still festers.
I am disgusted that it was a plastic weight and not even glass 😂 Just shocking!
I worked somewhere that would not get welding tips for the one MIG welder. There was not a lot of welding, most welds around half an inch so one would last weeks. If you were doing a lot of welding them may last 20 minutes or less. You go into a busy welding shop you will see them everywhere just from that days work
They cost at that time in the late 90's maybe six for one pound a(UK) from a shop next door They got so bad I had to hold them in with electronic tape, which costs more than the tip did and they got from the same shop next door.
The thing is not using the correct ones damaged the weld gun which was cheap at £180, in around four months. So they payed out close around £560 per year plus £30 on tape and a lot of down time just to save £10 and this went on for over eight years that I know of.
_____________________________________________________
They would not get in any "anti spatter spray" as only the welder (me) used it. To be fair I didn't care as I don't like being round it and it meant I made 10% less work, it would also mean more welding so more tips used on the welder. I made sure to order it every week to show that it was not me holding back the work,
When they stopped the welding job to save money (it didn't) and made me redundant I found out they had a box of 24 cans in stock, They would not issue it as if they did they would not have any in stock. It only had one use on one job, mine, so what was the point of having it and not issuing it. It ended up in the bin.
_____________________________________________________
They ones changed every part on every item for two weeks so every jig needed changing then changing back. It saved them £3.60 and none of the items could be fixed if they came back.
Turned off the low level background heat in the plant room at the top of an 8 storey building over Christmas break to save money. Pipes froze and flooded every floor on the way down
Receptionist ordered coloured paper clips. International incident, when the plain metal ones were ever so slightly cheaper.
You remind me of my last place of work.
Young trainee, given job of Purchasing. In the same week she was asked for A4 notepads, and for a selection of fruit.
We had someone shouting at her for ordering Pukka notepads rather than non-brand cheapest, and also someone shouting at her for ordering Asda's basic fruit and it not being a nice visual display for our upmarket clientele. Poor girl couldn't win, was supposed to be a mind-reader.
I worked somewhere where you had to pay for every plastic cup or paper plate, like 15p or 20p a time. Funnily enough, it’s also the only place where people would unashamedly steal other people’s lunch.
On Friday afternoons we had to clean the office, including the toilets.
That company no longer exists.
A surgery I worked in, private I may add, wanted us to sterilise disposable objects to reuse and I also got pulled up on my usage of disposable gloves and was told to just wash my hands with them on if it was the same patient. I refused all of this and found another job. I was very young at the time, this was over 15 years ago I wish I would have had the sense to follow the proper channels and report it all.
Okay, this is gonna sound fucking ponsy, because it is, but here goes. 2 huge things that have caused upset at our company - no more snack/fruit baskets delivered, and no more fancy soaps/moisturisers in the bathrooms.
All the offices used to get a huge basket of fruit delivered every week, for anyone to eat. It went to fortnightly, which pissed off people enough. But then 'times are hard' kicked in and it was done away with entirely. People were outraged.
Also, all the bathrooms used to have fancy brands of soap and moisturiser. Quite recently, all swapped to those easy refill automatic dispensers, like at a premier inn, and it just doesn't exude luxury like it used to. People have gone mental about it hah.
It's amazing the impact that losing perks can have.
No one would be bothered about working for a company that doesn't provide weekly fruit baskets. But having them taken away when people are used to them causes a lot more upset than just never having them in the first place.
It's a thing - "Loss aversion" The pain we feel from having something taken away is double the pleasure we get from being given something of equivalent value. It's why everything is a subscription now - cancelling Netflix/Spotify/whatever and losing the ability to use it (whether or not you actually used it) feels so bad, you'll just let them take the money for another month. Which leads onto us valuing access highly. If you had free coffee the was costing your employer £10 a month, they shouldn't give you £15 to let you buy your own coffee instead. Despite being technically better off, you feel the loss doubly, but more importantly you're not experiencing a loss of £10 of coffee, but "as much coffee as I ever wanted". When you buy a cup, you're not taking this off the extra £15 you were given, you're thinking "this used to be free" - and build resentment with every drink.
Decent-quality, nice-smelling hand soap and moisturiser cream are a good thank-you gift for hospital staff. The standard stuff they're issued with is awful.
The Fruit Thing is hugely counterproductive though. Most peoples normal diet is lacking in basic vitamins and minerals which you get in Fresh Fruit, and studies have shown that office workers eating fresh fruit on a daily basis have better attendance records due to Lower illness than those that don't have access to Fruit.
