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Company coruption

Tell me how legal this is, i work for a steel company, we sell bars,tubing and angles, plus plate. We buy our material from the mill baded on weight, for example, tubing 4×4×.375" thickness by 48 feet long, now it comes to us in bundles of 9 pcs. From yhe mill they mark the end in chalk the actual thickness usually 10% less. Its our tolerance, but we sell all our steel by book weight ,so the customer pays a fake weight thinking that the material is actually .378" thick per foot, when its actually less, plus the pay a mark up on selling this tubing, now think of this in the bigger picture when we sell millions of pounds of steel perday when we really pay exact weight from yhe mill, everyday for a year just how much profit we scam from every customer we sell too, it adds up on every bar,plate tubing,sheets,angles, and machined parts that are cut for customers too. I signed a non disclosure paper almost 26 years ago.im disgusted on my companies corruption all our material is marked up by 10 % but thats not counting on the actual price we pay for our material from the mills. By law the mill has to provide exact measurements and weights for deliveries of such material. The law ends there. Whats your opinion of yhis fact ?
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ArishMell · 70-79, M
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.

++++

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".