Ex-Workers Expose 35 Shady Secrets Companies Don’t Want The Public To Know

After working in any given company for a year or two, you learn a little something about the inner workings of that organisation. Secrets that management would otherwise withhold from their customers becomes common knowledge amongst employees. People pick up on industry loopholes, get the goz on office scandals during water cooler chats and figure out the weak points of their service or products the longer they work there.  Of course during most of one's career these secrets are treated as sensitive information in order to safeguard one's job. But all bets are off once someone has resigned from a position. So when someone recently asked, "What’s a company secret you can share now that you don’t work there anymore?”, folks candidly spilt all the eyebrow-raising tea, as they threw their former employers under the bus. 

#1

Image source: maineCharacterEMC2, Mike Mozart Macy’s employees have a code of the day, SOMETIMES, where they can choose to give you a little further discount if you’re nice to them and not a total a*s. I used to work there, and before that, I couldn’t figure out why they kept selling me stuff at a higher discount than advertised. But I’ve worked retail and waitressed a lot, and I’m always friendly with clerks/waitresses, etc. cause it is a freakin hard job. It’s not the tasks that are so hard; as much as the long hours on your feet, and customers being very mean sometimes.

#2

Image source: anon, Daniel Honies Skip the chili at 7-11. No one ever changes it. usual7: Can confirm. I worked there for several months, and I never touched it.

#3

Image source: smellymarmut, Natracare I work in public service. I don't know if I'd call it a dirty secret, but when the government started stocking men's rooms with free pads/tampons we all agreed to turn a blind eye to the one trans dude taking them all regularly and dropping them off at the local homeless shelter. He's the only one affected, and he's keeping homeless women well-supplied on the government's dime.

#4

Image source: KyleD2000, Getty Images As a long-time probation officer, one thing that surprises people is how many **unusual**, "creative" sentences we have to enforce. Most people think such sentences are banned by the 8th amendment but that's...not really how that works. For one, most of the time the offender takes the plea deal for the unorthodox sentence willingly to avoid prison, so they never appeal on 8th amendment grounds anyways since that would just result in re-sentencing and going to prison. Occasionally such sentences make the news, but many don't. The most notable one I worked was in 2016, which did make the news, when a woman was being sentenced for a serious case of animal neglect. The judge gave her a choice - incarceration, or spending a day sitting in the "stinkiest, smelliest part of the county dump" to see how it feels to live in filth. She chose the latter. We had to contact the dump and say "hey, judge's orders - help us find the absolutely most revolting place here." They didn't believe us until we showed them the paperwork. I took it seriously and found the nastiest place there for her. By the end...I think she was wishing she'd taken the jail time.

#5

Image source: Dahns, Yan Krukau I used to work for a company that run check on medicine secondary effects. And buckle up for the big secret. The truth is... Homeopathy does not have any known secondary effect. Because it doesn't have a f*****g primary effect.

#6

Image source: Due_Reading_3778, Curated Lifestyle Health insurance companies will deliberately and intermittently slow down or completely stop claims processing to hang onto their money longer. They also have days where they reject en masse across the board because it allows them to not pay out for an additional 30 days or maybe never pay if the claim is not resubmitted. True stories.

#7

Image source: booksandcats4life, Getty Images [Note: United States centric] Some d**g companies that make lifesaving medications know that your choice is to pay them or die. And they price their d***s accordingly. It's not about the years of research or the investment in production facilities—in most cases 80–95% of the research was done via government grants (thanks NIH!, we'll miss ya!) and production facilities are usually in low-cost countries. It's all about people being willing to pay anything to not die screaming. Simple_Song8962: I'm taking a new drug to treat my leukemia. It's 4 capsules daily for 24 months. It retails for $16,000 per month. That's close to $400,000 for the full 24-month treatment.

#8

Image source: StockKaleidoscope854, Getty Images I once worked for a polling company, the kind that runs surveys for elections and marketing purposes. I learned that numbers can be made to prove anything remotely plausible and to not trust election polls when they are too tight.

#9

Image source: Kanye_X_Wrangler, Media Digital A s**tload of auto parts are made on the same line and are the same thing. If you are looking at three different brands of say brake pads and there’s not a difference in materials (say one is ceramic) it’s very possible they are all the same thing and came from the same factory. I worked for a company that made the parts going on the new car, the official replacement parts from the manufacturer, and more than four different aftermarket brands and they all came off the same line.

#10

Image source: bingocatswithhats, Andrea Piacquadio A shocking number of retail stores force new employees to watch anti-union propaganda videos during orientation. Also, to whom it may concern, products that claim to be made in the USA are actually just *assembled* in the USA. The parts are still manufactured elsewhere.

#11

Image source: 80s_dystopia_is_now, Getty Images We're shipping dangerously corrosive chemicals across the country in tanks that have repeatedly failed safety inspections. Very few get pulled over, so it's cheaper for the company to pay the fines instead of repairing the tanks or buying brand new ones. And with all the slashes to funding, firings, and relaxation of environmental regulations, it's getting even easier to do so.