So yeh long term that cost saving measure hurts the business.
Mine sounds stupid too and I don't know yet how many other people are annoyed, but i work for a remote company and every year I've been there, they've sent out a cheap advent calendar (think those standard cadbury ones) to everyone in late November, and a Christmas hamper in mid December. I chased this all up around the 8th as I had been keeping an eye out for the invoice (i work in the finance team and we usually pay pro forma), only to find out they didn't want to do it anymore and don't see the big deal.
The hotel I work at made a change from two hand towels per room to one. This was before I started working. I hear about it all the time from guests and my co-workers alike.
In catering. Frozen veg like green beans and cauliflower. Always revolting. No one likes them. Frozen roast potatoes - hit and miss. Mostly miss. Tinned fruit salad - 70s where are you? Frozen peppers & onions are tolerable. Shitty cheap sliced bread. Cheap crappy frozen sausages. We are actually a place that supplies good home cooked food. The shortcuts/budget cuts are horrible
We're removing cars for everyone except senior managers. One rule for one, one for another.
Branch manager - turns the boiler off so no heating in the offices.
Kettle. Not a single one in the building over 5 departments, one central urn...
Soap. Yep, replaced with the sort you had in school in 1982.
Hand dryers. Yep, those are gone too... blue towel roll now.
Yellow blocks in the urinal. Gone.
Colour printing. Although, 99.9%.of us know the work around.
Oxygen, acetylene, argon & propane. We don't hold spares of any as they don't want to pay cylinder rental on bottles not in use !
Cut the van fleet from 9 to 4, service engineers fighting over the means to go and do their work.
Paper mate pens. Now the absolute cheapest of the cheap 5*.... can also be used to scribe metal, cut glass, fire them out your crossbow, pretty much anything except bloody write with them !
And... the cherry on top ? One single packet of the cheapest laminating pouches witnessed by mankind shared between all departments.
Replaced proper milk with that UHT shit
One time, I needed approval from the COO to buy a pen, a regular BIC ballpoint probably cost about £1. It's more about control than cost cutting the way I saw it.
Used to work in a well-known meat alternative company.
In late 2019, they decided to replace our desks with ones 2/3 the size, to fit 50% more people into the already full Finance office. Expensive to replace everyone's desks with new, and absolutely not a popular move.
Joke was on them. Couple of months later we were all sent home for the pandemic, then everyone WFH for a long time, and now relocating that function down to Leeds. All that new furniture barely used.
Caused personal upset for me, though I didn't make it known.
My workplace wanted a Christmas tree. I grow Christmas trees, and this year we were raising money for the local first responders.
Offered the company a tree in exchange for a donation. The business makes £10-million+, yearly
They donated £10...
Stopped supplying post-it notes as part of a money-saving measure in our offices. We used post-it notes extensively at the time, so had to resort to wasting time carefully cutting up A4 sheets of paper that we had pinched from the printers into little squares and stapling them onto whatever we had previously stuck a post it to! Some just bought in their own post-it notes but many refused to do so out of princicple. This was quoted as an example of ridiculous penny-pinching against the employer for years.
At my previous Work, the MD did the following.
Too much tea being used so switched from Yorkshire teabags to happy shopper catering teabags.
Too much time and money being spent boiling a kettle so replace the kettle with A (boiling water tap) it didn’t boil water so no good for tea.
Too much loo roll being used so swapped it for one ply toilet roll that was narrower than the width of my hand.
Still too much low role being used, replaced the loo roll holders with bolt on lockable stainless steel loo roll covers
Too much time being spent in the kitchen installed CCTV in the kitchen.
Too much money being spent on tea, coffee and milk after the bags and tap were replaced. Covered up the electrical sockets removed the hot water tap and replace replaced it with a tea and coffee vending machine. The sort you get in a shit mechanics.
People spending too long in the toilet, turned the heating off in the toilet over winter and the AC over summer.
They tried to take away our tea breaks. It lasted about a week from memory until management backtracked. They told us "You don't need a tea break, you can have tea at your desk." Unlike the management, we work in labs, we can't have tea at our desks - its against H&S to eat & drink in a lab... Management were not impressed when we asked if we were allowed to drink our tea "at our desks" during the next MHRA inspection, hence the backtracking
I imagine there's a special place in hell for English employers who try and take away their employees tea. I didn't even like tea before I started working in England, but now I do because tea breaks
Our millionaire boss cancelled our free coffee allowance because 'people were abusing it'.
