hmmm. Megan's story makes her point well but I wonder if it's missing an angle.

here's one from one of my early 20s shitjobs https://twitter.com/asymmetricinfo/status/1326574914988613632

One summer I was the mail clerk at a very fancy and very wealthy research lab complex. One of my responsibilities was minding the office supplies cabinet, where all the pens and notebooks and such were located.

During training it was impressed upon me that I needed to keep the cabinet locked at all times and not let the employees self-serve. Most supplies were freely given (you just had to ask me to unlock the cabinet first). Some supplies required paperwork...

...like lab notebooks, which I gather were expensive enough that the company was annoyed when grad student summer interns took extras for themselves. Still, they couldn't have been more than about $50 if that. It's just a notebook, ultimately.

This was in a facility with multi-million dollar lab equipment ALL OVER THE PLACE. you could trip and break something worth more than 10 years of your salary. They weren't hurting on funding. Record profits in fact.

So why keep the cabinet locked?

It's a power game. It's a way to impress upon the workers that NOTHING is freely available. That they require permission for ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING no matter how trivial. Big psy-op. A means to enforce a culture of obsequiousness and obedience.

And from this perspective the company Megan describes is not acting so obviously foolishly. They probably gave zero shits about bic pens going missing. Instead, they wanted to beat their workers into submission with Kafka-esque conditions.

And why would they want to do that even when it so obviously results in inefficiency and loss of social trust and emotional comfort?

Exercise left to the reader. Draw your own conclusions. But there's no way it's an oversight or unintended consequence of penny pinching.