31 Company Secrets People Revealed

1. Cleaning up animals after an oil spill is feel good propaganda to make the public think they are helping. 90% of those animals will be dead within a few days or weeks. They've ingested enough of the oil that they are moving corpses, they (and you mr. nice person with a bottle of Dawn dish soap)just don't know it yet. Real oil spill work is done by trained professional crews, not volunteers. If you ever tried to help, you were given busy work to keep you out of the way.

2. I worked at a White Castle from 2000-2003. It was clean. Nothing super disgusting at all. All of the equipment got a thorough cleaning every 24 hours. The floors were mopped regularly, walls were wiped down... everything. The food was always fresh. If the burgers cooled enough for the buns to get hard, they were trashed. If fries/sides sat under heat lamp for 15 minutes, they were trashed. We threw away a lot of food. We had to track it all for inventory purposes, and filled up a couple pages a day of stuff we through out. Even when the bulk of the crew was teenagers, we really were trying to work fast and do a good job. Every year or so, they made us get timed on the griddle by a regional manager. Everyone had to do it. Starting with a clean griddle you had to fully prepare, box and bag 30 hamburgers as fast as possible without cutting any corners. I know not all locations are like that, nor are all fast food restaurants, but when I was working there, we did a really good job of everything.

3. Apple: All techs and “Genius” employees are fully aware of wide-spread issues well before they are officially released to the public. They are NEVER discussed at the morning staff meetings with management present but are ALWAYS a source of discussion in the 3:00-3:30 tech staff meeting. For example: It got to a point where I would replace an iPhone 6+ for the “display” issue and sometimes had to replace the replacement 2-3 times while the customer was waiting. It was embarrassing and frustrating that the official release from the company was that the issue was caused by customer misuse. We all knew the truth and the techs with any sort of conscience would bend over backwards to do what we could to right the wrongs. That is one of several manufacturing issues masked as user error or misuse that we tried to work around.

4. Airline pilot here. You know those blankets that we give you on the flight? The airline never washes them. Ever. We just shake them out and shrink wrap them for a later flight. Every once in a while we toss one that's unusable.

5. I worked at UPS ages ago. The word "FRAGILE" on a box meant nothing to us, so make sure you pack your stuff properly.

6. When purchasing items on the internet (especially airline tickets), use incognito mode on your browser. We use your own cookies against you: raising the price on tickets the more times you check, as you shop around for better deals. That way you'll think the price is going up or that seats are being actively sold - thus increasing your urgency to buy, and punishing you for trying to get a good deal.

7. Viagogo are just corrupt, straight up. Not a little thing here and there, they are just a criminal company. They will take your money for tickets even if they have none of those tickets, assuming they will eventually have tickets to sell you. If they don't get them, you get the ticket money back. An example of this was when a guy in the UK bought tickets to the Superbowl in 2013, booked his air travel, flew to the states, booked his accommodation, was staying in a hotel he paid for, and was calling us every 15 minutes to ask where his tickets were. We were told to lie to him and say someone will meet him at the stadium. We let him know 30 minutes before the game started that he wouldn't be receiving any tickets. Viagogo refund the ticket cost, but the travel, accommodation and time wasted? Nothing at all. And they never had the tickets. Same for festivals: I took loads (LOADS) of calls from people who were told to get to the middle of the wilderness in Eastern Europe for a dance festival, having booked time off work and prepared for a 5 day festival. When they got there they were told there were never any tickets. Just go home, write off the time off, write of the ticket costs, write off the transport, write of the preparation and deal with feeling s**tty for 5 days because they were ripped off by a company...except it isn;t that simple, because now they are in the middle of a field in Eastern Europe for 5 days, the bus that took them there has gone and they have no admittance to the festival...so essentially Viagogo were responsible for just dumping around 100 people in a field in eastern europe with no provisions and no way of getting back. Far from discouraging the practice, they LOVE scalpers and give them preferential treatment ('super sellers'). They get discounts, skip phone queues, and get a higher price for tickets than honest customers with a ticket to sell. If an event is coming up soon, the seller can meet you at the venue to pass the ticket over. What this means is if you show up and the seller isn't there for whatever reason (illness, decided to use ticket themselves, just can't be arsed etc.), you have paid and have no proof they did not meet you. Byebye money. If you buy a ticket from Viagogo, I would honestly say you have a 40-45% chance of getting it.

8. I used to work in skincare: None of the products cost more than $2 to manufacture, but would retail at anything from $20 to $150 per product. Always amazed me how much people would shell out for anything with volcanic clay or snake venom cream

9. I used to work for a large smart phone company. During development, we used to go through phases, Engineering Verification testing stage, Design Verification Test, Production Verification Test, and finally Mass Production. Each stage was meant to have checkpoints in order to ensure that the final product was built with good quality and any known bugs would be able to ironed out before the product launch. Any bug that was not resolved would potentially have the ability to delay the launch. Except that there is a thing called Waivers. So the PM could request that certain bugs be granted a waiver delaying the fix of the problem to a later date. No big deal, every project has a few minor bugs, right? For each stage there would be hundreds of waivers. Some would be minor, to be fair, but sometimes they were definitely not minor. I will never, ever, buy an electronic device in the first 3 months of mass production. Wait for the second wave of production, the quality of the product increases ten-fold.

10. Volunteer paramedic ... when we find an old person who clearly has been with no pulse for hours we close the doors, shut relatives out and pretend to do something to avoid useless legal action.

11. I worked at a car dealership. The $1200 car care system that we would discount to $900 was “applied” with about 15 squirts of a spray bottle. Many times I’d hang out with the detail guys so the customer wouldn’t get suspicious at a quick turnaround.