Yeah dickhead, the person abusing it is your wife that comes over every morning before school and, makes 5-10 cups of coffee, then takes them to the othe housewivse at the school.
Like most of the UK, our city had a heatwave this summer and my workplace, a busy highstreet shop, was actually unbearable.
Work unexpectedly bought in some air con units, which didn't fix the problem completely but made it 100x more comfortable, especially as our floor didn't even have windows. It was a great 5 days, until I started my shift and the air con was just gone.
We asked about it and were told it was too expensive to run, we shouldn't have ever had them. Obviously the ones in the managers' offices were fine though!
went from 2 ply toilet paper to single ply. absolute nonces.
The last company I worked at (30 employees) had 4ply. One brainiac suggested 3ply, boss almost ripped him in half. On the job before that (international recycling company) they had 3ply for office staff and 1ply for garbage men/ drivers,... We would take at least 2 metres per wipe. Proper paperwork would have cost them a lot less.
Big Uk Body scanners place i was a temp at, i was washing up they decided he kitchen staff should also pay for their dinner, you know the stuff we made all day and dished up and threw away at least 20% or every day. There was an instant "don't give a toss" attitude to cooking and serving food.
I work in a school. We always used to get a bacon or sausage sandwich on the last day before we broke up for Christmas. Probably cost £2 max per person. The past 2 years we have been told that there is no money in the budget for this anymore. The bad feeling this has engendered can’t be measured. Keep in mind we now have a CEO on £170,000 as we are now part of a trust…
Our cleaners are being made to hand wash the cloths in the sink because they aren't allowed disposable ones any more. Now we have grubby cloths drying on the radiators every day. It's a GP surgery, the last place you want to be tight with hygiene.
Worked for Arriva (UK bus company), after working throughout Covid our ‘thank you’ was a box of Heroes. Not an ordinary box of Heroes though, a specially made smaller version that contained about 6 chocolates
The radiators in the staff breakroom have been broken for over 2 years now. The reason they don’t get them fixed is that «staff are only really spending 30 minutes there a piece, they should be ok».
I'd absolutely hit them with the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992.
ACOP 7 clause 66. https://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/priced/l24.pdf
my old manager gave me a list of things to order from Amazon on the business account, I got all the things bar 1 screwdriver that I found with a different seller on there that was £30 more, he went batshit, telling me I would not have ordered that one if it had been my money being spent, was a total of under £60, the other things on his list added up to over £3000.....could not use the link he sent as they did not provide VAT receipt needed....
Getting rid of the bins so they wouldn't need to pay anyone to empty them.
I worked at an ASDA when they still had normal plastic carrier bags
We ran out because “we were overspent on carrier bags”
So people just left their shopping and went away lol
Used to have this in Sainsbury’s too. I remember having to drive to a neighbouring store (in my personal car mind!) to borrow a box or two of carrier bags. The commercial manager was a COW too. I transferred to coffee shop, and was promptly told we couldn’t order takeaway cups or lids because one box was more expensive than our entire weekly budget. We lost out on SO MANY sales due to not being able to sell takeaway coffee.
I was sure to direct the annoyed ones to customer service and to ask for the store manager.
As I was leaving I found out she was bonus’ed on keeping stores below the budget, so she was choosing to short all the departments on essentials. Cleaning materials, consumables. The amount of times the bakery couldn’t sell bread because she had dropped items off their weekly order was ridiculous.
The checkouts manager had to go out and borrow till rolls from neighbouring stores more times than i can count. Chaos.
it’s so short sighted when someone can go “wow look at me! i managed to go under budget on carrier bags!” when surely anyone with half a brain would think
“wow, we’re selling a lot, better get some more carrier bags!”
istg retail managers are largely awful/thick people
Back in the days of the credit crunch/recession I was working for a company with a London head office and around five regional offices.
In the Leeds office we were saving money wherever we could, using the back of scrap paper instead of post it notes. Keeping the free pens from hotels and so on.
One day an email was sent to all staff nationally from the head of finance. Saying that in order to economise they’d be taking various measures including “cancelling the office fruit baskets and the fresh flowers on reception with immediate effect.
…both things we’d never had…and had no idea the people in London were enjoying. So that went down well!
I used to work in a bike shop. Best job of my life, I loved it. We were part of a small chain that unfortunately went under, but because our specific store was highly profitable we were all kept on when a new company bought the store. Great, right?
