Ill flame wrote: ↑June 5th, 2023, 11:31 pm
Last year I was responsible for approving all purchases for my battalion so i was in a unique position to see how much we spent on each item. To illustrate the problem a box of 4 low quality dry erase markers and an eraser that everyone has in their office costs around $15 through the mandatory supplier. You can buy a higher quality pack of markers at wal mart for $5. Unfortunately $8 million is a rounding error in the army, if people knew the true amount of fraud waste and abuse there would be riots.
Having contracts for basic supplies like office supplies are almost always bad.
My employer switched to Staples from Office Max to save money but everything costs more and the quality of the paper is so bad that we end up wasting more paper than before because every printer constantly jams with this Staples paper.
Only time we're allowed to go outside of Staples is if Staples doesn't offer a similar product and then we have to wait to get approval from some other department that takes eons to approve anything. Thus most of the time it's not even worth the trouble, so we just learn how to adapt without or pay for it out of our pocket.