"Never underestimate the American middle class to sacrifice their personal time and welfare to upkeep a cheap product line to avoid paying less up front."
Exactly! Somebody here gets it.
You have that right. A few years ago, I resigned from a company over the "thousands paper cut cost cutting" by the new CEO who only had an accounting and marketing background.
New ideas where considered too much of a risk. "What's that?" became way too much of a response when talking about new markets and technologies. At times I felt like I was leading children with not enough mischief in their eyes.
I threw a few links at her e-mail under variances of the title "The High Cost of Being Cheap." She refused to read them. The only way she knew how to increase profits was reducing expenses. In technology, that is suicidal.
It finally came to one of those walks into her corner office, slam the door closed and let the rest of the floor know I was in there to make something happen.
In short, her cost cutting drove the labor costs through the roof, turned down productivity and drove down morale. For me the final straw was the company picnic last summer where she dropped the catering and announced it was a pot luck. Catering for a crew that size wasn't even a grand in expenses. "We are not running a church picnic!" was the line many said.
Instead of having these creative people do their best to make wonderful product, they were delegated to, part-time entry level service jobs. This drove down production to say the least. The only response was "This is your ship and we all must make it clean!"
Common assigned overhead duties such as cooking, cleaning and even custodial duties created a lot of turnover. Another one that drove away many was someone monitoring and enforcing who was not washing their coffee cups in the break room instead of hiring a maid to take care of it during lunch and the end of the day.
It has been three years and no major product release since myself and a few others left. So many people dig their own hole and then scream when they can't get out blaming others for their problems.
