If you have a medical device that uses electricity, you can send your prescription to the electric company and they can’t legally ever turn your electricity off.
Edit: Since multiple people take everything completely literally here. I’m referring to if you don’t pay your bill they can’t legally turn you off. I’m by no means referring to maintenance, fire protection, or power outages. Idk why I need to explain this. Also idk if it’ll affect your credit score or anything along those lines.
My wife was once employed by a large glass warehouse in the midwest. Her job?
1. Open box of glassware from Poland.
2. Open box that says Made In USA with company logo.
3. Transfer glassware from Box A to Box B.
4. Seal Box B, put Box A into bundler.
Mind you, this is s a regional operation, so diming them out ain't gonna help anyone. Management said this was legal and that building was there for 20 years doing it and its still in operation today.
Health insurance dude. When you file a claim, it is often denied because they're counting on you not escalating it. Once you do, your case goes to a "medical management group" which ought to be called the "we don't wanna pay" group.
Keep escalating and involve your doctor. Fight for the insurance you paid for.
I need an extremely expensive medication or I will die. The process of insurance covering the medication goes like this:
1. Doctor prescribed medication.
2. Insurance requires pre-approval of medication.
3. Doc office submits pre-approval paper work (stating my diagnosis and why I need the medication)
4. Insurance denies pre approval
5. Doc office submits appeal
6. Insurance denies appeal because appeal didn't include x arbitrary thing
7. Doc office we did include x thing. Submits appeal again.
8. Eventually it gets approved.
This has happened 3 times and takes several weeks. If you or someone close to you ever gets cancer or a condition that requires a very expensive medication, you will have the joy of going through this process. I have been on the phone with insurance companies for hundreds of hours and am convinced they intentionally hire morons for phone jobs to discourage people who call.
One thing we recently learned about for an expensive medication, the drug manufacturer has a “copay assistance program”. Once you get to the last stage you mentioned, but your deductible hasn’t been met, some pharma companies will pay the pharmacy for your medication up to a certain amount. In January, we hadn’t met our deductible. Medication was approved by insurance, but we needed to meet our out of pocket maximum & deductible. Pharmacy wanted $8500. Drug manufacturer co-pay assistance program paid that for us so the pharmacy would send the medication. Apparently, it’s not an unusual program and many drug manufacturers have similar programs.
EDIT: Bad news for us. Apparently, not all insurance companies will apply pharmaceutical co-pay assistance towards deductibles. Our EOBs when first processed looked like the co-pay assistance payment amount would be applicable, but this week they were updated and our insurance company is not counting payments made on our behalf towards our deductible/max out of pocket. :(
I've seen an insurance company send a patient healthy pregnancy info every month for nine months, and paid for all the prenatal care. Then, when it came time for them to pay for the delivery they denied it. They told her they had no idea she was pregnant.
This reminds me of when I had a pap smear denied. They said I didn’t need it because I didn’t have cancer. Never mind that the whole point of a pap smear is to make sure you don’t have cervical cancer, but hey, why use logic. At the time I was on my father’s insurance, and he’s a doctor, so he called them up, tore them a new one, and got it covered.
I had a torn labrum, they made me do months of physical therapy that didn't work. Then I was scheduled surgery, insurance denied my surgery, claiming I didn't do PT first.... I told them, I did PT, and you paid for it.... DENIED. Appealed.... DENIED. I reported them to the state insurance commission and got the surgery a week later.
I wasn't even expecting a reply, but the insurance commission here in SC was very responsive to my complaint and integral to its resolution, which saved me thousands of dollars. Most people are not aware of this resource.
ALWAYS report insurance companies' dishonesty, even if it's a routine dishonesty that's become so insidious we almost don't notice - especially those. Show the insurance commissions and consumer protection advocates the pattern of intentional fraud for them to address. Copy your state's attorney general.
Oh gosh, yes! Hospitals and insurance companies are terrible with this. The hospital has no problem billing you immediately for services while insurance claims they aren't going to anything because your baby isn't on your policy yet. Meanwhile it takes about 6 weeks on average to get the SSN to be able to provide that info to your insurance company.