Sadly not. The new management were cheap in the extreme - the previous company was badly run, but these new guys were something else altogether. They realised that, although I'd been working 40 hours a week for the past two years, through some weird legal mumbo-jumbo they were able to cut my hours down to what I was contracted when I first joined. All of a sudden I was down to two days a week. As the only dedicated sales person in the shop.
We tried to explain that this was not only illogical and completely unfair on me, but also a real risk to the business; we were in a high theft area in a city centre and had had people ride out on bikes before. I obviously had to get a new job in order to keep my rent paid, so I did just that.
Two days later our store manager and one of our mechanics were alone in the shop, two people distracted our manager while someone else cut some locks, and then all three of them rushed out with a bike each. Almost £15k, gone in the blink of an eye. The entire shop closed about a month later. All because they would have rather hired someone they could get away with paying £1 an hour less.
Sounds like Frasers Group logic. I worked in a HoF that had so few staff and so many floors it was impossible to stop thousands of pounds in stock getting nicked by shoplifters.
NHS worker- we used to get tea, coffee and milk years ago. Now we have to provide our own. I get watching every penny but when you’re providing such an essential service and working your arse off it feel like a bit of a slap n the face to have to bring your own tea bags into work
In the UK, chain bars and restaurants routinely put skeleton crews on to save on wages. They might save a couple hundred pounds on wages on a busy weekend night but they'll lose thousands in takings.
I worked in hospitality for 12 years and only one place understood that when there's 100+ people waiting to be served at a huge island bar, sending staff home is counterproductive.
Company I worked for 15 ish years ago cancelled the office Christmas party two weeks before it was due, in some stupid cost cutting exercise. It was meant to be at Kings College in Cambridge, and was going to be pretty swish. Because they cancelled it so late they had to pay pretty much the entire booking fee still. They then put an an afternoon thing in the office break room, with catering and a mobile casino (with fake money for betting obviously), and overall spent more money than if they'd gone ahead with the proper party.
Later on, the project I was working on had lots of consultants, who travelled to client sites at the client's request at fairly short notice a fair bit. They decided we were spending too much on travel, so every single trip had to be approved by the senior VP of the business unit, but he only did this once a week. This meant that we had to start declining client meetings, as we couldn't get the travel approved, or often by the time it got approved the price of flights had gone up a lot. This carried on for months. I did wonder how many hours a week he SVP spent reviewing and approving travel requests.
One of my friends used to work for JP Morgan in London. For one Christmas party the company had booked a boat on the Thames with food and drinks to be served there.
Turned out the pre-paid tab at the bar was gone in 20mins and the food was just catering with stern waiters who were only allowed to put 3 bites on each person’s plate. So everyone queued for ages, then had to go again for seconds. This is mostly how people “enjoyed” their ride on the boat.
All in all they were left hungry and paid for expensive drinks. The boat only had two stops or something so everyone just stuck around for a while, then went off in big groups and had some McDonalds/ Five Guys.
I think the office was also super basic and aged + no free coffee/tea but of course you’re expected to do long hours etc. Stingy rich people are the worst! The CEO is horrible. Definitely changed my mind about applying there and luckily none of my friends work there anymore.
Lower quality stationary, also making us stay at ridiculously cheap hotels when we’re travelling for work.
I personally think that if you’re travelling for work and it’s a big company that you shouldn’t have to stay in a budget hotel
I like the predictability of a premier inn. I've stayed at some rotten premium hotels.
For years in local government (UK) we used to get. Christmas eve afternoon off, albeit paid, to go out for food and drink which we paid for ourselves. Stopped just before Covid, due to comments in the media about public sector slackers, and we had to work the afternoons. Now we are post Covid and WFH, everyone just fucks off in the afternoon, knowing full well nothing is going to happen
About 10 years ago I worked at a university bar on campus. As staff we had to pay for everything despite them throwing away £1000s of food per week. They literally could feed the team when the kitchen closed without it costing them a penny. Lots of other backwards things happened on that job including always promoting the last person standing!
I used to work for a premier league football team on the bar in their stadium. The rule was that any pies unsold at the end of the shift were fair gain for staff. Usually, I ended up eating a pie at the end of the shift and taking a few home for dinner for the family, so it was pretty good. They changed to rule to left overs had to be binned, and anyone taking any would be fired. That killed all good will quickly, plus saved them nothing.
