Article created by: Gabija Palšytė
There’s a certain amount of comfort in walking away from a toxic job and knowing you can spill all the juicy dirt about your experiences online. After all, nearly every business has some muddy secrets they would like to keep tucked away deep in the closet under lock and key. But as we all know, these dusty skeletons are just waiting to be showcased in broad daylight.
A couple of Reddit users decided to find out what dark company secrets and questionable practices people can reveal since they don't work there anymore. Thousands of ex-employees typed out their priceless insider knowledge and spilled the tea about discount hacks, store policies, and other things their former employers preferred to keep from the general public.
So take out your notebooks and grab your pens because Bored Panda has handpicked some of the best answers these two threads had to offer. Also, remember to put your thinking caps on — we can’t guarantee whether these stories are fact or fiction, so take them with a pinch of salt. Continue scrolling, upvote your favorites as you go, and if you have any similar tidbits to share, be sure to tell us about them right in the comments below!
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Worked in the kitchen at a Wetherspoons (pub chain in UK). If anything went out of date, we simply changed the day dot on it so it now says it goes out of date tomorrow instead. If something fresh didn't sell well but we already had lots of it prepared (this would happen with steaks and fish mostly) the dates would get repeatedly changed until it went brown/stank and then it would get put on 'special'. Manager's bonuses were, in part, based on wastage; lower wastage=higher bonus. Also we got pretty much everything pre-portioned, frozen and so at least part if not all of your meal will be microwaved. In general the later you come in, the more kitchen equipment we have turned off and cleaned so more of it goes in the mikes. Send back your food because its cold? That's going in the microwave. That job seriously broadened my mind to what exactly you can cook using microwaves alone. We also didn't get breaks. They would even tailor shift lengths so that you would get the shortest legal length breaks (that we would get shouted at for taking anyway). For example, a 5 hour shift gives you 15 minutes break but a 4:45 shift gives you no break, guess which one they give you.
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I worked for the northwest company in northern Canada. The Inuk art that they sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars they buy for $10-20 from the artist. I asked a manager why, he said it’s because they’re poor anyway. I quit that evil company the next week.
Dupont killed off an endangered species in an area they wanted to expand. Then they laid off some folks who knew they were endangered, and magically the epa inspector didnt find anything, because they had buried up the pits and holes where the frogs had died.
Worked at Domino's in college. Our franchisee made it a fireable offense to call in sick. If you missed a scheduled shift, it would be considered quitting, and you wouldn't get put on the schedule ever again.
As a result, workers would come in to work INCREDIBLY ill and still make your food. I once witnessed a coworker begin to make a pizza, stop to go puke in the bathroom, then continue making the pizza.
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.
Also Aveda is owned by Estee Lauder so there is literally nothing natural about them. And they test on animals.
Glassdoor.com Does remove job reviews and DOES let employers choose which ones get shown first!
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 im 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 hadnt 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 every thing in the book to avoid backpaying 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.
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.
This is way more lighthearted than most, but here it goes. I used to work at a fast casual burger place with a secret recipe BBQ sauce. The secret ingredient was Root Beer syrup.
When diesel fuel gets spilled in working water front they just spread dish soap. This sinks the fuel to the bottom, where it can't be cleaned up, avoiding the rainbow slick, 10k fine, and a real clean up.
Walmart distribution center had a week long orientation. For about 2 days of that orientation they gave us reasons why unions are bad and have no place in the company . They told us we would be terminated if we tried to unionize.
They pretty much fed us propaganda materials and treated us like kids. They made us repeat that we understood the situation and the consequences of attempted unionization.
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.
Worked for a few years in a Shell gasstation in Denmark. The mixed candy isle is only filled, it's never, ever emptied or cleaned.
The gummybears at the buttom are probably highly saught by archeologists around the world.
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.
I worked at a “luxury” movie theatre for 3 years. Complete with service to your seat, oversized recliner seats, pillows and blankets. The pillows and blankets were never washed. Ever. But the break room was stocked with brand new ones. Always ask for a new blanket.
Worked for the United Nations. There's a list of global corporations they refuse to work with/accept donations from, because they are considered basically evil. It's not publicly available info even to most people who work in the UN system, but if you try to work with a company on the list, and you send the proposal up the food chain, eventually you'll get shut down. Don't have the list to share, but maybe someone else does. Some very well-known brands are on it.
I used to work for a food distributor and I was forced to work when sick with out gloves or masks because they ran out.
At a certain chicken establishment, we had deep friers that you put chicken into, locked them up, waited on the machines timer and pulled them out. It was 3 mins and 30 seconds long. In rushes when we were low on chicken, they made us open the machines up earlier before they were fully cooked by sometimes a full minute... I didn't work there that long.
Most dairy coolers in stores are riddled with mold.
