The Little Things

Most of the time, when you hear about a major corporation making a minor cost-cutting measure, the temptation is to laugh it off. A company that grosses hundreds of millions each year can’t really care about a wasted slice of lemon here or there, can it? I mean, unless you’re getting into six figures worth of money, why would it even matter?

Well, sometimes it does. Consider, for example, this story on UPI Online, which details a cost-cutting measure adopted by Southwest Airlines last week. According to the UPI account, flight attendants had been noticing for some time that at the end of the day they were ending up with a lot of leftover lemon slices on the drink carts. It may not sound important, but when you add up 3,200 flights a day (that’s over a million flights a year), even a few cents worth of waster fruit adds up. The company’s estimate is that they will save over $100,000 per year, just by not carrying lemons and just offering people a slice of lime instead. Which still doesn’t sound that important, until you consider that it isn’t costing them anything at all to get it; all of that money drops straight to the bottom line…

For some time now we’ve been seeing several different airlines making what appear to be trivial cost-cutting measures, and I’ve mocked them as much as the next person. It’s not so much the fact that going from an ounce of peanuts per customer to a half-ounce doesn’t actually save much money; as noted above, saving a few pennies at a time adds up if you do it several million times each year. My problem with these measures has always been that they annoy your customers by implying that you’re saving money by doing less for them. But Southwest’s lime versus lemon initiative is saving money in a sector of operations that the paying passengers will never even notice – the leftovers in the galley (or lack of them) at the end of each flight. It makes you wonder how many additional little nuggets of waste are wandering around each Southwest flight – and how many of them are things you’d never even notice unless you read about them in a UPI online article…

Which, of course, raises the same questions about other types of business. Fast-food companies introduced those little ketchup and mustard packets to promote the same kind of incremental savings by reducing waste, and if you really cared I could suggest a dozen similar innovations. Trimming a little bit off your operational costs every day isn’t usually that difficult, but doing so without violating the Second Rule of Business (e.g. without annoying your customers) is another matter. If you haven’t already considered how to achieve incremental savings in your own business, it’s probably worth taking a moment to do so, but I’m going to suggest that you take it one step farther and consider the cost-cutting measures you may already have taken. How many of them are true cost-cutting measures, things that will eliminate waste, and how many are things that will cost you as much in lost business as you save by cutting costs in the first place?

It’s probably worth taking another look at those programs. Oh, and while you’re at it, you should probably get the lime juice off your keyboard…