One of my previous employers would send out loads of letters on headed paper. To cut costs, management refused to order any more. We were told to print the letters onto photocopies of the headed paper, which as you could imagine looked terrible.
At best the letters looked unprofessional and tatty, at worst they looked like poor forgeries.
I was the only IT person in an office of about 100 people. I spent years upgrading their shitty optiplex 3020 pcs one by one with 8-16gb of ram and SATA SSDs just to keep them alive. About 3 years ago we finally got the budget to replace them all.
My head of IT intervened and insisted we need to buy the £20 per unit cheaper version of PCs that had HDDs in them. I didn't even know that Dell was still making them with HDDs. That was about 3 years ago.
I quit that business soon after.
Always pisses me off when I see highly paid people using shit hardware. If you even get a 1% productivity improvement out of sticking an SSD and a second screen on a system then even at minimum wage that'll pay for itself in under a year.
It upset a lot of us but not enough to cause walkouts or even speak up. The boss was infamous for dishing out P45s for the slightest reason.
He would turn off all the lights when staff were on a lunch break. Literally pennies over a 30 minute period. The morale was already low with the crap wages, lunch breaks just made life worse. Especially in winter months when it was already overcast outside and you had to sit eating your sandwich in a gloomy room.
Fk you Michael you lisping penny grabbing b'stard.
First not our company but new landlords took over the building and immediately sacked the cleaning company that cleans the communal areas and toilets, we were left for weeks with no one cleaning the toilet or replacing the toilet roll. Taken over by a larger company we used to get a gift card on anniversary years (think 5 or 10 years service) I made 10 years this year would have been £300. The larger company stopped this as said it needed to be declared as a taxable gift and that they could expense a reasonable gift instead. Used to get annual generic Christmas gift of wine and nice chocolates (probably £30pp max ) this stopped this year. Also a cap on the cost per head for Christmas do.
We were once told to leave the milk out of the fridge because opening and closing the fridge all the time was wasting electricity.
Wow.
I bet the health and safety people would have had views on that...
12 years ago the company stopped us claiming milk on expenses. We sourced tea and coffee via stationary ordered but obviously fresh milk wasn’t possible. Then they stopped it. That upset a lot of staff.
Supermarket I used to work at (Green pocket tap). They used to have fresh milk in the staff canteen for use in drinks and cereal etc.
One day they decided to only provide UHT.
My company recently bragged about how much we were saving because of switching to only buying two types of milk and one type of tea and coffee for the kitchens. This cannot have amounted to more than a few hundred pounds a year, all the while our executives fly first class to pointless conferences and our CEO gets driven around in a limousine...
We used to get gift boxes at Christmas. The box used to be big enough that I could use it to store documents, it would be actually heavy to carry and have plenty of really nice Xmas treats. We would also get 20% off the week leading up to Xmas. The boxes got smaller and smaller and cheaper and cheaper. To the point you couldn't be bothered to take it home most people put it in the donation bin. Then the discount dropped. The last Xmas box we got contained probably not even £5 worth of products. Now they dont do the boxes anymore.
My last place cut back on the cleaners, reduced bins available, any tea or coffee had to be purchased, and countless drives to reduce printing costs.
My current place will supply tea/coffee/milk, but isn't sufficiently heated and the owner moans if the lights are left on in the dark foyer
They switched to cheaper paper in the printers, which led to everyone spending stupid amounts of time clearing paper jams.
Removing the free cereal from the break room. Not the biggest loss ever, but also barely a significant saving in the context of layoffs at a company of 120 people.
The supposed saving was colloquially known as a 'kellog' and used as a standard unit of measurement in the office for months.
Heating has been massively decreased and hand towels have been removed from the toilets (they did replace the dispensers for appearance but they now lie forlornly empty).
Owners said if people want to come to the summer bbq they need to come to mandatory 10AM team-building first. It was a sham so that they could write the bbq off as an expense and claim it as catering. The people 200 miles away who would need to get a 5:30AM coach were shafted.
One Christmas, the entire staff team was ~treated~ to a £3 pen and pencil set with the company logo on it as well as 3 quality streets. We had boxes of cheaper company pens (£0.15 each) that staff use on the regular anyway, but the expectation was that those cheap pens in storage would no longer be used by staff and instead exclusively used for marketing.
To top it all off, my team wrapped them for all staff, including ourselves and added the "merry christmas, from management" cards, which felt insulting.
The pens cost £3 per person. If management had let people keep using the cheap pens, knocked on office doors and greeted everyone with a mince pie and a cup of tea, they would have done a lot better. It's a small company with <200 employees, so really not a massive ask.