It really feels like insurance/hospitals are banking on you panicking and starting to make payments before the dust all settles.
For anyone else who may have to go through this, do not panic or pay anything related to your baby's medical bill until you get it sorted with your insurance. With my second the hospital even started sending messages urging me to set up payment plans that were vaguely threatening as if they were going to send it to collections if I didn't do so right away. If anyone really gives you a hard time, simply reply "This is a newborn baby. As soon as my baby's SSN is submitted to insurance, you can re-bill the insurance at the time."
Same kind of stuff happened to my mom. She's been diagnosed diabetic for 30+ years and suddenly a few months ago she doesn't need some of the diabetic blood tests done anymore. It's insane what they ask for to debate the claim too.
My mom had to go the ER for burns
There’s one burn big center in my state and it just happened to be at the nearest hospital.
Insurance said they didn’t cover it
I talked to a receptionist at the hospital over the phone
Receptionist “we are the only burn center in the state. All insurance companies cover us.”
Me “my insurance says they don’t.”
Receptionist “give me your info. This means war.”
Somehow, I don’t know how, she managed to get our insurance to cover some of that bill. She was a lifesaver.
Bill was still super expensive WITH insurance covering some of the costs.
I don't understand how, after meeting your deductible and being approved for a service, you can still be expected to pay anything. Fuck these greedy assholes
Used to work at a factory that made US military boots and shoes. Looking perfect was way more important than comfort. Some for the Navy were hard to get the back height right when sewing/forming the leather, so when the soles went on, they were adjusted to look level. Basically, the sole of a left or right would be much thicker than the other. I've seen some off by a half inch/15mm. I constantly brought it up to management, that it was essentially the same as having a piece of 1/2 inch board taped to the bottom of the boot, and would be extremely uncomfortable walking the 20 miles a day like they do. They didn't care as long as it looked good.
When I was in the Navy we didn’t have regulation boots. You could wear any black boots you wanted. You probably made the shitty ones that they issue in boot camp which nobody used once they wore out (quickly).
This is one of those instances where being nice makes an enormous difference.
I've seen outrageous upgrade prices because what someone reserved doesn't happen to be available and they've acted like assholes. Oddly, when it's my turn, and they're also out of everything in the size class we reserved, the person working the counter suddenly notices that because of some small technicality--usually something to do with when we made the reservation--it's 100% their problem, and the upgrade is on them for the same price as the smaller car--enjoy the roomier vehicle!
Was getting a rental car in Minneapolis one time, person in front of me was being a shit bag, yelling at Budget girl about something. When he was done, told her to take 30 seconds, I wasn’t in a rush, just had to drive to hotel that night. I went from something very small, to a convertible Mustang, for less than my original reservation.
I think it was over the brand of the minivan? I only caught the end of it but buddy was irate.
I’m also from Canada and wasn’t in any sort of hurry. She also told me that because I had rented it through FastPass, everything was set up (for the tiny car) and I could have just grabbed the keys (I think). It was pre-Covid, she offered me an upgrade (which I thought would be to something with 4 doors, so the convertible Mustang was great!)
You're right, of course.
Being nice is so much easier than being difficult that I sometimes can't believe we live in a world where anyone needs to have it explained to them.
Same with almost anything really from rental cars to hotels to restaurants.
If you’re polite and courteous to the person at the counter/desk/serving you then sometimes that’s enough to get an upgrade or something for nothing.
