Corporate penny-pinching is so often the death of business that started out strong.

How would you handle your workplace’s top client beginning to get stingy? One guy recently shared his experience with this on Reddit, to hilarious results.

Here are the details.

You need the parts but don’t want to pay. Right

I worked for a small fabrication shop.

I filled several roles.

One was billing and one was accounts receivables.

Two departments that get the most flack from customers.

We had a machine shop as well.

One of our clients was a rather large maker of a specialty truck product.

They would order certain parts from us to use on the trucks.

This required the machine shop to make the dies and then we would make the parts.

They would constantly make changes.

As large companies have the tendency to do.

Our contract said they would pay for any increase in cost.

Now, the change orders might add 2 to 5 cents per part.

They would say alright and we would produce the new part.

Efficient enough system.

We would then send the invoice for the new part.

Which would get rejected because the contract said the part was 35 cents each, not 38 cents each.

I would have to explain that they had changed the order so they had to pay the new price.

And that likely never went over well.

They would refuse and would only pay the original price.

Finally, I stopped the plant from making the parts that they were not paying the proper price for.

They used a JIT (just in time) inventory system, so they had no backstock in inventory when we stopped shipping.

Seems wildly inefficient.

They called in a panic.

Where were the parts?

We told they refused to pay so we refused to ship.

Hate to hear it, hate to see it!

We went back and forth for a few days, then we had a check and all change orders were approved.

The week they were down cost them several hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The total of the difference between the original price and the new price on the parts was around $250 total.

That’s what corporate bureaucracy will do.

After the contracts were up, they found another machine shop.

Sounds like they’ll likely keep running into the same problem. Let’s see what the good people of Reddit had to add.

Many commenters were able to relate.

Others lamented bad business practice.

And shared similar stories.

One person empathized for the new shop.

And one person felt the story was insufficient.

All good parts keep moving until they don’t.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.