12. A "high class" spa I worked at used epsom salts and vegetable oil for their $65 salt scrubs.

13. Wash your fruits and vegetables very thoroughly a lot of them will end up being scooped off a disgusting warehouse floor and put back in the package after falling out

14. Worked for a private school. Grades were definitely bought. We were discouraged to give anything lower than a B. Had one principal that told a teacher to take the final for a student that went on summer vacation early. She called it a shadow final and said nonchalantly that it's no big deal, just answer how you think the student would answer. This school is expensive, and these kids go on to fancy colleges because of these grades.

15. Idk the legality of this but it always seemed wierd. But we would get bags of another company's product (animal premix) and manually transfer that product into a bag of our own. We would give these products lot codes of our own and sell them to customers.

16. Applebees; on the tabletop computers, go to "Extras" and tap and hold the little white space on the top left of the screen. When it gives a password prompt, it's 4321. Lets you change the table numbers or play games for free.

17. We didn't meet the contractual obligations to entirely destroy the laptops Google sent to us for decommissioning. We shredded the HDDs and sold the laptops for a profit. Couldn't do s**t about the servers though, Google branding all over them

18. It has been several years, but when I worked at certain satellite tv company, they had a value system for customers. You are valued at 1-5 stars, based on how much you spend, and how much they value you as a customer. If you are are a higher star value, they will do basically anything to keep you. You will get a ton of services and equipment for free, and they will bend over backwards to keep you from cancelling. If you are a 1 or 2 star, they don't give a s**t. Especially 1 stars, because it usually means that you are late all the time, or that you don't spend very much. If you call in asking for deals or credits, they won't give it to you. If you threaten to cancel, no one cares. Also, there are special phone lines for people they consider "VIPS". They never have to wait on hold, and only special employees are allowed to take the phone calls.

19. Former Starbucks partner here. I've worked at a variety of different stores during my stint as a barista, and I can't tell you how many times I've gone to clean an espresso machine and have found mold. I've only worked in one store that followed cleaning protocol correctly, out of a total of six (all in a major U.S. city). Also, don't be a d**k when you place your order, otherwise you will without a doubt be decaffed. I've even witnessed assistant store managers do this to customers.

20. I used to work for a major card service company, and before the law changed if you bought a gift card to say a red lobster and didn't use it for like say a year. It was a distinct posibility that the entire value of that card would be gone due to monthly service charges. So picture me the guy trying to explain to the guy how his 50$ gift card was worth nothing, and you can imagine how that goes. Weirdly enough I ended up loving that job the most due to other types of accounts I used to handle. That was one of the worst parts of my job honestly.

21. Our secret sauce is just Thousand Island dressing.

22. If you ever hear "Code Brown" over the walkie talkies at Target, it means they found s**t on some of the clothes in softlines. EDIT: Most of the time, it was people coming in and trying on clothes while not wearing any underwear. It sounds disgusting. and thats because it was. Few times someone would just dump in the changing room, but most of the time its because after they tried on the clothes and decided they didn't want it, they would give it back to the employee at the counter to put back, and thats where the doodoo was found.

23. Former Geek Squad here - most of the people that work there, aren't really technical at all. We usually just walk it over to a bench, hook it up to a corporate VLAN and run just run some software. If there are real issues - people remotely connect from India or somewhere else. We are basically just salesmen with a clip on tie.

24. I worked for a cold storage company that held products for Good Humor. The inside of the freezer was -20°. One day a friend of mine caught some boxes on the racking causing popsicles to go everywhere. When he stepped off his lift to look up into the racking to evaluate the situation he stepped on a popsicle causing his feet to fly up in the air and busted his head on the ground. He lasted a few days in ICU and eventually passed. Instead of this being a freak accident and giving us time to deal with it we were all brought into the freezer to look at the frozen puddle of blood to show us what could happen if we aren’t careful.

25. Wal-Mart would make us work past our shift and then force us to clock in late the next night to avoid OT. The managers got so paranoid about OT that they started accusing us of going over 40. I was docked 4 hours when I had no overtime and had to use my PTO to get back to 40. Edit for clarification on my state. This was in 2012 and I live in Oklahoma. The labor board is a f**king joke and the keep you from going over your hours happened at two stores I worked at. Both stores also did shady s**t like having maintenance work both cleaning and stocking. I had to stock the first half of the night and clean five bathrooms the last half and had to get them all cleaned before 7. I will never work for Wal-Mart again and I warn my friends not to work for them.

26. Used to work for a coffee shop who's claim to fame was that all food items were made from scratch in house. All of their pastries were made using Pillsbury dough, and every other kind of dessert was bought from a grocery store.

27. I worked at Whole Foods. Your cookies and bread were heated in store, not baked. Oh. And in AM meetings, you're referred to as "basket size", not customers.

28. Red Cross makes a ridiculous amount of money selling plasma to makeup/skin care companies. And Buffalo Wild Wings, wings are always frozen never fresh. And they cook them before hand and keep them in a warming drawer. The motto is “they come for the sauce not the wings”.

29. Most sushi places will use the same distributor and have the same quality of seafood. The difference between a fancy sushi place and a hole in the wall is pretty much the environment, and the price.

30. Every, single, automotive parts company will let you return anything if you simply call the district manager. I have yet to see anything not taken care of when it reaches their level. You think your battery is under warranty but its not showing up? Call the DM. They'll tell the store to take care of it. 100%, everytime.

31. Used to work in a business hotel. If You get scrambled eggs on sunday morning, You can be 100% sure it's left over from friday morning.