50 People On ‘The Secret My Company Doesn’t Want The Public To Know’
"The recycle bins at Seaworld also just get emptied into the dumpster. They are just there to make the visitors feel better."
collected from users on Reddit about their respective workplaces… Thought Catalog has not verified the veracity of their claims, but has collected the more interesting points of the conversation happening over on Reddit. Head over to the post for more.
1.
The recycle bins at Seaworld also just get emptied into the dumpster. They are just there to make the visitors feel better.
2.
I used to work at Claires and The Icing (same company). We got about 15 minutes of training before we were allowed to pierce kids’ ears. If people bled on the ear piercing guns, we would simply wipe them off with a tissue, and use them again on the next person.
3.
I worked at a beverage plant years ago that made Arizona Iced Tea, Tropicana, Nantucket Nectars, etc. There was one drink that we produced and the label said, “Made with Spring Water” and it was.
Each 600 gallon batch that we made had exactly 1 gallon of spring water poured into the tank.
4.
The old hotel I worked at wouldnt change the sheets if they wernt “dirty”
5.
While working at HHGregg, customers were told we’d recycle their old TV’s for them. Really we just threw them in the dumpster. Can’t speak for HHGregg corporation as a whole, but at my store this was the definitely the case.
McAllister’s Famous Iced Tea is really just Lipton with a shit ton of sugar. They even have a trademark for the “Famous Iced Tea.” There website says, “We can’t give you the recipe, that’s our secret.” The secrets out, Lipton + Sugar = Trademarked Famous Iced Tea.
6.
My girlfriend works at a small chain of coffee shops here, and was recently told that she had to take down the tips box. She asked why and her boss said it was because the tip box diverts money from breast cancer donations box. The kicker? Her boss pockets the money from the donations box.
7.
If your ever looking to buy something from a Cash America Pawn store you can tell the how long the items been out and how much the pawn shop has into the item by reading the tag. The date is always printed on the tag. You get a better deal on items that have been on the floor longer. They use a code so an employee can decide how much they can take off if the customer asks. So it goes like this, MARY LOUISE=M-1, A-2, R-3, Y-4 and so on till you get to E-0. So the code will read, YLEE or $45.00.
8.
I used to work for Sears. The week before our Black Friday sale, we had to mark everything in the store up. I specifically remember marking the treadmills up an extra $500. Then for Black Friday, we marked them back down about $200. They were “on sale” for an extra $300 than they normally would have been.
9.
I worked at an Orange Julius for 4 years. The fresh orange juice you guys pay 6 dollars for is half fresh orange juice and half concentrated orange juice.
10.
Baskin Robbins. Not a huge secret, actually a bit of a plus. But you get a lot more ice cream than you should. I scooped practice scoops for training and the weight it’s supposed to be is so tiny. General rule was when the manager isn’t there to just make sure the customer doesn’t see the bottom of the cup.
11.
I worked at an IVF lab (fertility center) in a major city in the United States. Our center was on the medium-large end, doing about 2000 IVF cycles per year. They wouldn’t want the public to know this: exactly what everyone fears will happen, happened. More than once. An embryo belonging to one patient was transferred to a completely different patient’s uterus. You hear about this in the news occasionally, but for every case that is published, there are a few that don’t go public, and just quietly settle with the patient.
12.
That Goodwill (in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, company name is Goodwill Industries of the Columbia Willamette) makes ~$100 million in revenue per year (whilst claiming to be nonprofit), the entire board of directors is comprised of business moguls who are either in, or are close to being members of the 1% (just google Michael Miller). Most of the things you donate (80% or above, easily) are thrown away or are sold in bulk as scrap to third world countries. The rest of it is sold at near-new prices ($8 for a shitty shirt in a thrift shop sounds ridiculous to me, and that’s barely the tip of the iceberg).
They treat their employees terribly, put forth anti-union propaganda, and (in my store, anyway) use bullying, intimidation, and coercion to keep the employees in line. I’ve witnessed active discrimination (firing a girl the day she announced her pregnancy; knowing she would be too poor to sue for anything), sexism, racism, and sexual harassment from the assistant manager AND manager of the store I worked in. This was all reported, and nothing was ever done. If there was a person (male or female) that the AM or Manager found attractive or disliked for whatever personal reasons they chose, that person would be either gawked at by the upper staff or derided by them [respectively] in the office. That person would then either find themselves recieving preferential treatment or being given the worst jobs and/or maybe fired [again respectively].
