Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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One wonders how large that line item could possibly be across literally the entire company.

Running a quick Fermi calculation, multiplying my personal rate of staple usage over the past year by the number of employees at Google we get... $0 spent on staplers.

This may be an underestimate.

Still... here's 5,000 staples for 4.29, with no particular effort put into price shopping: https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/749601/Office-Depot-B... which yields 1.2 million staples for a cool $1000. In reality I'm sure bulk buying could push that down even more.

I'm finding it hard to believe even Google goes through much more than that in a year. But even if I'm wrong, does it go through 120 million staples per year, necessary to get up to even a semblance of one employee's salary?

What an astonishing message to send to stockholders and investors.

Worse, if stapling at the reception now takes significant more time than stapling before, that's costly too. Particularly when the stapler is in use when you need it, or someone borrowed it and now no-one can find it. Before you know it, you've wasted an hour stapling a stack of forms or so.

As an aside, the organization I worked at before had two to four secretaries per floor. Before the pandemic, most were in their offices when you needed anything practical, like staples, batteries, etc. After the pandemic, most of them work from home most days of the week. That's great for them, but I've had days that I had to go through the whole building to get this or that.

These small informal conveniences and ways-of-working aren't on the organization's radar, and when they're gone, it takes some doing to get them organized again. Until then, and until everyone in the organization knows about the new ways of working, this can be quite frustrating and inefficient.

The alternative explanation is that they have a theft problem.

Maybe some intern realized they could arbitrage $0 work staplers into >$0 eBay staplers.

If that is a problem, you deal with it by litigation against the bad actor. No need for a corporate "lets drop all staples" announcement.

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