“I worked for a chicken restaurant. At one point we were so infested with cockroaches it was normal to see about 20 a day. We (The management and supervisor staff) begged the manager to shut down the store to clean. Instead we never ever stopped and were required to come in on the weekends to clean around everything. We also were required to call cockroaches “friends” so we wouldn’t let the customer know that we were infested. On more than one occasion we would feel them crawling on us and we were told we weren’t allowed to react or we would be written up. Thankfully we got shut down by the health department and corporate took over the store and turned it around.”

“At a movie theater where I used to work, at the end of the night, we would collect all the unsold popcorn and stuff it into these enormous yellow trash bags. The next morning, yesterday’s popcorn was the first to go in the warmer. My boss said that popcorn was fine to reheat and serve for up to a week. We never dated the bags, though (bags that we were not allowed to throw away. We reused them all the time) so there was literally no way to know how old the popcorn was. Not as horrifying as some stuff here, but I thought it was kinda gross. Edit- You are all correct that popcorn is very inexpensive and the profit margin is huge. No, I don’t know why they went to those lengths to conserve as much as possible. We all thought it was absolutely ridiculous too. I can at the very least tell you that the reason there is such an enormous upcharge on popcorn and concessions, in general, is because movie theaters make next to nothing on ticket sales. I’m talking something like $0.06 per ticket.”

“When I worked at a gas station while I was in high school, whenever the owner would call us to raise the price, we’d fill up our cars first.”

“Went to an Aveda beauty school. Every year Aveda does a big recycling cap program, since most plastic caps cannot be recycled. We collected caps for a month, and our clients were really excited to be helping the environment. After the promo was done the instructors made us grab 3-4 garbage bags of caps each…and we threw them in the dumpster of the building next door. We didn’t even use our own trash. Probably because Aveda can take away their franchising rights if they find any infractions.”

“I still have copies of emails from our Gamestop district manager directing us to sell through all our pre-orders of GTA4 instead of holding them for the customers that reserved them because he got a commission on total numbers sold.”

“I’ve been waiting a while for a thread like this. Fuck Home Depot. They have a department called Home Depot Interiors – do not have your home remodeled by HDI, people, come on. The specific department I worked for was Cabinet Refacing. I was a salesman for about 4-5 months before I got the fuck out of there. Here’s the deal: Anytime you have a salesman come into your home, to give you a pitch and he/she brings samples and has a little presentation, please know that their commission on your remodel job is sometimes as high as 20%. That means if you buy a kitchen remodel for $20,000, your salesperson just took home up to $4,000 of your money just for selling you this ripoff remodel and sitting in your house for a few hours. That’s $4k you could use for all top of the line, new appliances. Also, when it comes to cabinet refacing, it’s a waste of fucking money. They work so hard to spin the information to make you believe that you’re getting this incredible service when, in reality, the ONLY benefit is that they can remodel the kitchen in like 3-4 days versus a couple weeks if you pay a contractor to do it properly. I have had customers show me a bid from a contractor for, literally, half the price of refacing and they would receive an actual full remodel of all new cabinets. The sales process is dishonest. You are taught to bend the truth as far as possible without technically lying but THEN, once you start working with the salesman who has been there a while, you are taught to full-on lie and cheat and, basically, steal from people. This comes in the form of over-measuring everything. Countertops. Cabinets. Flooring. Everything is measured keeping a huge cushion so when the customer inevitably tries to haggle with you, you can bring the price down and still make money. This type of stuff is so pervasive in virtually 100% of in-Home sales. Solar panels, windows, vacuum cleaners, security systems – you are getting ripped off. Your haggling skills don’t mean shit because these people eat, breathe, sleep thinking about clever ways to rip you off. A true salesman is sharks who adore money and nothing will stop them from getting yours. It’s totally crooked but because it’s a deeply ingrained mentality in the entire sales culture, it’s hard to weed out the few good ones.

“I “managed” a food joint at six flags when I was 16. But a 16yo running a food establishment is not even the worst part. We literally watered down the nacho cheese about (50/50), I grilled chicken for 10 hours a day on the same grill without time to clean it so by the end of the day there was a quarter inch of gunk built up, I had new crew members every day who had never worked there before, my managers would take their breaks when we needed to close but we couldn’t leave until they checked our work, so we would just sit for a good 30mins before we could go home. I ended up getting fired because of accidentally bumped a HIDDEN SECURITY CAMERA while cleaning in the back room.”

“I worked at this awful fucking pet store that sold dogs. We all knew the prices of all the dogs by heart but if someone asked we had to pretend not to know, bring the dog out to them to play with(even if they specifically ask you not to)so they get attached. Meanwhile, I’m in the back with my thumb up my ass pretending to look up the price. Then when they’re all nice and bonded with the dog I’d have to come out to tell them that instead of the $300ish they were expecting, it would be more like $2,500. Cue tears. Lots of fucking tears. There was all this complete bullshit we had to tell them to justify the price including that the dogs were registered. Well, I had a customer come back absolutely fucking furious that the dog wasn’t actually registered. Turns out what management meant(but didn’t EVER say to us) was that the dogs were register-able. That’s just one example of a whole lot of shit I put up with there. I’m a pretty honest person as guilt really gets to me more than normal I think and all that intense lying through my teeth to good people made me extremely depressed and I quit after only 3 months.”

“I worked at a gas station/ auto shop and I was told to dump used motor oil in the gravel behind the building because the storage tanks were full.”

