Working for the man can suck. As if having to deal with the drudgery of the daily grind isn’t bad enough, things take can take a turn for the worse when an employer is hiding stuff. Funny thing is, it doesn’t matter whether it's a large corporation or a small mom-and-pop shop, they are equally guilty. From dirty working conditions to dirty dealings, these employers’ disgusting little secrets were enough to make their employees expose them and show the world who they really are.
1. I Couldn’t Pack This One Away
I worked for a self-storage place. They made every customer sign a lease agreement that said they wouldn't be held responsible if the unit was broken into and things were stolen. I found out that we had about seven to eight burglaries a year. The owners would get sued, but they would always get off because they would produce the lease agreement in court, and the judge would dismiss the case.
One day, I came in from vacation to pick up my paycheck—and I made the most disturbing discovery. I found the owner and the manager loading up a truck with the contents from a unit that wasn't theirs. I went around the corner to an area where the fence allowed me to look in without being seen. I saw that they went to another storage space, cut off the lock, and proceeded to load up the truck with a telescope, big screen tv, and some power tools.
I came back the next day and asked one of my co-workers about it. He told me that the owners of the storage facility would sell the stuff they snatched from renters and that the manager and owner did the same thing with another property that they owned as well. I quit and called the authorities to tell them what the owners were doing. Unfortunately, they said that there was nothing they could do unless they were caught in the act.
2. Recycling Was The Key To Their Demise
I worked for a gelato shop that made us dig through the so-called recycling bins to fish out used plastic cups and spoons to wash and give to new customers. Even if the spoons had bite marks from other customers and were coated in chewing gum, we were told to wash them up and only throw them out if they were really unpresentable. We were told to do this because "These things are expensive!"
Furthermore, all the other stuff in the recycling bin got thrown in the dumpster. Customers ATE IT UP and told us regularly how GLAD they were that we were a “green” business who cared about the environment enough to recycle. It didn't take long before I just couldn't keep doing all of that with a clean conscience. I turned the company into the health inspectors, who were absolutely horrified at what was happening.
About two months later, I got laid off, and the business closed its filthy doors forever.
3. This Boss Was Bad For My Health
I worked for a small-business owner. He kept deducting the employees' health insurance premiums but would never send the payments into the carrier. After a few months of this, our insurance was canceled, right before one lady's teenage son was in a fairly severe car accident. She found out at the emergency room that she had no insurance whatsoever when she thought she and her dependents had been fully covered.
The next day she went into the owner’s office, very upset, to find out what happened. He gave his usual song-and-dance and made excuses for not having been able to send it in. This normally mild-mannered woman picked up a stapler and threw it at him! But that wasn't the most despicable thing he'd done. He'd also spent thousands of dollars a month of company money on groceries and big-ticket items for his house.
This was in addition to his already generous salary. Then to top it all off, the owner actually TOOK THE EMPLOYEE TO COURT for the stapler-throwing incident. After hearing the story, the judge dismissed the weasel's case and made a comment to the effect that if he were in the same position as her, he probably would have done the same thing.
4. This Place Left Me Flooded With Rage
I worked at a salad place called Doc Green's. The bathroom piping had burst in the wall. At first, it was a slow leak, but then there was literally poo and pee oozing out of the wall into a booth and eventually in the entire back of the house. I brought it up to several people's attention, and no one did ANYTHING. I was appalled.
There was poo flowing on tables and down the wall. The staff and I ended up squeegeeing the flooded wastewater out of the side door, toilet paper, and all. I seemed to be the only one horrified by this. IT WAS A SALAD PLACE. LETTUCE IS EXTREMELY POROUS and can definitely hold moisture full of bacteria. Luckily, the place eventually closed.
5. I Couldn’t Stomp Out Their Unethical Protocols
I used to work for a major office supply chain. One day, I went into the back and found one of the cashiers standing over a pile of stuff—printer cartridges, calculators, etc. She was stomping her little heart out and trying her best to smash all of it. I was like, “WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING!?!?” She said, “Oh, they told me to break this stuff because they can't sell it.”
