Company coruption

I operated a factory materials store for several years, and as far as I know all metals were sold to us by size not weight. The weights of stock bars were known from the catalogues and other references but for engineering, not sales, purposes.

Also the designers would have known the size tolerances on stock metals; the finished dimensions allowed for that and the working surfaces were all machined anyway.

So we could not be short-changed in that way; and no-one was infringing any laws.

When I cut the bars into billets for issuing that was always by length so the work was costed by length actually used; plus whatever the Accounts added as my charge-out rate. The machinists were on set wages and overheads but booked time-on-task; I was on a set charge-rate irrespective of product and batch.

However we also bought plate materials, mainly aluminium. There I would book out the overall plate used, but some finished parts were fairly large L-shapes so I'd cut the bulk of the angle out (leaving about 3mm all round for machining) and keep the off-cuts back for smaller components, not necessarily even for the same product. So those bits were effectively booked out twice but at the correct blank size per product; and the amount of metal actually scrapped was very small!

Corrupt? Not really. A bit cheeky though. The extra profit was not that large, the products were still costed correctly, it reduced the waste, and no supplier or customer was harmed in the making of these parts.

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One day I wanted for my own purposes two large-diameter rings cut from 20mm mild-steel plate. We did not use such metal so I went to another engineering company on the same trading-estate. When I returned a few days later to pay and collect, I saw the off-cut centres propped against a wall.

"Oh, and I'll have the two centre-pieces please!"

The store-keeper looked surprised.

"I work in a metals store in another manufacturing company," I said, "So I know how things are priced!"

I went home with the two rings and their centre "off-cuts".

It's unfortunately a standing practice in all industries. A 2" by 4" really isn't a 2" by 4" either.

The DV (Daily Value) percentages on food products, same thing.

The ethics in business is long gone. Why they can get away with selling the air in bags of potato chips. After all that air has the SCENT of potato chips.

This is actually allowed because otherwise the government would be considered anti capitalism.

This started BTW with pet rocks back in the 1960s.

The government had to consider the value of such a rock and what could be considered false advertising.

Thank capitalism for this moral value insanity.

Legally your allowed 10% +/-, your right but everything we get is underweight when you are charging a customer by our book weight on what the material rwally is, a full bundle sold straight out to a customer is charged by what our book says the weight is, but the mill tag shows a lower weight. The customer is getting hosed big time, and our rule on the floor is to tear off the mill tag before shipment, the company says to not advertise the company we buy from, but in real fact the stenciling is on the material where the material was made from, so ripping off the mill tag the customer can see his charged weight and mill weight is not the same, hence all tags to be ripped off before shipment ,this is just one example of how corrupt my company are.

So its up to incoming inspection to verify the weights but i brt there's a clause in the terms and conditions of sale allowing for +/_ 10% variation in the weight due to mil tolerances.