The whole thing miffed people off and made their task of announcing company sell off and maintaining staff morale during the process almost impossible.
We have to get 3 quotes from different suppliers before a purchase order goes out.
You would argue that this is done for some serious cost saving reaons but no. Prices in the industry are more or less the same, the actual benefit is how quickly you can get the product/service. We had delays of 1months plus for a saving of £50 on a 3 year project with a budget in the hundreds of millions.
Suffice to say, almost everything has grinded to a halt because of this policy but we spend countless hours in meetings every week arguing why we cannot accelerate the project timeline and deliver 6 months earlier. Not to mention how many suppliers we have pissed off that no longer want to work with us
White collar problems…. But a company making billions a year decided to stop funding exams that make the workers better and cost a few hundred. Workers studied in their own time so it was purely financial. Battered motivation across the firm - it was an exam-heavy industry.
It used to be in my contract at my last job that I was expected to work reasonable overtime. There was another clause that overtime was unpaid.
I would end up working extra hours if I was on site. HR would whine about me arriving 5 minutes late to the office (it was a 1.5 hour commute and there would sometimes be worse traffic) but my boss told them to back off because of the free overtime I did.
A few years later HR whines again because they have to adjust the clockins all the time. They didn't care I would always work over to make it up or work over half an hour to finish something.
So I said fine I'll be here at 9 on the dot and I'll be leaving at 5:30 on the dot, mid sentence if that's how it goes. No more free overtime. The boss got pissy when I refused to go on site one time going on about "oh we're still doing that are we". Well yes since you've not fixed it .
Anyway I ended up leaving for a 5k pay rise.
British Army, Armoured Infantry (charging about in something that’s half tank / half minibus) in the 00s.
Bought Indian made machine gun ammunition for training to save costs. Between mis-fires, malfunctions, hang-fires (where it goes off slower than it should) and other issues it did £10,000s worth of damage to our vehicle’s weapons and doubled the amount of time spent on ranges while waiting to fix said broken stuff. Lucky (and only by luck) no-one was injured.
I used to do low level admin and order processing for an NHS Trust. One day we were mandated to only buy the cheapest economy tea and coffee we could find for the staff kitchens. If anyone wanted different they were told to pay for their own and bring it in from home.
That was the rule for everyone. Except….
The CEO. His secretary was apparently allowed to order the very best stuff for him and his guests. Bearing mind, this person was not only the highest paid person in the Trust, but also supposed to be leading by example.
I will not name him (despite the fact he is a public officer!) but when I left a few months later, he requested an exit interview as the turnover for my team was exceptionally high.
I took the opportunity to explain how demoralising that sort of behaviour was and why so many at the Trust had developed a ‘just keeping the seat warm’ culture.
He was stumped and pretty much ended the interview. He has gone on to ‘lead’ 2 more Trusts since then.
It really was the little things that cumulatively piled up to create the most stagnant working culture possible.
I worked for a large outsourcer, about 15 years ago. We put in place a 300 seat contact centre in a government building, and our break rooms were furnished, had decent quality fixtures and fittings and a free tea/ coffee/ hot chocolate machine in each one, and more frequent (higher quality) cleaning. Inevitably the Civil Servants in the building would use our break rooms, which really wasn't an issue for us. Good to maintain friendly relationships with colleagues.
The client asked us if there was a problem and we confirmed no, as the benefits far outweighed the cost of a 15% increase in tea/ coffee consumption.
The client put locks on the doors preventing people coming in to our zone, then "leaked" that it was our call to do so.
I responded by putting automated door closers on the doors, so that we could leave them open whilst remaining fire compliant. Citizen information remained protected as all of the internal doors to the contact desks were already secure.
Milk. We had 12 hour shifts as part of 24 hour shift rotation and had to buy milk for our coffee ourselves
Printing. Had to get director approval to print a page of paper. Major organisation. How to spell out loudly that you’re in the shit and desperately out of ideas
Another one about 20 odd years ago worked in a pub minimum wage job, it was a chain pub. One manager moved on and a lump sum of money was left to have a staff do, we never went anywhere for staff do it was after work and usually pizza and brought in booze and karaoke they would let us stay over in the rooms attached (premier inn). So new manager starts and arranged staff do and charges £8 per head for pizza costs no mention of the pot of money left to cover this. At the time £8 was probably 2 hours wages I skipped the do on principle most of the other staff went and paid the £8. Shocking
Replacing nurses with care assistants.