I marched into my manager's office and asked what they were thinking. Their response FLOORED me: “Well, that stuff has sat in the clearance bin for months. We can't afford to keep it on the floor, so it has to be destroyed.” I asked, “Why can't you donate it to, like, a SCHOOL or something?” Their response was, “Well, if we donate it, we have to write it off as a loss, and it makes our profits look lower. This way, it's written off as damaged property, and it improves our books.”
They did the same with blank CDs. There were hundreds of them in stacks. I figured I could use some of them, so I grabbed a bunch and put them under my jacket. When I came back at the end of my shift, they had taken them back, and another cashier was taking them one by one, scratching them with her keys, and dumping them in the trash. It totally shattered my youthful optimism.
6. This Job Drove Me Crazy
I used to sell cars at a major dealership. We had an unofficial sales contest to see how much over MSRP we could sell a car for by confusing the customer on the price. We would use payments/financing, manipulation of trade value, and sometimes outright fraud, like promising manufacturer rebates then not applying them to make their head spin.
The "winner" for the two months I was there was over by $10K by selling a car that should've been about $20K for over $30K. The sad part was that the customer had no idea because they still got the PAYMENT that they wanted.
7. She Removed More Than Just Stains
I worked at a dry cleaner. The lady who ran the place was heavily into voodoo/black magic or something along those lines. I didn’t understand it because I was too scared to quiz her. What the customers didn’t know about the place was that the owner would actively assess the customers at all times in terms of first impressions, perceived health, wellbeing, spiritual makeup, karma, etc.
Anyway, once they had given the clothes over to her for cleaning, she'd show her unsettling true colors: She'd perform incredibly elaborate rituals with the clothing in order to affect the lives of the customer. I would hear extremely unsettling noises coming from the back room and have seen several unrecognizable objects in there.
Once, I heard her just laughing for about 15 minutes. Then at the end of a "session," she came out covered in sweat.
8. I Wasn’t Horsing Around
I worked as an equine assistant at a ranch in Indiana. The stuff that went on at that place made me so depressed to the point where I was crying every night. The ranch mostly had horses, with a few goats here and there. The horses were underfed, overworked, and just miserable. At the time, the owner had around 20 horses ON A HALF-ACRE OF LAND.
By right, one horse needs around three acres for adequate space. There was also little shelter, and the entire "pasture" was a huge mud-lot all summer. The owner had no knowledge of equine nutrition, so she made us change the animal’s diets almost daily. This resulted in two colic cases where the horses could not pass anything for about 48 hours.
I pleaded with her to call the vet, but she refused. We also had two horses with fevers that were still being used on rocky trails at the time in 108-degree heat. The same thing happened with two horses who had hoof abscesses. Most of them hadn’t had their yearly shots in two years, and none of them had their teeth done for five. The only thing she provided for was hoof care.
The worst part was that the owner was praised by many people for her horses and her facility. She also had a boarding facility. She had gotten horses sick, their diets get mixed up ALL the time, and we had a horse almost die from the contaminated feed as a result of a horrible raccoon problem. I ended up calling the local ASPCA, hoping SOMEBODY would go out there and take her horses away from her. She inadvertently found out and threatened to sue me on the matter.
9. Different Rules For The Rich
I used to work in the woman's lingerie department for a really big designer clothing company. The company policy stated that they do not do exchanges or returns on underwear. I believed it and lived by it. I would refuse customers’ exchanges or refunds no matter what their excuse was. One day, a customer wanted an exchange and had asked for it right in front of my supervisor and me.
I refused it. Then, my supervisor looked at me with eyes like she was about to gut me like a fish and simply said, "Oh, I'm sorry. She's new here and still doesn't know our way of doing things." She led the customer away, let her pick out other underwear, and took back the other ones. I assumed that maybe the company would throw away the underwear or something.