#12

Image source: impeccadillo, Tom Fisk I work in a manufacturing-related industry. We tout how much effort we're putting into making our consumer products "eco-friendly" and "green"- which really does have an impact - but the amount of waste our day-to-day operations generate is staggering. When I was working from home during Covid, receiving samples and contracts and other documents to review and sign, I was filling up 4-5 big trash bags PER WEEK with all the plastic shippers and Styrofoam padding that came along with those. Imagine that x100 people doing similar work across the org. Now that we're back in office, we have to have trash collection come by multiple times a day. And this doesn't even touch on how many next-day international air shipments we send back and forth, how many pieces the factories scrap due to small defects, and how many unsold products go straight to the landfills after languishing in a climate controlled warehouse for a year. I guess the point I'm getting at is: trying to reduce your personal carbon footprint is a noble goal. Don't abandon it! But real change will have to come from holding corporations accountable for the waste they generate.

#13

Image source: Choice-Marsupial-127, Mike Mozart TJ Maxx makes employees shuffle clothes around so customers have to search through everything for different sizes of a particular clothing item or matching sets of suits.

#14

Image source: dirtybird971, Getty Images I work in a plastic bag plant. Everything in here runs on electricity. The owners tapped into a power line that runs through the property and for more than 10 years they didn't pay a dime. They made tens of millions. When the fraud was found out they blamed an employee (who was from latin america) and were given a 200K fine. You can't find the story online any more, they used their community connections to have it erased. And flat out deny it ever happened. Who says "crime doesn't pay"?

#15

I worked for a petrochemical engineering company. One of the designers noticed a flaw that if two people in two different parts of a specific plant each opened a specific valve at the same time it would cause a bad thing to happen. When he brought it up to higher ups that they needed to address it they told him don't open the valves together. A few years later it happened and there was a kind of big explosion and fire. Engineers all had to sign an NDA but I wasn't an engineer so I never was told to sign one. Image source: superpj

#16

Image source: Jackieirish, MikeShots No longer employed there, but when I worked at a certain big box retailer of home improvement products we would occasionally see hopeful strangers sitting in our lobby with boxes or other packaging waiting for meetings. These people were small-time inventors of new products and were trying to get them on the shelves of our retail locations. What they didn't know is that, as condition for consideration of carrying the product, they would be required to turn one or more samples over to the company to be examined by the product teams. If the product showed promise, one of those samples would be shipped to another country where it would be thoroughly dissected and analyzed so that an equivalent product could be developed under the house label (with enough modifications to not infringe on any patents, of course) and *that* product was what would end up on the shelf. From what I heard, a lawsuit pretty much ended the practice and now they don't allow pitches from independent producers any more. They just wait to see what other retailers are already carrying (and selling well) and copy those.

#17

Image source: Feeling-Attention43, Mikhail Nilov IBM is a traitorous company. They routinely lay off whole teams of their American employees, keeping just a single token worker to interface with the client while outsourcing the rest of the work to H-1B visa holders or teams in India via remote work.

#18

Image source: Illustrious_Dust_0, RDNE Stock project A lot of tech consulting firms in the US are running immigration/trafficking schemes. They sponsor people to come over from India, or students who graduate and are about to lose their student visas. They do grunt IT work with ridiculous hours and little to no pay. I’ve even seen the students family pay the company to sponsor their child and have them work for free until they find a paying job.

#19

Image source: TraditionalTackle1, Getty Images I used to work in the hotel industry and a lot more people die in hotels than get publicized.

#20

Image source: GB715, Cj Expired food products that haven’t sold are often mixed with new products at a specified ratio. It‘s called rework. cabronfavarito: Ughh I worked in a meat room and the chicken that didn’t sell would have to be taken off the shelf after 3 days. Sounds cool but where does it go after? To the garbage? Nope! It was sent to the seasoning room to be repackaged as freshly seasoned chicken and people would actually buy it. The seasoning masked the smell most times but after day two of that fresh chicken being on the shelf it smelled f*****g rancid. Any chance I get to tell customers not to buy the seasoned meat, I would.

#21

Image source: anon, Scandinavian Backlash The United States military spends so much money on useless stuff. We would spend $200 on a single bolt I can get a 20-pack at Home Depot for $8.

#22

Image source: susanreneewa, Getty Images I sang opera professionally for a long time. The amount of sexual harassment and a*****t that is not only overlooked but excused is absolutely abhorrent. When Domingo was called out, I had a colleague who furiously defended him. Her argument was that he was always nice to her. Well, he must be a good dude, then, if he was nice to one lady who was close to his age and was already an established artist! He preyed on young women early in their career, d*****s. Our old general director didn’t give two s***s about most of the artists and would repeatedly hire one particular conductor who groped a colleague onstage. It’s getting a little better, but it’s far, far too slow.

