Leaving lights on is so far down the list of wasteful things companies do that it shouldn’t even warrant mentioning. There are flights from Boston to Philadelphia weekday mornings (approximately a one-hour flight) that cost $1200 for a roundtrip on US Airways.

These flights are mostly taken by businesspeople that need to be in Philadelphia or New Jersey that day for meetings, and usually expense the cost. Since most people on these flights are not paying for the flight out of their own pocket, US Airways is free to charge many times what the flight should cost. The same flight on Delta is about $600 for a round trip.

No wonder they are hurting after the state has cut their budget another couple million bucks.

Thank you I was just reading the Black Friday piece.The text and the comments certainly put things in the right perspective.

Its like the guy bellyaching cause he has got any shoes.Then he comes across a guy with no feet.

Good on you for speaking up, and good luck with the next career move!

The only quirk with it is that when they aren’t running, people might walk up/down the wrong side. So they also put one-way gates at the exit end.

With this system you can opt not to start it and use your legs instead.

“Jeezus! I thought I told you to turn the lights out!”

“Who the hell turned the the heat up?”

“Close that door! We’re not heating all outdoors!”

For the matter, I don’t know why Otis or one of the other escalator companies hasn’t developed an on-demand escalator that shuts off when nobody is riding or about to ride. The notion of running it continuously is tremendously energy wasteful. They can put a sensor pad into the approach to the escalator so by the time a rider’s foot lands on the first step the escalator is up to speed.

Does anyone here remember when GM removed the last “e” in employee in all their internal HR documents to save printing costs. I started with Remy, then part of GM, in the early 90’s, we were still using a lot of paper documents then. I remember reading my offer of employment and chuckling at all the missing e’s. If I remember right, this was part of the employe suggestion program.

Turning off the lights: good idea, mis-spelling words: bad idea.

To GM employes, keep a roll of toilet paper with you, it will become valuable soon, if not already.

As one could imagine,some of the responses were crude ,imature and just plain unworkable.However some had some merit.

Senior management drive company supplied Suburbans Yukons/Tahoe’s with gas.It could be argued that nobody buys em anyway,so why not get some use out of them.So why not a Lucerne or a LaCrosse?They ain’t flying off the shelves either,
but the deprecation/gas costs could make a difference.Mangement just shook thier heads and told me to shut my PC down at the end of the shift.

Hundreds of suggestions had a common theme of slash management, numbers,perks,COMPENSATION!

Cause I,m on my way out the door,I can be braver.
Why not bring management head count/compensation in line with Toyota and Honda?Rumour has it that the transplants are weathering the storm.

Right off the top of my head I rhymed off 5 positions that could be axed,with zero impact on day to day operations.I pointed out that back in 1972 the only white collars on the floor were a handfull of hardworking firstline foremen.We didn’t have any need for buisness managers/coordinaters or senior supervisers,shift managers,and god only knows who else.

Managements response was “mikey,things have changed since 1972″

I answered that with “right in 1972 we owned 57%
of the market.We were also the biggest most powerfull company on the planet.Yes indeed things have changed.Now here in 2008 wer’e reduced to begging for money.

I’m confident that after I walked away the next question from management was,when is that asshole gonn’a retire.

WHY? They just become stairs when they are not on.

jaydez It’s weird how some people and companies think it’s their God given right to use as much energy as they want, even when they don’t need it. I can’t get where I work to stop wasting so much paper and recycle it to save my life. And we go through A LOT of paper being an architecture office. Same thing with electricity, our computers, printers, plotters run 24/7/365. Money wasted I wish I had in my pocket.

It’s sometimes had to believe that this country wasnt this way 60 years ago during WW2.

Then as I mentioned before (half tongue in cheek), simply offer a few vehicles through each sales channel, no more than a few, in order to keep the lawsuits at bay – with nearly no overlap in all of the marques.

Chevrolet. Low priced small and medium cars & trucks, Corvette as a halo model.

Saturn. Quality small cars. Toss the Vibe in this batch of cars and the upcoming Cruze.

Pontiac. Sporty small cars & Firebird (kill Camaro).

Jeep. Patroit, Wrangler, Grand Cherokee only.

Dodge. Sporty large/medium cars. Only build Challenger until this generation is finished.

Buick. For the white shoes and beltline near-nipples set.

Chrysler. Luxury minivans and the 300. (No point in building cheap minivans, since only people with money at hand will soon be buying cars)

Cadillac. Luxury.

GMC. Pickups.

Hummer. Let it die on the vine.

Saab. Sink or swim in NA.

She didn’t have an answer and said it only costs Pennies to run a light (yeah, pennies, times a few hundred lights).

And this is at a time where they are trying to find every way possible to trim money out of the budget.