In less than five minutes, the same pair of underwear that had no tags on it was re-tagged and put back up on display for sale. It turned out that the company only does exchanges and refunds on lingerie from the wealthy, regardless of whether the undies looked worn or the tags had been removed. Ever since then, I started soaking all new lingerie in boiling water, then throwing it into the washing machine and dryer before I even dare put it on.
10. Contemptible Cafe
I was a manager at a cafe, but because the boss’s sisters also managed occasionally, their word was final. On the shifts they managed, we used out-of-date milk. When I say out-of-date, I mean so out of date you might as well call it cottage cheese. We also had an electronic point of sale machine that would show the name printed on the card on the merchant receipts.
My boss would hang around and scope out potential women, sometimes young girls barely 18. If they paid by card, he would take note of the time, track down their name, and add them on Facebook or Twitter. But that wasn't all. There was also a complete lack of procedures for nut allergies and gluten sensitivities, that almost injured a girl.
If I had not known her and if she didn't have her EpiPen handy, which was in her car 10 minutes from the cafe, she would have sued, or worse.
11. Cellular Sham
I worked for a major cellular provider. It literally costs nothing to send a text message, and the worst overages were always some teenager sending a bazillion texts without a texting plan. An individual text message is piggybacked on data that your cell phone was going send already to maintain contact with the cellular network.
So, that individual packet of information costs nothing for your cellular carrier to move because something was going to be moved anyway. Even if you don't have a text messaging plan, if your phone is turned on, it is taxing the network the EXACT same amount as the person paying to send messages. This ONLY applies to SMS.
MMS is more taxing on the network and has to be sent through 2G+ connections. That said, a single MMS takes far less data than loading an average webpage. Hence, the pricing, especially for individual messaging rates, is completely incommensurate with the actual costs of providing the service, and therefore, a giant rip-off.
The system is designed to drive people into unlimited plans that provide the company with a nice steady revenue stream. Even working tech support, I was constantly being harassed to increase the revenue stream—get them more insurance, a more extensive text messaging package, a bigger data plan, etc. On top of that, I would always get chewed out for over-educating customers.
12. Hospitality Hustle
I was in the hotel business for most of my life. When you drive into a hotel parking lot, and you see that it's not full, that means the hotel is probably NOT FULL—unless there's a bus or something. There are no such things as fixed hotel prices. You are given automatic discounts for AAA, AARP, senior citizens, membership clubs, etc. However, you can easily get 20% off the rate the person at the front desk quotes you by hustling and haggling. It is better to sell a room for 80% of the asking price than not sell it at all.
13. The Bad Conditions Were Bugging Me
I worked in a restaurant that had a roach problem. There were also gnats everywhere. Customers could see them flying around the salads, fruits, and pies we had out, but I guess it didn’t disgust them enough to not come back. More than a few times, customers complained about bugs in their drinks that had ended up there after they fell in our ice machine. But I'll never forget the worst insect debacle...
A live cockroach ended up in someone's salad because it was on their fork as they went to take a bite. Not only that but, whole-cooked slices of turkey and roast beef had been dropped on the floor and served. None of the managers or even employees cared at all.
14. The Owner’s Wife Was Neither Classy Nor Fabulous
I worked for a vet and ran a whole month of raffles, nail cuttings for donations, and pet pictures with Santa for the SPCA. When we added up the last of the money from the month, I put it in the safe. The practice owner's wife deposited the money and bought herself some new Chanel makeup. I couldn't believe it. I quit in disgust.
15. Caught In The Act
Back when I was a warehouse manager for a major office supply chain, one of my duties every month was to gather items from our inventory that were selected by corporate. They were to be donated to local charities. All items would be collected, scanned, placed on pallets, and loaded onto trucks to be delivered to the charity distribution center.
After a few months, I started to notice that some of the donation items that should have been shipped out, mysteriously ended up missing or being used in my general manager’s office. I later discovered that on the days that the donation items were collected, my manager would send me out for lunch. He would then revert the scans on whatever donation item he desired and keep it for himself.