They turn a HUGE profit from donated goods, and provide little actual good to the community. They say they provide employment benefits to unhirable people (those with special needs); what they actually do are utilise government loopholes allowing them to put special needs people to work for sub-minimum-wage, in situations where they don’t have any choice (living in group homes or care centres which they have deals with). They end up making ~$5 a day. I wish I was kidding about this, but I’m not. The only other tangible benefit I can actually see from Goodwill are free English classes, which they provide in Salem.
As for their ‘standard’ employees, they are given a ‘competitive wage’ of minimum wage, and most aren’t given full-time; they are given the 27 hours required to keep them ‘part time’ so they are not eligible for benefits.
Myself, I was scheduled 40 hour weeks while being on a 27 hour per week agreement. I worked for 40 hours for six months, and yet was ineligible for health insurance. On this wage, I could barely make rent; I had $40 take home at the end of the month (after rent, and before bills), and I survived because of food stamps.Oh, and when they do take on a full-time employee, they tend to find a reason to fire them just shy of the date when they’d be eligible for benefits. Yes, I saw this happen, to a single mother of two, no less.
Do not give them your things. They are the lowest of the low.
13.
Worked at a restaurant — The Elephant Bar in Columbus, Ohio, in case anyone is wondering — and the managers made us save uneaten food from customers’ plates and serve to other customers.
If your side of carrots was untouched, it would go back into the warmer and get re-served. Same with dinner rolls and anything that could be passed off as new.
14.
I had an internship at one of Merck’s production plants over the summer. Six months prior, a group of chemists were discovered in one of the abandoned facilities cooking meth. They had a pharmaceutical grade lab, hidden behind a false wall, and were churning out something like six figures weekly. Not something you hear from their PR department.
15.
Bank of America… Tellers are all about sales. It is highly unlikely that any of the products they advise you to sign up for are good for your financial situation. Many times they will actually be detrimental, but the position is a sales position, not just a friendly face to help you with transactions.
16.
Capital One is famous for a practice similar to this. When you want to close and payoff a credit card, they will not tell you the payoff amount on a credit card you want to close, just whatever the current balance is. You think you have paid the card off but there is now a $0.12 balance, which starts picking up late fees and non-payment penalties because they STOP sending you statements because you think they account is closed. Next time you heard about it when some b.s. law firm is calling to collect on over $400.
17.
I work in a shipping company warehouse.
Fragile stickers don’t do anything for your package until it’s in the couriers hands – maybe.
Your shipped items are going to get BEAT the fuck up. Wrap it 5x in bubble wrap. If you think you’re being too cautious – you’re not. Warehouse workers don’t care. Your packages are going to be loaded into a hauling truck, stacked in no specific order, slammed around while transported, then throwing around by workers sorting them.
I’m sure this is already common knowledge. Just a friendly reminder before the holiday season comes full swing.
18.
Told to use moldy pepperoni at the little ceasers i used to work at.
19.
Home Depot has recycling bins out in front of the building, but everything ends up in the same dumpster at the end of the day.
20.
I worked at a Denny’s. One of my supervisor’s children was conceived in the walk in cooler.
21.
at Kansas State University, the FBI has equipment to listen in on all phone calls and data on the network.
22.
When I worked at Wal mart we would throw literally EVERYTHING in the garbage compactor.
Everything includes car batteries, bleach and various household chemicals, large amounts of meat, TVs and other electronics, anything and everything that is easily recyclable.
23.
The Staples equivalent to geeksquad, “easytech” , just runs malwarebytes freeware on your computer and charges you a bazillion dollars for virus removal
24.
I work as a web developer. One of my most disappointing clients was a used car company (one of those ones where they put a GPS in your car).
Basically, they had balloon payments. They’d start off paying something super cheap, $50 a month or something. Each month it goes up by a certain amount. If your notes got to be too expensive, you could actually come trade in that car and get a new one with lower notes, you’d just be starting your payments over for another 6 years.
