My favorite story of "unintended consequences" of belt-tightening like this was when I worked at a startup about a dozen years ago. We did well for a few years, but it was clear to people we were reaching a point of market saturation. Nevertheless, the CEO kept agreeing to doubling of sales revenue year after year. Well, no surprise, the last year before big layoffs, we were way off on sales goals.

The CEO announces we have to "put our heads down." Pretty much the main change enacted was no more ping pong. The problem is that were really only two guys constantly in the ping pong room. Those two guys just happened to be the two most senior sales guys, and the only two that were meeting quota.

They both left about a month after this and not-so-slyly told the CEO he was an idiot.