sunshine0221's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Don't Be Cheap Don't be Cheap The following is a paid public service announcement for people who think being cheap is a good way to save money. As with almost everything, there is a right and a wrong way to do things. There's great shopping, and then there's, well, cheap. Getting brand new gorgeous Tommy Hilfiger jeans for $6.50, that's great shopping. Deciding that even though one has recently purchased a late model Avalon and an incredibly overpriced Mac laptop, one does not have the money to pay one's web designer - that's cheap. Way back when I worked in the telecom industry. My department sent out millions of dollars in phone bills every month. And to state the obvious, not sending out bills = not good. We printed the invoices ourselves, and we had nice, shiny HP service contracts to keep our printers running. Until Purchasing decided that we were paying way too much for the service contracts, and cancelled HP and got Other Service Contract. The only good thing about OSC was that the repair guy was gorgeous. And we saw him a lot because he COULD NOT FIX OUR PRINTERS. Yes, I am sure we were "saving" a couple hundred bucks a month, but we couldn't send out bills. We all rejoiced when we got our older, overweight, non-sexy HP guy back, because he could FIX THE PRINTERS. At my most recent place of employment, I made a lot of the financial decisions. The previous CEO had been spectacular at spending millions of dollars with not so much to show for it. Cutting costs was a real need for the company. We laid off unnecessary employees, we improved our processes. We stopped ordering expensive crap we didn't need, and just said no to bidding jobs for less than they cost us to complete. Then our investors wanted us to keep cutting employees. And did not seem to understand that if we didn't have people to, like, do stuff, it might help the balance sheet very temporarily, but only until customers stopped getting their product and went away. That's cheap. And shortsighted. These are also the same people who billed the company thousands of dollars every time they came to see us, and hired Turnaround Experts for $75,000, who did exactly nothing. Do "Investors" ever make good decisions? I sell books on the internet. I researched and found the best packaging materials for the best prices. And I snork whenever I read on a booksellers message board how someone "saves" a "lot" of money on packing by scavenging for free packaging supplies, and then spends an hour packaging a book in cut-up cardboard from McDonalds and plastic grocery bags. Time is money too, folks. And also better to not ship books in packaging that looks like you got it out of a dumpster, especially when you did. I wll be the first to admit that the Frugality Fairy only visits me when absolutely necessary, and if I win the lottery I would have to pace mself so I didn't spend all the money the first day - personal sushi chefs don't come cheap you know - but I do at least have a clue where to economize, and where to not. 10:49 a.m. - April 27, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||