One day I returned from lunch early and caught him in the act. Needless to say, he was not able to come up with a good excuse. Instead, he insisted that I take my pick of whatever I wanted from the pallet as well. I was so disgusted that I immediately put in my two weeks notice during the busiest time of the year and filed a complaint with corporate.
16. This Place Was A Designer Dud
I work in a designer clothing retail store. The clothes were quite expensive, and the assistants were required to only wear full-priced garments. So the whole team would just pick clothes off the rack wear them all day, including during lunch and bathroom breaks. At the end of the shift, we would replace the tags and put the clothes back on the shelf for the customers to buy at full price. I was grossed out my first day there.
17. He Put Himself Into His Work
I used to work at a local higher-end pizza place—and believe it or not, this is actually what went down. The owner, who was a fairly hairy dude, would come in and stir the pizza sauce himself every morning with his ARM. He didn’t wear any gloves or anything. He would just use his bare, hairy arm. Sadly, that was just one of the many disgusting secrets that place had.
18. There Was No Dancing Around This One
I used to work at Arthur Murray and Fred Astaire Dance Studios. Most dance instructors are not well qualified and have no formal training. They would begin teaching after a week or two of video training along with what they were taught by another instructor in the studio. Whatever the instructor learned that morning during training, they would teach to their new student that afternoon.
Instructors were basically students who had one more lesson than the people they were teaching and were thus called instructors. Yet, the studios would charge more per hour than most doctors did, regardless of the instructor's experience. It was ridiculous considering the vast majority of them did not have a big name nor the experience to warrant such a high cost for lessons.
Someone could receive a lesson from an instructor who was well known worldwide in the international arena for half the amount. Also, the dance studios believed that your talent was based upon the amount of money that you shelled out every month. The less you would spend, the fewer compliments you would receive, and the less they would care about you.
19. Hot Diggedy Dog
I used to work at a major movie theater chain, and we would recycle the hot dogs. It was pretty nasty. Basically, if the links were on the spinning rack all day and didn't get purchased, they would be thrown into a bucket and re-frozen. We poked a fork hole in one to see how long it would stay in rotation. We were shocked—it was a full seven days!
20. This Was Not Music To My Ears
I did the music for various media around Tokyo, from big corporations to sketchy dirty production basement deals. Once, I witnessed a director, who had a bad reputation, threaten an actress. He told her that if she continued with her gloomy face during the filming, he would take her child away. I even saw him hitting her on her head.
It was all very serious and cold. The look on her face as she quietly agreed with him ate into my very being. Then, I thought how in a few weeks, hundreds of people would get off watching her without actually being aware of the reality of the situation. I felt disgusted even getting paid by the same company.
21. I Wanted To Cut These Puppy Dog Ties
I worked for a popular national pet store chain. We would tell our customers that our puppies came from reputable breeders and not puppy mills, which wasn’t true. We got them from puppy mills. I can't express how many of them came in on the back of large, pitch dark freight trucks, malnourished, scared, and sick. We also adopted cute kittens from the local shelter and charged customers outrageous amounts of money, most of whom just felt bad for the kittens.
22. I Couldn’t Compute Their Policies
If you came into Geeksquad with a computer under warranty, we were required to at least perform a $70 diagnostic on it before sending it out for repairs. If viruses were detected, that price would go up to $190 for the removal. I have had to remove viruses from a client's laptop and then send the computer off to get the hard drive replaced.
One time, our department was doing poorly in sales, so they brought in a specialist to give us an after-hours training session. His very first sentence shocked me: "If anyone is stupid enough to walk through those doors looking for a repair, they deserve to be charged $189 for it." I hated working there—it was the worst.
23. Nothing Sweet About THIS
I worked in an expensive tea house and cafe where we were forced to recycle customers' jams. We would serve a scone with clotted cream and jam. Then, when we cleared the plates, any leftover jam went into the jam bucket by the dish wash. This jam was then used for the jam layer in the $6.70 per slice Victoria sponge cake. The leftover sponge cake was used to make truffles and cake-flavored ice cream.