I had to write an application where the salesman would put in the customers income and expenses, and it would find the “sweet spot” of where the car would be too expensive. We had to make sure that sweet spot was after the payoff point plus a certain rate. That sweet spot was where the company would make the most profit by ripping the customer off the most. It was a combination of how much they paid in to how much the car was still worth. We could predict when a person couldn’t afford the car within a 3 month window.
I felt horrible about it, because I knew every one of the customers was going to get ripped the fuck off with it.
25.
Hewlett packard barely exists, they’ve outsourced everything, production, support, R&D, development, management, they probably outsourced themselves by now
26.
I work for a parking company. Just a little tip: If you get a parking ticket from a private parking agency, you don’t have to pay that shit. None of it gets reported.
27.
I worked for Blockbuster. Those collection notices you would get in the mail? Yeah, those were fake. We didn’t have a collections agency. They were just meant to scare you and didn’t hurt your credit.
28.
I work at a Starbucks in an airport. It’s a licensed store operated by a company called HMS Host.
If an employee calls in sick or goes home early from a shift for any reason, even with a doctor’s note, he or she receives points that count toward being fired (at 15 points, you’re fired).
One day, one of my coworkers told our manager that she was feeling very ill and needed to go home. The manager believed she was sick and told her that she could go home, but she’d get two points. My coworker did not want the points, tried to tough out her shift, ended up passing out, hitting her head on a counter, getting carried out of the store by paramedics, and received the 2 points anyway.
This type of policy results in my coworkers and I coming to work with communicable diseases because we don’t want to get penalized or fired. As a customer, I wouldn’t want a side of pink eye, diarrhea, or strep throat with a fever along with my latte, and as a co-worker, I don’t want to catch something at work from sick people!In the past month alone I’ve worked with a girl who had strep throat and a fever so high she was hallucinating, and another girl threw up twice in the back of the unit because she had the stomach flu with a fever. Strep throat girl called in sick but was asked to come in because we were short handed, and stomach flu girl came in because she had too many points to call in sick.
Does this sound gross to anyone else?
29.
I was a social worker at an institution for the severely disabled and we had a non-verbal, mentally retarded patient turn up pregnant. Tests were done, establishing paternity. It turned out not only had she been raped by an employee, impregnating her- she also tested positive for syphilis, which the baby’s father did not have. So, basically, a severely disabled woman was raped a minimum of twice by two different people while in our care. Fucking shameful.
30.
I work for a university where, in the 70s, a professor who had risen very quickly through the ranks to become chair of the Faculty Senate, took a group of students to Egypt and abandoned them. He took off with all the money that had been designated for the trip and left them with nothing but a huge hotel bill that no one could pay.
Last year, when his biography came out, we discovered the professor was Steve Jobs’ biological father.
Also, our most famous grad? Ted Bundy.
31.
The New England Patriots make hourly front office workers clock out early and keep working so that they won’t have to pay for health insurance.
32.
I worked at Sbarro’s Italian Pizza for a year, and I was the only one to pull off the counter top (where we actually make the food from scratch) to clean underneath. I found an infestation of maggots that had to have been getting into the food we made everyday for god only knows how long.
33.
Don’t ever trust market research. Just don’t. Cunningham Field and Research Services is one of the many companies which collect responses for companies like Nielsen, etc. And… they totally falsify the fuck out of their data. Need a 90 year old woman for your quota? Well why not use a 15 year old boy and tell him not to tell anyone. Or… if it’s really down to the wire, why not enter it yourself and have the check made out to a friend? I had to quit, the lack of ethics was killing me.
34.
The restaurant where i work is well known for their home-made garlic toast. It comes with every entree. If the table doesn’t finish their basket of toast, whatever is left in the basket goes back in the warming drawer…. And then back out to another table. I always try to encourage people to take it home with them, usually saying something like, “you might as well take it home, we’re just going to throw it away and it’ll go to waste!” just so I don’t have to put it back in the drawer. I can’t help but think about that one piece of garlic toast that keeps traveling from table to table and never getting eaten and continuously gets recycled. Eew.
