I was the geotechnical engineer of record for the Shops at Arbor walk shopping center (strip center) at Mopac and Braker in Austin, Texas. The center included a pad site for a big box store, in this case Home Depot. Kleinfelder, a competing geotech firm, decided to "value engineer" the Home Depot foundation recs since Home Depot was a national client of theirs. I warned Simon Properties that Home Depot had a low tolerance slab movement spec (i think it is 0.25" per 50 feet) and that the proposed value engineered shallow foundation / limited soil improvement recs could not guarantee meeting that performance spec and that i could not stamp such a recommendation. Simon went with the cheaper alternative of course. Being inquisitive and upset at losing the QC testing portion of the project, i went back a couple of years later to check on the performance. Sure enough, the tall racks in the Home Depot were tilting as evidenced by inspection with a long level, the Home Depot manager on duty complained about uneven floors causing their low-riding equipment or forklifts to get caught scraping the floor or even getting stuck in localized areas, there were some minor cracks in the floor slab, and outside there was a large crack in the concrete pavement in the deep old fill area of the site.
Just another case history proving that "value engineeering" is really neither.
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