24. I Booked On Out Of There
The company I worked for had to maintain a trust account where money owed to clients was kept, and then they were paid out of it. There was a small lag of about 30 days between when the money came in and when it was sent to the client. It was a highly regulated industry. For more than three years, the company hadn't been paying their clients and had been fudging the books.
I found this out when I was told to stop sending reports that showed clients were owed money. I pressed management and found out they had been lying to clients for well over three years. One client, who was top three in the nation in their particular industry, was owed one million dollars. Collectively, thousands of companies were owed tens of millions of dollars.
I was instructed to lie to the clients until they were so fed up they threatened to sue the owners, then they would get paid. This was common knowledge and was openly discussed with customer service until I filed a formal complaint with the regulatory agency. None of the more than 100 employees had ever reported them—not one.
After I gave proof to the regulatory agency and quit, they swooped in and seized the company books. All of my allegations were true. However, instead of filing charges against the executives involved, the regulatory agency just fined them and then made them pay back the missing money to the trust. No one was charged. No one lost their job, and no one was put on probation.
25. This Internship Made Me Lose My Spirit
In my last semester of university, my program had to do an internship with a real company and help them come up with an advertising campaign. One of my friends in the program was really excited because he had gotten his internship with Jack Daniels. However, his view on advertising completely changed after his horrible experience.
One of the bosses at JD literally told him to go to AA meetings and figure out how to get those people drinking again.
26. I Couldn’t Wait To Retire This Position
I once worked as the night watchman for a small retirement home that was owned by a church. I, and everyone else, could smell the odor of poo wafting down the halls. The nurses at the stations would typically wait until their mandatory rounds to deal with it. So basically, they let the residents lay in their waste. I'd say about 10% of nurses actually cared about the residents. The rest were just there to get paid.
27. I Couldn’t Keep Calm About This Storm
Years ago, I worked as a bartender at one of the many bars on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Our famous Hurricane drinks were pre-made and kept in five-gallon buckets with little spouts at the bottom to pour the drink from. But here's the big secret: These buckets were never emptied or cleaned. One year during Mardi Gras, one bucket became so empty we could actually see the bottom.
Much to our disgust, we found a t-shirt in it—a nasty, old, gross t-shirt. There was no telling how long it had been in there. Not only that, but all the random booze leftover from the promos were dumped and made into a Hurricane. And don't even get me started on the Tooter shots.
28. They Profited From The Pooches
The veterinarians where I used to work were all paying off student loans and adding pools and decks to their beach houses. They would get spiffs on procedures they provided to clients. So, if your dog came in with a case of vomiting and diarrhea after something minor, they would talk you into an exam, Xrays, bloodwork, and about five different medications.
Clients trust their vet, so they would believe them. It would break my heart to watch. Especially cancer patients. Even if they KNEW treatment more than likely wouldn’t work, they WOULD NOT tell the client this.
29. This Employer Was A Rotten Egg
I worked overnight in the dairy department of a Wal-Mart—and it was a downright horror show. We would often get returns or stuff that had been left out in the store. It was our job to put it back into the cooler; however, there was no thought given as to how long these things were left out. It didn’t matter if a gallon of milk had been sitting out for five minutes or five hours.
It was put into a cart and wheeled back into the cooler, and probably put back out on the shelf. This is done in the name of "expediency," which is what drives every policy at Wal-Mart. Things don't get done right—they get done fast. Therefore, if a dairy employee finds milk outside the cooler, it would probably go on a return pallet.
Dairy employees knew better than to put room-temperature milk back in the cooler. The store then would get a refund on the milk we would send back to the milk company. However, regular employees were trained to put it in a basket, wheel it into a cooler, and hand it off to the next guy, who was probably being told to "get this stuff back on the shelf.”
