20 Stupid Cost-Cutting Measures That Ended Up Being A Lot More Expensive

‘Removed all the wastepaper baskets’
20 Stupid Cost-Cutting Measures That Ended Up Being A Lot More Expensive

Corporate higher-ups get paid more than the rest of us to make decisions like, “Yeah, turn off the HVAC system during the summer to save money,” without considering that maybe the HVAC system is serving a divine purpose — like preventing mold. Half a million dollars later, that divine purpose was finally understood, with it becoming clear that the whole penny-pinching scheme cost a lot more money in the long run. 

Redditors have weighed in on the times their idiot bosses tried to cut company costs and ended up spending more cash instead, and most of these decisions are so stupid they should be criminal.

Captain_Lavender6 . 1y ago You had to book the cheapest available flights, no matter what. We were paid hourly for travel, from arriving at an airport to leaving on the other side. The cheapest flight always had ridiculous transfers, I booked every single hour. 29 ...
1y ago Company was too cheap to block the entrance to a thermal exhaust port only 2 meters wide. The whole facility ended up exploding. 14 ...
PJMurphy 1y ago Owner's son was a computer-savvy guy. Installed pirated software on computers, no problems. Business grew, more people hired, more pirated software on a LOT more computers. They fired a guy, and he ratted them out. Huge fines. HUGE. Far more than the legit software would have cost. 8 ...
Splintzer 1y ago Against my judgement, we ditched a subscription that only cost us $12k per year to save money. Less than a year later I was told we had to renew the subscription. Turns out we were grandfathered into an old subscription level that we lost by dropping the service. Now we're paying twice as much for half the licensing. 15 ...
optiongeek 1y ago Removed all the wastepaper baskets. Seriously. Instead, they handed out little lidded buckets and we're supposed to empty these once a day at the recycling stations. Grand savings? Fuck knows. But I just had one of my engineering leads quit and he cited pin-headed, feel good penny- pinching in his exit interview. 157 ...
boin-loins 1y ago The home health agency I work for was bought out by a hospital system in the next state over. They decided to cut costs by eliminating the position of the person who would obtain authorization from the insurance companies for services and move it all to their centralized auth department in the other state. Only problem was, they had no idea that things worked differently for our state's medicaid program than it did in their state. They ended up getting denied for well over a million dollars in the first year for services we provided because they
WildRancidCaveman 1y ago A company I used to work for. Stopped providing milk in the break room which resulted in most of the staff going out for coffee a couple of times a day while on the clock. Same company spent a huge amount of money on a company Christmas party then cancelled it at the last minute because we didn't meet the numbers for the year but still had to pay for the party that nobody attended. The company no longer exists. 3 ...
Shadow948 1y ago Worked for a grocery store that hired multiple part time workers but only gave them 8 hours a week and scheduled them all on the same day. Because we'd get the work done within a couple hours they were literally paying for use to just stand around 5 hours out of the day doing nothing. Then because no one was in the back to help the rest of the store for the other 6 days they ended up having to hire a couple full time employees who also was just getting paid to stand around doing nothing
el_monstruo 1y ago The company my mom worked for had new offices built and instead of hiring movers they had the staff move. They had 3 injuries occur including my mom tearing her ACL. The HR director, who my mom was friends with, said it cost them 16x the amount they were quoted for movers to cover medical, legal, etc. costs. 26 ...
mtgguy999 1y ago Old job, we had a fancy large format printer. The guy in charge of supplies kept buying knock off ink cartridges. A genuine new cartridge was probably $80 I don't know what the knock offs cost. Every time the cartridge ran out the operator would try to replace it but it wouldn't work and the line had to shutdown and the operator would but in an IT ticket. As the IT guy i would need to though 4 or 5 or more cartridges before i got one that worked. The duds would just get thrown away. The
TrickBoom414 1y ago Thinner recycled plastic bags. We just have to use two now. 285 ...
HazMama 1y ago Buying 30 buses with 100-200 less horsepower than the previous ones, turns out you need shit tons of power to get up the steep mountain hills in Norway. 132 ...
1y ago currently got a job at a pharmaceutical company that has water tanks that are too small to handle our water requirements, so the company spends $10k per week having the tanks replaced and fixed. i spoke to the worker who handles the replacements and he said its the stupidest fucking thing hes ever seen. they can just get the correct water system size for $100k-150k 151 ...
BigPZ 1y ago Not giving the guy doing 2.5 full time jobs a slight raise, instead letting them walk and paying 3 new people (combined) at least twice what they were paying him to do all the same work at like 65 percent the quality level 188 ...
dinosore 1y ago Shut off the HVAC system to save on electricity costs during the summer. Had to pay over half a million in mold remediation costs. Fucking morons. 629 ...
junotinychonk . 1y ago . Edited 1y ago Underpaying the nurses so they quit and had to pay agency 3x the going rate 775 ...
velvet_satan 1y ago We used to get a travel per diem for our meals. Most people would eat cheap like get a free breakfast at the hotel and get a $5 footlong and split it for lunch and dinner and bank the rest. I traveled a lot so it was like a nice perk. The company got wind of this and changed their policy to we had to buy and expense all our meals. The problem was they had to have the same policy for all employees so they couldn't put a cap on meals due to the sales guys
sonsonmcnugget e 1y ago The roof of our building was leaking bad. Got quotes for doing just a third of the roof and for doing a whole new roof. They choose to do third of the roof. All it did was move the leak. A month later they did the whole roof. They would have paid a lot less had they done it right the first time. 1K ...
WimbleWimble 1y ago Moved corporate phone support from UK to India for a very large fizzy drinks company, despite the contract saying guaranteed UK support. over 50k phones cancelled and moved to their rival 268 ...
BossHoggs 1y ago Switch a department from salary to hourly to avoid a tax. They didn't realize how many extra hours every employee (30ish) was working. Since working over 8 hours would force time and a half pay, we were basically never granted the option to work overtime. So your average working went from 45 hours to 40 - so 150 hours lost per week. They switched back a few months later. 8 ...

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