Years ago I worked on a service desk and there was about 20 of us.. lots of heavy coffee drinkers
They switched from gold Nescafé to red Nescafé and the outrage begun.
People actually refused to work.. one guy made a post on the intranet complaining and was swiftly invited in for a conversation with HR.
The gold Nescafé never returned and an email went round reminding everyone that we're welcome to bring in our own coffee..
Work provided a bean to cup coffee machine - we had to provide the beans and milk - coffee was always available for visiting clients
Oh and we had to clean the machine down every Friday
Call centre I used to work in, when we got taken over all our guys were on one floor and their staff on another.
Our floor was peaceful we were able to have a laugh etc. then they decided to move us all upstairs where it was noisy weren’t allowed to talk to each other. People were not happy as we had a different system downstairs and had to get used to their Stone Age system that was like pulling teeth.
A few years ago our department managed to overspend its T&E budget, because a couple of people had to taken too many flights the offshore hub they're gradually moving all our jobs to. Naturally this meant no Christmas do for the rest of us.
"Cost discipline", you know.
Not my workplace but a cash & carry I use, they use to have big Biffa bin in the trolly bays for rubbish. Perhaps 4-5, they removed them. Now the car park looks an absolutes mess as traders just dump the rubbish. There is cardboard and plastic shrink wrap on the edges, in the bushes and trees that are on the edge of the car park. It’s so sad. But at lease they save the bill on having them emptied lol. Just looked the company only made 3.13 billon profit last year.
Not putting up signs.
I work at a big historical site owned by a big corporation, we get a lot of people through the main entrance where I work and 90% of my job ends up being directing people to the main part of the site. Employees (including myself) have recommended to higher ups that a simple sign after the entrance with an arrow would save a lot of hassle and make the customer experience better. Same problem in the car park, and for evening events.
There's not even a sign to say where the entrance and exit are, some people walk around the whole place twice not knowing how to get out. Surely a one time sign cost is cheaper than a recurring employee wage...
Signs cost money apparently, and yet so does having essentially an extra employee in each place to deal with the customer questions about where to go🙄
ETA: Should mention they were quite happy spending money on bunting and leaflets and a helium tank for balloons to sell our new annual pass (barely worked) which all got chucked in the bin the day the deal ended.
At my employer 20-odd years ago, they announced a 10p per drink fee on the vending machines (which had previously been free) and that this would save / make the company £500k per year.
It was unwise timing because the CEO’s bonus had just been announced, which was a very similar amount of money.
Unsurprisingly the dots were joined up by people, much pushback given (“we all have to pay for our drinks so Mike gets a bonus”) and the 10p decision was reversed.
The boss had a thing about post-it notes being expensive. He told us to write in pencil on them so we could rub it out and reuse them.
One day after work he went around and took all the post-it pads off everyone's desk. It didn't even make sense, they were already paid for, he could just have stopped any more being ordered.
We had a meeting every couple of months where a senior exec would come to our site and hold a lunchtime "town hall" session, but they would always get a bunch of sandwiches and cakes in to make up for it.
One month he arrived mid morning and told someone the company had decided to stop buying the food. Word spread quickly and without anyone planning anything not a single person went to the town hall, it was just him and a local flunky.
It was rearranged to the next week and made very clear that food would be provided.
My ex-employer used to have an "Acting up allowance", essentially if you were expected fill in for a manager you could claim an extra £1 an hour. Not extravagant, but generally the same people were acting up so it generally added up. Frankly, it was a pretty cushy deal, you got to come off the shop floor and avoid customers and annoying colleagues to do other work, got paid a sliver extra to do it. To an extent, it was already penny pinching because if a manager was off sick or on maternity, they didn't have to pay to second someone to cover, they could just pay an extra £40/week allowance.
But eventually they decided that you could only claim the allowance if you were covering for 3+ days. Two days (i.e. the manager's rota days off) you were expected to suck it up and do the work. Then they decided it'd be a flat £30/week if you covered more than the three days.
Folk complained to the Union, who, despite being pretty fierce with other companies they covered, were toothless with ours. So pretty soon there was no more management cover and shops were left in a shambles when management took holidays,
Changing to flimsy cheap paper, clogged up the printers and caused hours of rework and expensive repairs.
Our office roles occasionally require us to go into areas that require protective clothing to be worn, including steel toe boots.