Meanwhile, eggs would come in with general freight. There were no returns on eggs. So, once again, if a dairy employee picked them up, they probably got ditched in the giant bin of milk/eggs/flour that would sit outside the cooler. It would ferment and smell terrible but never see the shelf—unless someone got yelled at to put it back out. I hated every minute of working there.
30. Sickening Sandwich Shop
I used to work at a grocery store deli. If we ever dropped cold cuts on the floor, we were supposed to go to the back and "just rinse it off" in the sink. The first time that it happened to me and my boss told me to do that, I did it to appease her. I just ended up throwing it into the food waste bin after she left—and every time after that.
31. This Job Was A Rocky Road
I used to work at Rocky Mountain Chocolate factory. We were forced to do all sorts of disgusting stuff. The white chocolate was blended with Crisco shortening, and when the caramel apples sat out and became moldy, we sampled them to customers. If chocolate strawberries did not sell, we would put them in the fridge for the next day.
When they became shriveled, moldy, and disgusting, we had to drizzle them with chocolate again to hide it. When the chocolate would become dusty and have a white film called "bloom" on it, we would have to polish it with wet paper towels to make it shiny again. And for the record, none of the chocolate was made there, we had it shipped from Colorado.
32. What A Waste
I used to work at a pharmacy and was surprised at how much medicine would go to waste. Anytime we sent medications to homes, and they were paid for by Medicare/Medicaid or whatever, they would be considered "used." We would literally get huge trash containers full of unopened boxes, full pill packages, etc., that had to be destroyed. It made me sick to my stomach.
We weren’t permitted to donate these medications to people that actually needed them either because it was not allowed.
33. Repulsive Rentals
I used to work at a major rental tuxedo store. We used to color in black collars with sharpies and burn lapels to make them stop fraying, minutes before the suits headed out the door. The jackets were not dry cleaned, and the vests were rarely washed, just Febrezed 10,000 times. Neck grime would still be visible around the collars. But that's not the most horrifying part.
We've found wasps nests in a few of the tuxes, probably from some wasp-ridden corner of the warehouse, and pocket-handkerchiefs were made out of cut-up ties. Even though a rental would cost $200, the jacket and pants were purchased from the manufacturer for around $95 total. The tuxes were also an identical fit and material as the non-name brands but rebranded by high-end designers.
34. It Was In No Way Finger Licking Good
I worked at KFC. If we dropped any uncooked chicken on the floor, we were expected to wash it off and cook it. If we dropped cooked chicken, we just threw it back on the fryer for a second or two. My 23-year-old manager at the time refused to make us serve the dropped chicken. He was fired, and most of the other staff, including myself, left with him.
35. I’d Give This Job A Bad Rating
I used to be a customer service employee for 13 years. The surveys we would send out after we closed a ticket determined whether or not customer service representatives would keep their job. If they get enough bad surveys, they go to the bottom of the stack, and they're the first ones to be fired or laid off. Unfortunately, when people fill out these surveys, most of the time, they are grading the experience they had with the product, not the customer service.
They don't realize it is the customer service person who is affected by the survey, not the company itself. The company doesn’t do anything with those surveys other than grade the personnel. You might think they would take the feedback and use them to make their product or service better or to improve their management processes so that you have a better overall customer service experience, but they do not.
It's all a numbers game. Since a majority of the surveys are going to come back with negative responses, usually because the customers are angry that their product was broken, the managers hold on to them. When it comes time to reduce staff, they use these surveys to justify laying off or firing people. As a result, when someone applies for unemployment, the company can deny the application, stating that they were a bad employee because they got lots of bad reviews.
36. Computer Clash
I worked at Best Buy, and I did my best to be nice to people. I spent time talking with them to make sure I got them exactly what they needed and nothing they didn’t. People were so happy with my service they would often come back to ask me questions and buy something else. Although I didn’t land any huge sales, I was one of the highest-selling people on the floor. I valued return customers, but it turned out that management did not like my sales theory.
