[ccppurcell]

We already have a term for this: false economy. And "cutting the brakes to increase mileage" is a terrible analogy for the examples given. There are instances of that: rolling your own encryption comes to mind. But here the better analogy would be buying cheap shoes that you have to replace much more often.

[Rygian]

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.

[camtarn]

If it comes from Amazon, which I suspect it does, given a few comments to that effect, then it's because one of Amazon's 'Leadership Principles' is 'Be Frugal'.

These principles get drilled into you repeatedly, through new hire orientation, interviews, etc. In particular, you get evaluated against the principles in your annual review, so it's important to try and find ways to say that you have worked by them.

So when you look around and see everybody trying to apply 'Be Frugal' by penny-pinching on unimportant things, or refusing to buy software and thus spending hundreds of hours in dev time, it's quite natural to rephrase it as 'Being Frupid'.