Imaginary Savings

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Clarissa

August 2, 2013

I’ve noticed that a deli where we routinely get sandwiches has switched to using cheaper, flimsier paper to wrap them.

To compensate for the flimsy paper, the sandwich makers have started using two sheets of it.

I am sure an executive somewhere got a bonus for that. Saving money, donthca know.

And yet no money is being saved and customers aren’t any happier. Instead, time is wasted, processes are less efficient and everyone is unhappy.

That sums up the imperatives and manias of modern American business in one example.

We have the same problem at our university. Some genius decided to “save” money by buying substandard, dry, and brittle chalk that was cheaper than our regular brand. As a result, we use two whole sticks to write a very simple text on the blackboard. The floor is covered with chalk dust. Chalk sticks crumble in your hands the moment you touch them. We now get through a packet of chalk in 3 days as opposed to about two weeks that good chalk lasted. Plus everybody is annoyed and frustrated. Plus asthmatic and allergic people wheeze and cough in the clouds of chalk dust.

The bad chalk proved more expensive than the good, high-quality kind. Yet nobody has addressed this ridiculous situation in spite of endless complaints from faculty members and students. Because, you know, SAVINGS. They only exist on paper, but who cares, right?

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9 responses to “Imaginary Savings”

David Bellamy

August 3, 2013

I confess that if something like that happened to chalk here, I would buy my own. (Maybe that is what the university is hoping??)

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  August 3, 2013
  
  This might be their plan because most people have, indeed, started carrying their own chalk.
  
  But that is devious on the part of the administration!
  
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cliff arroyo

August 3, 2013

I’m so used to bad chalk that after four hours of class I felt like the guys in the lime quarry in Apocalypto (5.14)

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Dreidel

August 3, 2013

This sounds a lot like the supposed water savings with the low-flush toilets that are now mandatory in housing construction codes in the U.S.

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Tim

August 3, 2013

Saving is one of the worst practices when you want to increase your income, at least if it’s done on a regular basis.

I have seen more than one business going to the dogs with this. And it always plays out the same. It starts with shareholders demanding a percentile increase of profit ( and by this, their earnings). Easiest way to do this is to get rid of an employee or two. So an exec fires someone and distributes their workload onto the remaining employees.

Now because increasing profit makes an Exec look successful or because shareholders can’t get their mouths filled, profit needs to be increased again. So you save some more people. And so on and so forth. You do this until you run on the bare minimum you need and this works, at least until something happens.

And something always happens. In most cases employees become displeased with their situation. They usually ask for a raise, because they now work significantly more to compensate for the fired employees. Of course they can’t be given more payment, that would not make sense. You don’t save money by firing people just to give their ex co-workers a raise.

Eventually, the employees become so disgruntled that they find work elsewhere. And that’s when the shit hits the fan. It takes maybe one or two people who leave to destabilize an entire corporation. Because suddenly, you need to replace someone with maybe 15 years of experience with someone who is totally new.* And this is the point where everything goes off-balance, because bringing in new people often does not help but actually hinders at first and suddenly your bare minimum has become unbearable.

You can’t satisfy your customers anymore, they leave, your profit goes down and everything goes to hell. Management is great 🙂

This of course not only works with employees. You can also do it with operating supplies as in this case. It works a little different, but the result is the same. Wanting to reliably and repeatedly increase profit by saving is a shit idea and you should feel bad for trying it.

*Of course they won’t hire someone with an equal amount of experience. People who are new are cheaper.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  August 3, 2013
  
  This is a brilliant analysis, Tim. There is a really frustrating lack of vision and long-term planning in this way of running business.
  
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  1. mannie
    
    August 4, 2013
    
    More here
    http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/07/31/actualidad/1375269264_738518.html
    
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Kellen

August 4, 2013

Chalk? I don’t think I ever saw a chalkboard at my university. We had 100% whiteboards. But then, the whiteboard markers were usually never available in the classroom, so many professors just brought their own set that they would take from class to class with them.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  August 4, 2013
  
  I prefer a chalkboard because these white boards always end up looking very unclean.
  
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