HSBC are incredibly tight.
I spend a few months working for them part-time when I was in university. I started off working from nine until half past five with an hour for lunch.

After a few weeks of this I was told by my manager that head office had been checking the computer logs and noticed that there weren't many customers coming in later in the afternoon. So they made me finish at half past three every day from then on.

£25 a week that saved them, which is fair enough seeing as they only just managed to scrape together a profit of £7.1 billion that year.

That £25 probably meant that some of the executives could afford to give their children two portions of gruel a day rather than one. I feel happy that my little sacrifice could give a little bit of help to those in need.
(Dai Napoleon, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 0:57, Reply)