Once, I was selling a PC to a low-income family. They wanted a cheap machine that only did Facebook and Word. So, I hooked them up with a $300 laptop that did just that. I had spent half an hour with them, and it was exactly what they needed. After the sale, my manager pulled me off to the side and ragged on me for not getting them to buy the $250 protection plan on it. I ended up getting my hours cut, and eventually, I quit.
37. Not Really The Happiest Place On Earth
I was a former Disneyland employee. It was a standard policy that no one dies in the park. Someone could be decapitated, but the ambulance would have to announce the death after leaving the park grounds. Also, the Rivers of America ride was kept dirty to hide the tracks for the large boats. So much so that if 60% of a guest's body is in with the water, Disney has to send you off to get a tetanus shot.
38. I Tried To Be A Good Sport
I used to work as a cashier at Dick's Sporting Goods. The managers would constantly tell us to try and sign people up for credit cards to "save 10% on their purchase." Usually, the only people that would sign up seemed to be people that didn't have much money and were desperate for that 10%. The head manager emphasized that we should never tell them the interest rate, which was 27%, and just try to sign them up before they ask what it was.
I always told people what it was, advised against the card, and usually just gave them a 10% off coupon anyway.
39. I Couldn’t Dream Of A Better Life Working Here
I worked at a Ralph Lauren store. We were required to buy and wear their clothes while at work, all based on a salary of $8 per hour. Not to mention they only gave us 15-20 hours a week, so they could employ more people, rather than give fewer people more hours. I had to quit because the job literally wasn't even paying for itself.
40. This Was Straight Up A Bad Gig
I used to work at a mall kiosk selling straighteners, curlers, hair extensions, and other hair products. I was basically one of those annoying sales ladies who had to approach people walking by and try to get them to sit down and try the products. However, we weren't actually allowed to approach people. I was once threatened with a $250 fine by the mall manager.
I was caught off guard and completely unaware of that rule. My manager just told me to be more careful. I was also told by my manager to tell customers that all of our products were from Italy. That was a total lie. Whenever we restocked the shelves with a new shipment, it was my job to take all the "Made in China" stickers off the boxes.
We were also told to tell customers that they could exchange the products at any time, but when they came back with any returns, we would nail them with a $30 exchange fee for no real reason. We would sell VIP passes that would allow the customer to come in and get their hair done for free at the kiosk. When customers would come for their VIP treatment, most of my coworkers and the manager would make up some reason as to why they couldn't do their hair at that time.
Not only that, but everything had a maximum and a minimum price. For example, we tried to push our straighteners for $200. The minimum price we could sell them for was $100, which gave us all sorts of negotiating room to make up sales tactics that "end today" in order to throw on "free" products if the customer was dumb enough to buy the straightener for $200.
So, throwing in a "free" straightener was really just selling them both for $100. On Amazon, you can get these straighteners and curlers for $30. The hair serum I had to sell for $75 was only $10 online. They weren’t bad products, just overpriced. Once I had done the research and found out you could buy the products way cheaper online, I put in my two weeks notice and quit.
41. Seafood Shambles
I worked at a Red Lobster, and every night, the leftover food would be stored in the walk-in freezer. About once a week, a couple of women would come in to pick it up for the local food bank to help feed needy families or the homeless. All I would EVER hear them say was, "OOOH yeah, we havin' lobster for dinner tonight."
Then the other would reply, “Well, I have lobster almost every night. I wish they would start giving us something else.” You could just see their mouths watering over the free, fairly expensive food they were getting. I knew for a fact that, unfortunately, none of the food we gave ever made it to the food bank with those two in charge of pickups.
42. Say “I Don’t” To Working Here
I used to work at David's Bridal. The company wouldn’t donate discontinued or lightly damaged gowns to charities. They would instead make workers shred the dresses to bits and throw them away. They would also purposely play "Butterfly Kisses" when they thought you were close to buying a dress and make you imagine being walked down the aisle.
If they could make you cry, you were more likely to buy the gown. The veil stories were mostly baloney to get add-on sales, and the undergarments were ridiculously overpriced. Lastly, the interest on the credit card was nearly 24%. They would say you could make payments before the no-interest period was over, but they wouldn’t send a bill before then, and good luck finding the address of the company to send your payment to.