As it’s not common to visit (probably won’t be going back anytime soon) , the company refuses to buy each employee their own boots and there is a communal cupboard to grab a pair from.
I’m fairly new to the company and recently needed a pair. I’m a UK 4 and there were none in my size.
A colleague going with me was a UK 5 - same issue.
The smallest pair we could find was a UK 6, so she took those. Another colleague going with us was given permission to stop at the trade shop around the corner as we have an account there, to pick up an extra pair. Great!
However - I was not allowed to buy a pair in a size 4 as this is a ‘less common size’ and they wanted a pair that would be ‘more versatile’ as they wanted value for money. We got a 5.
I’m on the smaller side of a 4 and the 5 was massive, so I had these big boots jangling around on my feet in a dangerous area that included going up a ladder - and yes, I lost my footing. Didn’t fall thankfully but FFS…
At my old job we used to get sandwiches every Wednesday from a local deli. They were always really nice and it was a fun treat.
They switched to Greggs to save something like 20p per sandwich and they were just miserable. People stopped eating them after the switch because they were crap, which meant there was suddenly lots of waste, so they just stopped buying them in entirely.
Management tried to limit the sales team in meal expenses. Including “try to get the client to treat you for a meal” (would have been expensed by the client anyway). Also, we wouldn’t be funding alcoholic drinks in expenses any more.
Sales team responded with a snotty response asking what happens when they tell a client, who is going to be signing a half million pound contract with the company, that they can only choose items from the saver menu and they’re not allowed to have a bottle of wine with it. Then followed it up with “I suppose I could take John smith to McDonald’s to seal our million pound deal coming up!” (John smith being one of our regular clients who was old school MOD)
Many years ago I temped for a local council. At the end of each week you had to fax your signed timesheet to the agency so you could get paid. The office manager in the council wanted to charge me 15p to use the facility of the fax phone line as that is what they charged staff for personal calls. (Pre mobile phones)
I explained that it was a business expense and not personal as ultimately they would be invoiced for my time. She wouldn’t budge, so I went over her head and her boss agreed with me.
It always brings a smile to my face how penny pinching someone can be.
A £99.00 plastic cover for the big red shut down button in the computer room.
This was in the days of IBM mini computers. The switch was to cut power to the entire computer room in case of fire etc. Usually placed about waist height on the wall near the door. The ops director refused to authorise the purchase order for the plastic cover that would prevent accidental pushing of the button. It was the most costly purchase decline ever. When showing a group of senior directors from the parent company around the offices… yep, someone accidentally leaned on the big red button and in those days we were shut for over a week! As a junior programmer/operator, I genuinely almost got fired for laughing. We’d been predicting it for months. Unfortunately for them rather than dismissal I made a fortune in overtime helping 2 external consultant engineers get it all back running again.
At WHSmith when I worked there like 7 years ago, to try a drive sales in store the management decided to have a little competition to see who could sell the most bags of Mini Eggs with a “prize” guaranteed at the end of each week. The prize was a bag of Mini Eggs ffs
Change from pasturised milk bottles in the fridge for tea/coffee to UHT sachets... Probably cost more, even though the reason was that some people were using it on their cereals for their breakfast.
When we were told the milk was only for tea/coffee and we shouldn’t use it for cereal. I don’t drink tea/coffee so immediately donated my share to a cereal eater.
Tbf I feel like in hospitality bosses can get away with so much, because there isn't any concept of organized labour within the industry anymore.
We had a competition set by our regional manager to see who could sell the most of a limited edition coffee, and apparently the person in each store who won would get a £50 bonus. They, of course, reneged on this agreement, everyone was pissed off (but not surprised) and of course nothing happened. I almost for a while started to think I was making that competition up, but no it just wasn't honoured.
It's really kinda depressing how much we put up with without feeling like we can do anything :(
The changed the business expense policy so that hardly anything was allowed, and even then you’d get raised eyebrows for daring to put something on expenses.
They took away the water coolers and the site.
No lunch and no travel expenses for SMT away-day. Go fuck yourselves.
Not me, but my mum's a bus driver, I think she mentioned they used to have free coffee, now you have to pay for it.
Lack of free milk in the fridge, means everyone has to bring their own in but as I work different sites different days I may only be in the main office 2 days a week so its a complete pain...
At my old workplace the manager sent out a teams email stating that someone had used the UHT milk for cereals instead of tea/coffee.. and also stating it should be only used for drinks and any other use is prohibited as it goes against the budget... i quit soon after!