“I worked at CVS and we had a guy go back to the pharmacy, reach over the counter and grab a tray full of filled(?) prescription papers and ran out the emergency exit. These papers included private information on DOZENS of our customers. Names, numbers, addresses, meds they are on, etc.. There was virtually no reason for that information to be so easily accessible or out in the open, even behind the counter. Some tech really screwed up, but the kicker was my store manager who told everyone not to tell anyone or report it because it “wasn’t that big of a deal”. All I could think about were all of my regular customers that had come in that day. Called HR that night and reported him. turns out, it was a big deal. Full on investigation big deal. Every single one of our customers had to be called and informed of a breach because there was no way to know who’s prescriptions were in that tray and who’s weren’t. We lost a lot of clients.”

“I used to work for a big women’s retailer in Canada. I was paid by my department to read staff email accounts because the company was scared people were going to jump ship to a competitor. Then they had me create fake Instagram and Facebook accounts to pry on staff they wanted to turf. Then things got really messed when they had me create a fake profile on a dating site and screenshot anyone from the company using it because it was deemed suspicious to be on it. The site was one of those sugar daddy dating platforms. When I vented to HR, I was told to come in for a meeting the following day. I backed up all the email accounts, screenshots and correspondence between myself and my bosses just in case. Sure enough, they laid me off with a pretty hefty severance package. I’m still sitting on all the data today. They don’t even know I have it.”

“I was a TA for one of the larger universities in the Midwest, working on my doctorate. One day, my laptop was stolen from my office. Filed a police report, assumed it was a lost cause. But, only a limited number of people have access to that office, so it bothered me. I had my suspicions about an individual, but no proof. Explanation from building superintendent: a homeless man brought a ladder in and climbed over ceiling boards at night (apparently this had happened before, and the guy was still floating around somehow). Also curiously my office mate had had some checks stolen and attempted to cash a few weeks prior, so I had reason to believe this was wrong and something else was going on. Things don’t just walk away from locked offices. A week later, I’m on the pot late at night, and walk out to find my laptop (and half a dozen other valuables, including a checkbook) staring at me across the hall… in the open janitors closet (he was down the hall cleaning another office). So I grab it all, run back to my office, and call campus police. They show up, take a report, collect stolen items, call it a day. Next day, super calls me into office and tells me that I was wrong and found that stuff in the hallway, and that I need to amend my report, clearly implying that my enrollment was at stake. What he doesn’t know is that I had already completed my grad requirements and there was no way in hell they could legally pull them (I made copies of EVERYTHING, all electronic and paper, lots of trail to cover my ass… I’d already had tons of problems getting what I need, and I wasn’t going to let them win), so I went back to the campus police and told them what happened. Turns out the janitorial staff shouldn’t have even been there at the time I found those things.. They were scheduled for much later at night. A week later the campus cops came back and said they had to drop the case because it had been resolved. At this point, I don’t trust anyone, so I call the real cops. They take a report and can’t believe what they’re hearing. Detective says protecting students in a rough town is a top priority and thanks me for this information. A couple of months later, newspaper article detailing how the school had been hiring without any background check at all, hiring/paying under the table, including ex-cons and people with active arrest warrants. They had even been using the place to distribute drugs. Whole janitorial/grounds department gets turned over within days, a big public apology. I still got my doctorate.

“I worked in a coffee shop where they would buy individually packaged muffins in bulk, like the kind you see in convenience stores. They would then have us remove them from their packaging and wrap them in saran wrap, and sell them as homemade for over twice the price as what they sold literally next door at the gas station. I always enjoyed the compliments I got for my baking skills.”

“Soy sauce. the secret ingredient in Jimmy John’s tuna salad is soy sauce.”

“I started working as a casual in a seafood department of a supermarket franchise a while ago. After 2 months they moved me to full time, 4 after that I was Employee of the month and assistant manager. The company asked if I could relocate to another store to run their shop as Manager. I was stoked, manager at 18? Felt good man. I was there for eight months, 13 hour days six days a week. I was getting paid $450 a week. I thought something was wrong about that and approached my manager, he said because I’m young and still on my full-time probation period I was earning less, but once probation was over id be on a higher pay grade. Well, probation rolls past and my pay hadn’t gone up. The union came in one day and were chatting to all the staff about the job. I asked him about my paygrade and what I was earning, and his jaw literally dropped. He pulled out his folder and showed me what I was supposed to be earning which was over double. He backed me up when I approached head office about it and despite them trying to pull over everything in the book to avoid back paying me, I ended up walking out of that meeting with something like seven grand plus a penalty. The company went from 15 major stores to 2 in the space of 3 years.”

“Uber had a project where they hired a bunch us (from a temp agency) to just take free rides over the city all day in order to essentially spy on the competition. They asked us to take pics of drivers had Lyft enabled phones turned on while in the ride. I heard the info was later used to fuck with Lyft and create fake activity zones or something, so that it would create less business for them. Pretty messed up, really.”

“It’s a pretty open secret, but Wal-Mart constantly works part-timers 40 hours a week so that they don’t have to give them the benefits of full-time employees.”

“Worked at a mid-sized ad agency (~200 employees) that was and probably still is a house of cards. Basically, the agency was like in Mad Men, where they had one large client essentially funding the whole company. If I were to guess I’d think probably about 95% of the revenue came from one client. In this agencies case, the client was a US government agency, and for months our Project Manager would tell us to bill all of our hours to that client no matter what we were working on, especially if we had nothing to work on at all. It wasn’t a secret either, it was pretty much a running joke to just bill everything to that client. It felt really shady, but I don’t know that anything was necessarily illegal or in violation of the contract. From what I understood, there was basically a huge pile of money allotted for years at a time, and the ad agency needed to bill for it or just not receive it. If we ran low on billed hours near the end of a contract, there would just be a rush to catch it all up. I’ve heard that many/most large government contracts work this way, but I have a feeling if the client knew what was going on, the contract negotiations would probably go a bit different the next time.”