43. I Turned The Tables On Them
I worked at a Joyce Leslie clothing store. Once a year, I was given the most jaw-dropping task. I had to take a rack of out-of-season and unsold clothes and destroy every garment with scissors. I was supposed to cut the clothes so they couldn't be worn. When I asked why they couldn't just donate them, I was given some nonsensical corporate answer.
The stock boy and I decided to donate them anyway. I spent an hour pretending to cut them. He bagged them and threw them behind the trash bins. I scooped them up on my way home and dropped them at a local women's shelter.
44. There Is No Real In Reality Television
I used to edit reality television and it should be no surprise, but very frequently what you are seeing happen in no way relates to what actually happened. This was a bigger deal on some shows than others. We routinely faked whole conversations and conflicts on shows like Whale Wars. That boat pitching around like crazy with people flying everywhere was edited together from around ten different moments.
45. This Job Left A Bad Taste In My Mouth
I used to work at a for-profit culinary school. They didn’t want anyone to know the actual placement and graduation rates. That information was buried so deep in the small print of the 28-page document students had to sign, and they wanted everyone to stay away from those topics of conversation during enrollment. The admissions representatives were just salespeople who had to hit quotes based on how many students they could enroll.
They would take anyone that had the money to pay but pretended to be exclusive with an application process.
46. Lesson Learned
I was a special education teacher who taught intellectually disabled and autistic children. Teachers would spend more time doing paperwork to prove they are teaching these high needs kids than actually teaching them. Not only that but the kids who had high profile parents, meaning the ones who were highly involved, received most of our time.
47. The Secret Was Out Of The Bag
I used to work at Victorias Secret—and oh my god, did they have a secret. We were required to refund and take back any used underwear as well as anything else that came back in the store. It would then immediately go back onto the sales racks, even if it had obviously been worn. I showed my manager a used pair of panties that had a disgusting smell, and she advised me to "just spray perfume on it."
I would often grab a pair of scissors from the back and accidentally cut the ones that I knew had been worn so they had to "damage" them out and not be sold.
48. Caught In The Act
I worked as a receptionist for a chiropractor. One day, our first appointment came in, so I went in the back to look for him. I walked in on him doing the deed with a co-worker on the table. It was the same table the patients sometimes would lay on face down on. I went back to the front and said, "He'll be with you in a couple of minutes." I was disgusted.
He was married with two young kids. I didn't work there long after that.
49. Don’t Bank On It
I used to work for Wells Fargo bank. It was all-around shady. We had to straight-up lie to people to get them over to a banker to open up checking accounts by telling them our policies were changing, and they had to do this. We had to make sure they had every single product we offered, whether it actually benefited them or not.
We weren’t supposed to give up until the customer had them all. This is the most chilling example: One time a blind lady came up to my window with THREE separate checking accounts under her name, and she didn't even know why she had them. A banker had opened them all up for her to meet their quota. Once I quit, I moved all of my accounts elsewhere.
50. This Manager Deserved Coal For Christmas
I used to work as a hostess, busser, and drive-thru attendant at a Frisch’s Big Boy restaurant. It was both filthy and corrupt. No one in the kitchen wore gloves, and the cooks loved making people eat old food or food that had been dropped on the disgusting floors. The manager would take the waitress's tips and blame the customers or the sketchy-looking bussers. The most corrupt thing the manager did while I was there was around Christmas time.
He would take $100 out of each of the new employees' cash drawers, call their parents saying that their kid took the money, and have them brought in to be questioned. I was one of them. It happened to a few of us, and we all got mad. Luckily, we knew exactly how to get our revenge. We took the key that locked the box to the camera controls.
We re-wound the tape to the day in question and watched until we saw the manager start doing his thing. Every single one of us reported him, and he was instantly fired. It was glorious.
Sources: Reddit, .
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