Cost Cutting

I have just recently been informed that as part of the cost-cutting efforts at work, I will no longer be entitled to business cards.

!!!

Well, it is not that I have a great need for business cards. However, I do sometimes wonder how the management goes about selecting things to cut. A set of business cards do not cost very much. Let us say that two boxes cost about RM30 at normal prices. If we factor in a 100% markup in order to support our affirmative action policies, let us say that it costs RM60 for each person.

Now, let us say that there are about 500 people who are affected by this decision (I’m not sure of the numbers but our company is under 1000). That means that our company would be able to save about RM 30,000 but the question is how is this money spread out.

The thing is, the bottom feeders like me are unlikely to give out many business cards because we do not normally meet lots of customers or vendors. That is probably the logic driving the decision to cut this cost because it does not apply to our senior management who are free to print as many cards as they want (talk about leading by example).

Let us say that us bottom feeders give out a card each week. So, two boxes of name cards would last us about four years each. So, that’s a savings of about RM 7,500 per annum. Wonderful, I can hear our finance department screaming in ecstasy now. I wonder which bright spark came up with such a brilliant idea to save the few thousand each year.

As the saying goes – “Penny wise, pound foolish” – let us shave off a few pennies here and there while the pounds continue to leak out various pipelines.

Moral of the story is: just be glad that they’re not cutting jobs… yet!

PS: I think that we spend more than that on toilet paper. I wonder if they would be cutting that too.