27 Insiders Share Shady Industry Secrets

1.

I don't know that this is a secret but flight attendants and pilots don't get paid while boarding, deplaning, and delays. So when you're delayed and angry, so are we. We're not making money and still have to be there.

2.

Starbucks corporate makes us have those recycling bins in the lobby to present this green image, but most of the time all of the garbage ends up going to the dump anyway because the facility doesn’t have recycling

3.

In academia, you create content for privately owned journals like Science and Nature, but still you have to pay them. Also scientists who review journals articles for the peer review process do it for free. If you don’t participate in this process, you can’t get papers and if you don’t have papers you don’t get funding and subsequently starve and die.

4.

I work with kids at a daycare and we see babies take their first steps sometimes but we never tell the parents because we don't want them to feel bad about missing it

5.

When renting a storage unit you do not need to get the insurance they offer. Even if they say it's "mandatory", it's illegal to force you to get insurance. Also the rent will increase yearly, forever.

6.

Other academics will steal your work for themselves and publish it under their name.

7.

Animator here. It's coming more and more to light lately, but big animation studios and game companies treat their employees like [crap] and pay them barely anything and expect them to work hard "because of the love for the job". And they can get away with that because there are hundreds of thousands of other creatives who would be more than happy to deal with all of the BS just for a chance to work at a AAA studio. Really it's not just animation though, the entire entertainment industry is this way.

8.

I make super expensive stuff that is bought by several governments and some high-end consumer product manufacturers. One of the machines that every bit of product has to go through only works right if you stand there and poke at it with a stick. We don’t even have a special stick. It’s just a metal rod that fell off of another piece of equipment that we wrapped some tape around to make a handle. We always make the new guy do it, because it is super boring.

9.

The official policy for customer dissatisfaction at a particular Canadian coffee franchise I worked at was, "offer them free stuff until they stop complaining."

10.

Funeral homes are businesses, and funeral directors will absolutely take advantage of grieving people. The most offensive to me are the cremation boxes. They're literally just big cardboard boxes, and should cost less than a hundred dollars. But they also make really expensive boxes, and directors will say things like "grandma would be more comfortable in this". No, she won't, because she's dead. Some of these boxes reach 1000 dollars, and of course are all just burned.

11.

The amount of toilet paper, random items, and bills used as bookmarks that are left in returned library books.

12.

Doctors spend so much time in their specific niche that they know jack s**t about anything else.

13.

A used car is priced based on what it will sell for but the margin is calculated by how deep they are into it. So if a car was just traded in, and they haven't detailed it or advertised it yet you can pay thousands less if you ask. And so e car dealerships have reward systems based on numbers for the salesmen and the dealer and management so if you are there at the end of the month you can sometimes get a screaming good deal because even at 0 profit, the sale bumps them up to a big bonus.

14.

Mobile Homes are cheaply made and mass produced by people making 9 bucks an hour and don't give a [crap] if it's up to code or safe. Hundreds of people in a factory with little supervision, and the main goal is to get as many made as possible, with little care to protocol, codes and fire stopping. I got hired as a HUD admin, ended up doing inspections so we could stop getting fined by the fire marshal and the amount of crap that is overlooked and not cared about is infuriating.

15.

At stores that magical backroom where you can just go and pick up anything is actually a huge mess where things go missing all the time.

16.

Nothing about The Voice, American Idol, etc is real. Your votes don’t matter. Everything is pre-determined. In some cases they even choose your audition song for you, and if they want to tear you down for entertainment, they’ll choose something they know you can’t sing. And with the contacts artists sign, you cannot refuse. Source: professional musician, I have not been on those shows but have friends who have. I cannot name names, them even telling me that stuff was against contract legalities.

17.

Half of technical support going on in the background of major platforms is convincing the developers to care about the issue enough to fix it. Also, every platform that interacts in any way with Facebook, hates Facebook. It's so f***ing broken.

18.

Hospitals are not clean The only really clean place in a hospital is the operating room, other than that the place is crawling with germs and whatever else has mutated on the floors and walls.

19.

Almost everyone in the TV and film industry is winging it.

20.

Wearing gloves in kitchens is a goddamn lie. They don't offer any sort of protection, they're actually more prone to spreading germs and filth because people don't wash them between touching different kinds of food. They exist to give the illusion of safety and professionalism. As someone who's worked in kitchens, I'd much rather see a cook wash their hands than throw a latex glove on.

21.

Most pet stores are really sketchy when it comes to where their pets are coming from. Usually it's large industrial breeders where the animals just breed more than they should and definitely don't have the environment they deserve. They pretty much never live their entire life span.

22.

Hotels are held together by more superglue and duct tape than you know. Doesn't matter how nice they are, unless you're talking about ultra rich type places.

23.

I work in the wedding industry. Every single service you purchase for your wedding has a marked up price because we know you’re going to spend it.

24.

Olive oil. I work at an olive oil bottling plant in Rome, New York. We had only one oil, but put it in 27 different packages, that sold at different prices. Some of the bottles claim to be aged and imported. Some claimed to be virgin, others extra virgin. Some cold pressed. One brand sold for $30 fir 12 oz., where another sold 128 oz for $12. All the exact same oil.

25.

I worked for a movie theatre. A large bag of popcorn that cost the customer $5.99 (at the time) cost the movie theatre six cents to produce, including the butter, the kernels, the bag, the power used by the popper and the time it took the concession employee to fill up the bag and give it to the customer.

26.

IT support people (help desks, computer repair shops, Geek Squad, etc.) are mostly just better at Googling than you are.

27.

That food on your plate wasn't made with love or care, it was quickly made with stress and hate by a cook either swearing at somebody or being sworn at.