#23

Image source: SinamonChallengerRT, Wesley Tingey The whole point of an "extended warranty" is to get the car in the shop and find things wrong that aren't covered by the warranty. iwtsapoab: Similar to my neighbour getting ‘free’ oil changes with her new Toyota. Every time she brought it in for the ‘free’ oil change they would find something else and fix it instead. Maybe drain some fluid maybe fix some plugs. I kept telling her, if your car is brand new why the hell are they having to do all of this maintenance on it - that doesn’t make any sense at all. She just wouldn’t admit that she was getting ripped off every time so her ‘free’ oil changes always cost her almost $400 every time she went in.

#24

Image source: Big-Melvin, Ip Photographer Don’t ever buy anything marinated from a butcher/meat case. It is how the older meats are sold, the marinade covers the smell.

#25

I'm a handyman. Contractors' favorite saying is "Can't see it from *my* house." You ever see those videos from home inspectors pointing out all the crooked or broken s**t in brand new construction? It's because the builders don't f*****g care. And then once all the cracks start forming in your walls they go "oh that's just the house settling." Nope, they built it s****y in the first place and now their shoddy work is shining through. Image source: the_xxvii

#26

Image source: artofdrink, Getty Images Major companies patent new technology they have no interest in developing just so others can’t develop it.

#27

Image source: anon, Mike Mozart Everything from panera is frozen, bread dough isn’t mixed on site, all the sweet treats are frozen, smoothies are made from a very syrupy purée, no fresh fruit at all.

#28

Image source: Retirednypd, Kindel Media The NYPD downgrades crimes from felonies to misdemeanors and makes every attempt to not even take a report for serious crimes. If there's no report, the crime isn't counted , hence, it never occurred. This is how high-level bosses get promoted, and politicians get re-elected. Yes, there is a quota. Cops have a certain number of arrests and summonses they need each month. If they don't hit the expected number, they get broken up from their steady partner, their tour is changed, they get s****y assignments, and ultimately get highway therapy, which is getting assigned as far from their home as possible. UN members have diplomatic immunity from ANY crime. We are to take no police action as to avert an international conflict. The UN members know this Hey, ask me anything.

#29

Image source: wearelegion1134, Karolina Grabowska I worked for a medical research company. All those research methods that they're not supposed to do because it's illegal here? yeah, they just go to other countries to do that. I had to take care of the machine that had all the research and information on the experiments they were doing in South America.

#30

Big box stores throw away obscene amounts of trash. You could build a house every week with the materials thrown away at each Home Depot and Lowe’s. Image source: Mike2830

#31

Image source: IamJacks5150, LightFieldStudios Walmart's off brands are made by name brands. Also, many managers cheat on their spouses with their subordinates; plural not singular.

#32

Image source: jleahul, Muffin Creatives Multinational pizza chain infamous for low quality. A local luxury hotel contracted us to provide their room service pizzas. We charged them $6+$2 tip per pizza, and we would deliver to the back entrance of the hotel in a plain white pizza box. We would normally charge $10 for the same pizza, they were selling it for $28. Our drivers loved it when they'd get multiple room service orders, plus a couple of direct-to-room orders. Raking in the tips to drive 2 blocks away.

#33

Image source: Visual_Counter_4897, Guillermo GR The Disney College Program is just a pixie dust coated excuse for cheap labor. I was a Professional Intern with the company and saw this first hand. Interesting_Tea5715: This. My wife did the internship at Disney World. They totally exploit young professionals. You get no time off and they are crazy strict about breaks. My wife would ask for a break when it was extremely hot and they wouldn't give it to her. She had several cases where she thought she was gonna pass out in the Florida heat. This was about 15 years ago though, so things may have changed.

#34

Image source: NewDaysBreath, FabrikaPhoto When it comes to delis (i worked in a few supermarkets), even if the company has strict policies, rest assured that there's always a few employees not following the food safety rules. Cross-contamination is a constantly broken rule, I have seen people open meats with box cutters they keep in their pockets that they use for an indefinite amount of time (weeks, months). They will drop entire hams on the ground and quickly pick them up, hoping no one notices. Those are NOT clean floors. Some won't change their gloves for hours. They'll be in the back throwing garbage out or having a smoke, or they'll clean the deli using nasty broomsticks and mophandles, and jump right back on the line and cut your cold cuts for you.

#35

Most people know by now that Target likes to let you steal long enough to build a case against you. What you don't understand is just how high-end their security camera system is. It's actually scary. They had cameras that could zoom in to such a degree, with such clarity, that even with a bad angle, they could zoom in so much as to have a single letter from your license fill the monitor. They could see the blackheads and pores on your nose or the fibers that make up the paper of the money being used. They could tag you with one camera and all other cameras could track you as you walked through the store, even the waist-height ones. Once again, this was 20+ years ago. I can't imagine how advanced it is now. Tldr. Don't steal from Target. Image source: j7style