Now, tell me something. How do you ration out toilet paper?! Every employee gets a daily/weekly quota of paper? Or, everybody is given a small roll for the entire week? What if that is not enough? I guess some smart folks will bring their own paper from home and keep it safe in their cubes for the rainy day! How awkward it should be to walk around with some paper in your hands or tucked somewhere! So, if you see somebody get up quietly and start walking down the hallway, you don't need to ask what is on his/her mind! What if, once you get there, you realize you needed to have brought more paper with you?
To survive the slowdown, outsourcing companies will have to learn to be thrifty. The successful ones have already been doing this. At Wipro, legend has it that chairman Azim Premji would ask that toilet paper be rationed, and insist employees switch off lights and air conditioners when leaving a room.
In fact, Premji, one of India's richest men by virtue of his share in Wipro, apparently practices frugality to the extent that he orders 'by-two' samosas in the office café.
Nah! All that isn't gonna work. Why not install toilet paper dispensers in each stall? A couple of slots for credit/debit card and coins, and there you go! You don't need to carry anything. Better still, add a keypad to it on which you can punch in your employee code and you have a running account of paper used! End of the month, you have a new deduction on your paycheck!
Oh wait, this can start a whole new business of manufacturing "Toilet Paper Dispensers!" With a few trendy tag lines, it will catch on pretty fast! I already have some ready!
Swipe Before You Wipe!
Pay-per-wipe!
Pay As You Go!
Ok, that is enough. I have given you enough ideas. Now it is all yours!
3 comments:
Not a bad idea at all! :D
Toilet Paper Economics is not a new 'development' at Wipro. It is not an outcome of the Sub Prime Crisis or the $700 billion bailout Dhamaka! Premji has been targeting this fraternity since Y2K meltdown and the subsequent dot com bust. A huge number of associates were recruited to cash-in on the Y2K revenues, and post 2000 Wipro had to dump either them or the toilet turnover to balance their P&L account. The casualty in this case was not the 'tissue wipes’, as the media exaggerated -- there was a clarion call urging people to be frugal wrt. 'Paper Hand Towels'. In a tropical country like India where people sweat a lot, we do not have the habit of using paper hand towels in restrooms. We use water for washing hands, etc. But, when Paper Towel dispensers started adorning restrooms (may be to lure customers from abroad that we follow Global Standrards), employees -- and most of the times the janitors starting washing their hands and faces so often, that people would mistake them to be victims of some obsessive-compulsive-disorder(OCD). Reams and reams of thick paper hand towels were wiped and thrown off. It became a fancy idea to use those towels. They forgot that there is a thing called - hankie in their pockets. And, mind you! Since the demand for paper towels is not as huge as in a country like US, it is slightly 'costly' too in India. They were investing more money for restroom paper than A4 size printer paper for work. That was the rationale behind the decision to cut down costs on restroom stationery. Supply of tissue rolls / wipes were unaffected, but paper towels became a deemed-luxury.
@Shruthi: alva!? :)
@Srikanth: I totally understand! Thanks for giving an insider-version of the whole story! :)
I know it is a serious problem, but we can still have a laugh! And it doesn't cost a thing except maybe a couple of facial tissues if you laugh too much. :P
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