A similar anecdote from one previous employer: at that company, we had a lot of remote B2B sales people all over the country and even one overseas. On rare occasions, there would be a sales meeting where all the sales people come in to meet with the top executives personally and discuss strategy.
Well, my first couple of years at the company, there was a sales meeting to coincide with the Christmas party. Basically, all of the sales people were flown in to attend the Christmas party and they justified it as a business expense by having a strategy meeting sometime that week. One year, that didn't happen. I mentioned offhand to somebody "too bad the sales guys couldn't make it", and I was outright told that they skipped out on the sales meeting to save money. So we had a Christmas party, but we cut back the invitations.
That was no surprise, given the events of the previous few months. They had been actively trying to shrink the company by attrition; i.e., letting employees quit and declining to hire a replacement. I also don't know anyone who got a raise that year. We ended up losing a lot of people just from that alone. They also fired a bunch of sales guys for underperforming and hired a bunch more who were almost exclusively paid on commission... and I'd heard that the CEO specifically intended to flood the company with commission-only sales hires because he didn't have to pay them more than peanuts unless they brought in money.
The next few months were brutal. January opened up with two executives being fired -- while the actual reasons for the firings were because of a power struggle, they weren't really replaced. One of them had his power distributed among the people who reported to him, and another was replaced by "promoting" multiple existing employees while still making them do their previous jobs. One of those was fired only a few days after being promoted, too. The next month, I was laid off. I heard through the grapevine that shortly after I was laid off, they laid off another guy and closed the entire India office, letting everyone go except one or two employees who were transferred to the home office.
