Golf ball manufacturing company loses millions after ignoring technician’s warning and refusing to spend $500K to replace faulty equipment: ‘[They] drained the entire production budget for 2 years as I sat smiling. I left shortly after'

Author image for Etai Eshet
Etai Eshet • Editor
Sep 23, 2026 7:15 AM EDT

You know that guy who refuses to change the oil in his car because it's 79 dollars now, then wonders why the engine seizes and he ends up buying a whole new car for 8 grand? That's this golf ball company.

Because they possess a kind of stupidity that's almost entirely reserved for boardrooms. The belief that ignoring a problem makes it cheaper. And they managed to prove that theory wrong in the most expensive way possible.

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  • Equipment too expensive? Wait a few years and pay double instead.

    Smiling worker in a hard hat stands in a factory with overlaying quote: text: “Higher-ups too cheap for 500k end up losing millions instead”
    via Getty Images For Unsplash+

    Smiling golf ball technician 

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • A few years ago I worked for a golf ball manufacturer. Big production, millions of balls a month, billions of dollars a year and yet every decision maker was cheap beyond reason.
    via rjr619
  • Most of our production equipment was from the 60s made by companies that no longer exist. This matters because when it breaks its all slap jobs
    via rjr619
  • and jerry rigs. I worked mostly with the steam presses. Think giant waffle iron but instead of electricity it uses super heated steam.
    via rjr619
  • Now there's 2 parts the press and the mold (think the waffle pattern part). The press was a 10 ton monster that had nothing but leaking pipes. The molds solid 600 lbs steel plates.
    via rjr619
  • Fast forward to my days as a naive technician, boss and engineering start complaining about bad product coming from the molds and tell me to
    via rjr619
  • investigate. Sure no problem 20ish presses and 50ish molds to go through. 6 months later I have all the data compiled nice neat and color coded. Surprisingly the
    via rjr619
  • presses are fine within 5% of eachother the molds however not so fine. I found that almost 20 of them had serious deformation issues (40% of total molds) from repeated heating/cooling cycles.
    via rjr619
  • Older bearded worker smiles while lifting a yellow hard hat as he sits among industrial machinery.
    via Dusan Petkovic

    Golf ball technician happily sitting in a factory

    Representative only.

  • Present the data and get the big question "what do we do?". I look at them and state the obvious buy new molds, you cant fix em and they wont magically get better. Makes sense right? Tool
    via rjr619
  • breaks or warps buy a new one. We'll they all started crying about prices how a new mold was $22k each and it would cost nearly half a million to replace them.
    via rjr619
  • So what did they decide after ignoring my input? Let's try everything else and i obliged smiling the entire time. New
    via rjr619

  • Management heard the price and froze. Twenty-two thousand per mold. Half a million total. Too much. So they tried everything except the obvious solution. So unsurprisingly, the problem didn’t go away. It got worse. 

    Finally, they agreed to buy new molds. The technician watched them get the new quote. Trade wars had done their work. Molds were no longer twenty-two thousand. Now forty-five thousand. The half-million fix became nearly a million. The entire production budget for two years, drained.

    For corporations, “Growth” is like oxygen, this is just how the economy works. And that’s why corporations love the word “scale” so much, just take a look at LinkedIn bios, and you'll see that “at scale” is more common than any job title. And this company is what cheap looks like at scale.

    It’s not saving money. It’s borrowing it from the future at terrible interest rates.


     

  • cavities, press rebuilds, limiting what molds go where, limiting product runs to specific presses, changing molds more frequently.
    via rjr619
  • So what did they decide after ignoring my input? Let's try everything else and i obliged smiling the entire time. New
    via rjr619
  • cavities, press rebuilds, limiting what molds go where, limiting product runs to specific presses, changing molds more frequently.
    via rjr619
  • The list goes on and i watched as the problem continued and the bill stacked up. The result is about $200k wasted and a lot of production missed or destroyed. Total loss probably close to 1 million from cost and product waste.
    via rjr619
  • Eventually the meeting comes. We need to buy new molds. I smirk the entire time. They get the quote and because of a
    via rjr619

  • They looked at half a million dollars to fix their molds and acted like someone asked them to buy a small island. So they did everything except the one thing that would have worked. Tinkered. Adjusted. Rotated. Limited. All while the machines kept making bad product and the losses kept stacking. It’s like refusing to replace your brakes because they are expensive, then slamming into a wall and acting shocked that the repair bill is higher.

  • certain tariff/trade war from a certain president the molds are no longer 22k. They are now 45k. So instead of half a million to re-
    via rjr619

  • Here is the thing about being cheap in a place that makes physical stuff. Stuff doesn’t care about your budget or your decision-making process. You can hold a meeting about it. You can make a spreadsheet. You can form a committee. The machine will still be broken when you walk out. And the longer you wait, the worse it gets. Prices go up. In this case, Tariffs kick in. 

    The thing you could have bought for 22K  is now 45K. And the cost difference is the result of you thinking you are smarter than reality.

  • kit the production floor we had to spend nearly 1 million. Drained the entire production budget for 2 years as I sat smiling. I left
    via rjr619
  • shortly after. From some friends who still work there told me several people got fired and replaced due to this.
    via rjr619

  • The technician saw it. The technician called it. They ignored him. Then they paid double and fired people. 

  • TLDR: Higher ups too cheap for 500k end up losing millions instead.
    via rjr619

  • Penny-wise, pound-foolish does not begin to cover it. This is penny-wise, millions-foolish. And that’s what I call “At Scale.”

  • chilehead If you can't afford to do it right, you sure can't afford to do it twice.
    via rjr619
  • diadmer I worked for a major electronics manufacturer and there was a director of engineering who ALWAYS suggested reusing existing plastic parts from previous products to "save on mold and engineering costs." But every din time I swear we would burn an extra 100k of engineering time just evaluating whether
    via rjr619
  • we should reuse molds and make the new product look worse using old shapes and meanwhile these molds were only $25k-$100k and we were either still using them on another product that planned to use them up (so we'd STILL need to do another mold later), OR they were used up old molds that would result in a ton of quality issues and burn mountains of money and delay the program.
    via rjr619
  • I swear it was his only trick and once he left the company our on-time project launch metric jumped 10% just because nobody bothered trying to pinch pennies on cheap or used-up molds anymore.
    via rjr619
  • unkyduck I worked in a TV station in the '80s. Primitive graphic system used 3.5 floppies, sometimes 10 of em for an image. Bg, drop shadow, foreground image, drop shadow, font etc. and keep everything. Any expenditure over $100 had to cross the GMs desk. At a TV station.
    via rjr619
  • Instead of buying a box of 500 for $500. My boss sent me walking down the street to the computer shop to buy $99 worth of disks at around $5 each. I did this three times a week for months.
    via rjr619
  • nondescriptzombie Buddy works in commercial electrical. He only gives out bids that are good for 14 days right now, because prices move that fast. Something that was in stock and ready to ship last month is now on a 24 month indefinite backorder. Alternative units that can be substituted need to be researched and have far higher costs to acquire.
    via rjr619
  • He quoted outfitting a whole warehouse like six months ago and the parts bill has doubled now that they want to do the work.
    via rjr619
  • SyphiliticScaliaSayz Nicely done. I'm reminded of this saying by an older tech early in my career “jury-rigged = built to work for today” "jerry-rigged built with parts out of your a" =
    via rjr619
  • noHcap2800 They turned a $500k problem into a million dollar lesson and I guarantee nobody there actually learned it.
    via rjr619
  • Truly_Fake_Username Spending dollars to save pennies, it's the corporate way.
    via rjr619

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