Wasted money, public and private

This may be a venting thread and nothing more. I doubt there will be much debate.

It seems like everywhere you look there are things being done that cost money. Stupid things that could and should be eliminated because it would decrease the amount of doing business, and because those costs are always passed on to us. It may be tax dollars or our consumer dollars, but the little guys always pay for it eventually.

Some examples:

The amount of money that is wasted with the census is unbelievable, especially this time around. A Super Bowl ad that didn't tell anyone the importance of the Census. Running a bajillion of those ads with big name celebs that didn't tell anyone the importance of the Census. The ads they are showing NOW tell you why it's important. Why didn't they show those earlier? Because Ed Beagley is a big supporter of Obama's? Just a thought... The ridiculous mailing to everyone in the country that they are going to get a census form. The printing costs alone for that is too hard to comprehend!

The insurance company that my company uses - large, nationwide company! - sends out new packages to every company that subscribes to their services at the end of December. They know that every darn one of their contracts can be renegotiated on January 1st! This is generally the only time that employees or employers look at the plans available and decide if they want to continue with the same plan or choose a different plan with a different premium. January 31st is the deadline and then they have to send a whole new package for each individual who is enrolled in their plans. In our case, it was for less than 20 individuals. Well over 1000 pages of printed materials wasted, the time for whoever put them together only to redo them, and then the postage for sending every BOX of materials twice.

I just wish every entity, government or private, would address ways that they can cut back on waste that is passed on to the
consumer. We are trying to do all we can in out little company - do you really need a print out of every revision? Recycling everything we can. Finding ways to make things more efficient overall. Part of it is necessary. We have to make our part as profitable as possible to stay in business with less work and lower fees available all around. But just because the economy turns around eventually, the end client is still going to want the lower costs that are being paid now until there is a viable reason to raise them.

Oh don't get me started on those commercials! And you're so right - we do pay for those with our premiums and the cost that our insurance companies pay for all of those brand-name drugs that they hawk on TV for diseases that we didn't even know we had until they told us. My gosh - what did we do before they lifted the ban on advertising prescription drug commercials??? Oh, right...we trusted our DOCTORS to tell us which drugs were right for us; we didn't act like our own prescribing physicians because we saw some stupid commercial.

Funny story about those commercials, though. A friend of mine is a single mom and can get a little intense sometimes. When her daughter was around 7 years old and she was in one of her intense/bad moods, her little one looked at her completely serious and said, "Mommy, you need some Viagra!" All she had seen were these people walking around really happy on the commercials!

I'm sure it's just because of my conservative leaning, but I am really wary of the government getting involved in making any rules for a public company of any size. If the shareholders of a publicly traded corporation are unhappy with the way the company does business, including the salaries and bonuses
given to executives, then the shareholders need to speak up and change it. If the big wigs in the corp. won't change it, then the shareholders pull their financial backing. As the saying goes, money talks and BS walks.

While I wasn't too upset by the government getting in a tizzy about the salaries and bonuses paid to companies that had been given or loaned taxpayer dollars because they were "too big to fail" or whatever catchphrase it was that week , it really was their own damn fault! They were so quick to pass the bailout and stimulus bills that NO ONE bothered to read it, until they got upset about something else. The exclusion for all of those bonuses was pretty well explicitly written into the bills that granted them the Federal dollars. Granted, the contracts were written so that an idiot would still get rich once he landed the job with guaranteed bonuses regardless of job or department or company performance, but Congress passed the law completely excluding any contracts written prior to (date signed into law). Tells us all how much the politicians really know about how big business works, doesn't it? I sure don't want those guys dictating how those same businesses are allowed to do business or compensate their employees, executive or not.

Mike, there's the point of view waste, and there's just flat out stupidity and bad business waste. I can't see any justification for sending out thousands of packages when you know that most of those packages will need to be redone and resent in a matter of weeks. The only justification I can think of is that the people just don't have enough work to do during December, so they keep them on busywork? That still isn't good business.

Maybe it's some California clause? I don't know how you could file a lawsuit against a company without first filing multiple complaints with the city/governing body first. I'm not doubting that it's happening, I just don't understand how?

No kidding! Why is it so darn difficult to get some companies/organizations to STOP sending things to dead people?????? Talk about waste!

Yeah, I always get a cover sheet saying, in English, that if I have trouble understanding the statement that I can call this number for assistance in Spanish. It's not even an easy sentence that someone who speaks only Spanish, or very limited English, could easily understand!