35.
Ancestry.com would destroy books they had digitized because they didn’t have the storage space. That place infuriated me.
36.
United States Military.
You would be amazed how many mission critical decisions are made with rock/scissors/paper
37.
When the potential investors came to visit our startup office, we got our friends who didn’t work there to come in and sit at computers and pretend like they were working so it looked like we had more employees.
38.
I worked at best buy when the Xbox was pretty new. At Christmas, I was forced I “bundle” the system together with crappy games and controllers and other useless items. We would then only sell them the bundle and hide the single system in the back and tell people the bundle was the only ones left. Most people didn’t care.
The worst was when a single mom came in with her 2 kids. They were super excited to get an Xbox. I could tell she didn’t have much money and this was a big deal. They were all devastated when I tried to give them the $650 bundle. Knowing I would get in trouble, I told them “let me check one more time in back”. I happened to “find” one just for them. I took the heat when they tried to check out, but I gave no fucks.
39.
At Best Buy when we recycle old products, we can take them home. I have a friend who works for Geek Squad and has a shit load of Macbook Pros that he convinced people were broken and unfixable so they’d “recycle” them. He takes them home, fixes them, and keeps them.
40.
Cabela’s – Their shipping charges are based on item cost. You can buy a $100 deer stand that weighs 90 Lbs and it’ll cost you less to ship than a 2 Lb camera. Also, keep your receipt as you can return anything there at any time because the managers are so scared to lose their jobs. You can go buy something for the hunting season, go use it, then return it months later just by saying it didn’t live up to your expectations. If they balk, threaten to complain to corporate and they’ll do it. If not, complain to corporate and then they’ll do it.
ETA: Goes without saying to stay away from their credit card, but every person they get to sign up for it Visa gives Cabela’s $300 pure profit, at least that’s what the amount was when I worked there years ago. They care more about signing people up for that credit card than selling you anything else in that store because it’s 100% profit which is why you get attacked when you walk in the door and by every employee you talk to. Easiest way to avoid the conversation? Just tell them you already have one and all pitch lines stop.
41.
Back in the 90s, my boss hired an ex-con because the state was offering some sort of tax incentive to hire people out of prison. The ex-con was eventually given keys to one of the buildings. He took two girls there after hours and murdered them.
42.
One time, working at Domino’s, this lady on the phone pissed off my coworker, so he put a fly in a black olive and put it on her pizza. I told him not to, but he did it anyway.
43.
We incorrectly installed the seat safety bracket mounts in over 750,000 cars, and there has been/will be no recall.
44.
TelemeriCorp calls clients on the “Do not call list”
45.
Cable Internet Provider: No matter what speed of internet you have it costs the company the same amount.
46.
I worked for a sister company of Hormel. We made meatballs and pizza topping meats. We were supposed to, before and after the almost 3 years I worked for them, clean our equipment between species. So wash all the equipment after running beef, and before pork. They didn’t start doing that until I left. So anyone who couldn’t have certain meats for whatever the reason may be, if you ate certain pizza’s or meatballs around the Midwest, you probably had a little bit of everything in there. (We still washed out for allergens! Soy/Wheat/Dairy/etc.)
47.
when i worked for chase mortgage collections department, during the time mortgage modifications were being rolled out by the obama administration, our customers were constantly asked to call back to check the status of their mod, lost paperwork, etc and told to pay less than their full mortgage payment so that they would be declined and then we would foreclose- even tho we knew they would be declined from the start because the bank made more money foreclosing than modifying peoples’ mortgages. this was about 3 years ago.
48.
The lobster you picked from the live lobster tank is hanging out in the walk-in till you leave. The one you’re eating was frozen.
49.
I worked at a Fish Market and 90% of sushi restaurants are lying about which fish they are using…..
50.
Wal-mart made me destroy around 30 brand new bicycles because it was the end of the summer and they couldn’t sell them. Apparently they don’t want people digging in the trash for a new bike, so they made me and another guy take a sledgehammer each and destroy them as much as we could.
They wouldn’t give the bikes to charity because they could apparently come back against them if the bikes were defective, which is complete bullshit since the bikes were new.
