HRpedia: 'Salami slicing'
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Salami slicing, v.
The supermarkets think we don’t know, but we do. Oh yes. We’ve noticed how salami keeps getting thinner while they charge the same amount for it. Damnit Tesco, we can see through it like sheet glass.
What irks is that they thought we wouldn’t notice. But what fails to fool our eagle eyes in the supermarket has been known to fool us elsewhere.
The practice of ‘salami slicing’ is shaving off things evenly and thinly such that nobody notices the overall effect. That might be budgets cuts or staffing cuts – the point is that the cuts are gradual and spread out so that the exact nature and size of the cuts is hidden from overall view.
Salami has a pretty terrible linguistic reputation for a delicious sausage. First it was besmirched in relation to the vicious ‘salami tactics’ of the Hungarian Communist Party during the early Cold War, who smeared increasingly moderate political enemies as fascists, ‘slicing’ off their opposition until only sympathetic left-wingers remained.
Soon after, ‘salami fraud’ came about, which involves stealing tiny amounts from large amounts of people – e.g. rounding down bank transfers and diverting the fractions of pennies into a single bank account, which over time can grow in hundreds of thousands of pounds.
It has a key role in Superman III’s plot. No, really.
So if you ever hear yourself getting called a ‘salami slicer’ they aren’t praising your taste in deli cold-cuts or making some disturbing sexual inference. Well, it’s possible. But probably it’s in relation to your sneaky cutting campaign.
Used in practice:
I had long suspected some serious ‘salami slicing’ in the office budget, but my suspicions were confirmed when I noticed that the toilet paper in the loos was actually invisible from the side-on.
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