When Cheaping Out Backfires: 25 Companies Who Paid a Hefty Price for Cutting Corners

Business traveler must fly to the closest airport to the destination.

Is Airport A one mile closer to the destination than Airport B? Yes. Are the airline tickets 2x as expensive? Also yes.

go4tli , Pixabay Report

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

WimbleWimble , Tima Miroshnichenko Report

My old boss was a major cheapskate and always skirted licensing and regulations whenever possible. He refused to pay $5k for a license for certain states we operated in and eventually several suppliers cut our contracts and we ended up losing hundreds of clients and untold hundreds of thousands in recurring revenue because it.

Grand-wazoo Report

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 supplies guy didn’t work for IT they worked for the operations department. Still we talked to him about it several times and he would just blow us off and keep getting the knock offs.

mtgguy999 , Wendelin Jacober Report

Refused to expand. My company “had a good thing going” working with small mom-and-pop clients for low prices. The issue is that it worked well because the employees were all extraordinarily talented but in the early stages of our careers so our pay didn’t quite match our capabilities. Once we started to catch on that we were getting paid 60-70k but could easily make 100k+ by switching companies, we started pushing our boss to charge more and market to higher tier clients so we could all make more but he simply refused. We wanted to stay, wanted the company to grow with us, wanted to do what we were capable of, but the boss was comfortable and didn’t want to spend the money or take the risk.

Well, surprise, we all started leaving for companies offering us 50-100% pay jumps. He replaced us with low cost employees. Work quality suffered, and clients started leaving. The company sputtered along for a couple years then finally went under.

ideit , Marc Mueller Report

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.

sonsonmcnugget , Adrien Olichon Report

A company I worked for (a fortune 500 company) was having a hard time getting employees for 8.00 an hour, our competitors started at 10.00 an hour at the time, this was 5 years ago. Someone at corporate had the bright idea to stop using preemployment drug screening, allowing the positions to be filled by people who we normally would disqualify. This company was a national auto parts chain, and we had a fleet of delivery trucks, there were so many accidents both inside and outside of the stores over the 18 months that they did this. Through lost productivity, theft, and several liability lawsuits the company lost millions of dollars even enough to affect its stock prices.

Impressive-Floor-700 Report

I work at an industrial plant in a rural area. We require water to operate- some to flush the toilets, but also some for certain cleaning operations that we do. We could have a water well drilled for about $30,000 and it would easily supply all of our water needs. Instead, we have water brought on site, sometimes twice a week at $240 per trip. A year ago I asked my boss why we didn’t just get a well. His boss didn’t want to spend the money. He also said that he stopped keeping track after water delivery would have paid for three water wells. There’s also equipment we have that is undersized and bottlenecks our process, but we got it really cheaply so we will make do. We also pay the lowest wages in our industry. In a year, we have had 60% turnover because everywhere else pays more. Then when someone leaves for more money we have to use overtime to cover for them and spend money training someone new. If we paid people more to start with and retained our staff then we would probably spend the same overall on wages and have a better trained staff. Lastly, our plant uses a certain chemical for our production. If we run the plant at a medium pace, most of the chemical can get recycled in the process and we lose very little. If we are told to run the plant faster, we gain more output of the end product but the chemical is consumed rather than being recycled. As an example, if our slower production produces 30 units to 1 unit of chemical, the faster production yields 50 units to 5 units of chemical. Of course the chemical is much more expensive than our end product, so each unit is much less profitable.

Dadofpsycho , Pixabay Report