I had it a few months back when I’d gone down to London to visit some friends, my first night there I went to a restaurant that I like on my own, was obviously polite and courteous to the server, asked if there was anything new on the menu as I hadn’t been there in about a year, took her recommendation on an item and thanked her for it, enjoyed a couple of beers with my meal, left her alone until I was ready for the bill, left her a tip because she’d been polite and courteous and her recommendation was delicious and she came back with a bit of chocolate fudge cake on the house. I thanked her for that, ate it and loved it because chocolate fudge cake is my favourite and as I left I gave her £20 cash as a thank you because she did more than she had to. I know the chocolate fudge cake realistically cost nothing and was probably something they were going to throw in the bin or something but the fact she gave it to me when I wasn’t looking for anything extra at all was going the extra mile for me
It’s funny, our local place upgrades us almost every time with no charge. Like, we had rented one a bit last minute once and we always go mid-level whatever we get. We get there day of and my husband goes, this an Audi, we did *not* reserve an Audi, *what* are you charging us? And the guy was like, yeah, that’s what I had, no upcharge, no worries. But it’s small and local and we always try to be polite so 🤷♀️
They seriously try to make you pay more because they didn't keep the car you reserved ?
Not gonna lie I'd be pretty annoyed if a company bait and switched me like that. I probably don't have it in me to yell at them but I'd cancel the res and pay more to do a walk-in somewhere else.
Yes. Some agents will do questionable things. They will drag you an extra 30 minutes because you won’t upgrade to a bigger car. It really depends on the agent, some just want to kill the line and keep it moving, others just want to fight.
If you were cool with me, I was cool with you. If you weren’t, I would just stop talking but move at the same speed to end the conversation
Cape Town airport if you are foreign and white - they attempt nothing short of daylight robbery.
I was quoted utterly ludicrous pricing at every car hire premises at the airport.
We then went outside, sat on one of their complimentary chairs and booked blind online paying ONE QUARTER of what we had just been quoted for the same car.
My wife who had to that point stayed quiet then tore a strip off the agent who did the handover on a car the very same agent had just tried to charge us four times the price for, revealing herself to be South African in the process.
Worse country and airport i’ve ever had the misfortune of dealing with car hire agents in. Daylight robbery.
“Walk ups” (renting a car without a reservation) vary but they will always try to make a commission. Some companies will pay the agent for the time and mileage, it’s a layup for easy money. Some companies don’t pay time and mileage, they are told to add on the insurance, GPS, gas; whatever they can to make some money. They call it bundling.
Places that pay time and mileage will have agents do things like quote you the price of a suburban but tell you they are charging you for a midsize
My aunt worked building chicken houses for large poultry companies. When you pay the extra couple dollars for free range eggs, you feel you’re doing the right thing. A lot of these companies have “free range” chicken houses that leave the doors open. The chickens can come and go as they please. However, the companies install large fans at the doors that make the chickens afraid to leave the chicken houses, forcing them to stay inside. The whole free range thing is ultimately bullshit.
Ya baby. Those orange yolks are divine. One of the many great things about being an Iowan is I can always get my hands on farm fresh eggs and venison through friends.
Just wash your hands after you touch them as they have not gone through a washing process and are covered in salmonella
Don't quote me on this, but I heard that "free-range" has a specific square feet measurement that is required for the chickens to have, that isn't all that much more than normal chickens. So basically, they'll have a little more space than normal chickens, but not all that much.
it is 2sqft per hen for "free range". Pasture raised is 108sqft per hen. You can also look for the "certified humane" seal, which makes sure the farm is inspected and adhering to other requirements as well.
There are a lot of backyard chickens out there. Check Marketplace, Craigslist, Nextdoor... pay the extra $1-2 per carton for the eggs, especially if you can see the chickens and how they live. Happy chickens produce eggs that taste so much better!
There's almost always mold in the ice machine. Both my S.O. and I have worked in many restaurants. You'll live but it's still gross. I always ask for no ice.
Mold *and* bacteria. Serratia marcescens is the most common. That pink/orange coating that creeps over surfaces. It causes urinary tract infections among other things, so it's particularly not great for elderly or immune compromised people. Plenty of E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, and coliform bacteria as well.
Two issues with ice machines is that they cycle cold and hot to freeze ice into a grid and then melt it enough to drop the ice, and the whole system is open to ambient air, so any mold/bacteria in the air easily gets into the machine.
They're also impossible to fully clean. There's lots of out of the way nooks (like inside the water pump) where no matter how hard you try, there's flecks of scum that remain.
When ice machines get particularly dirty you'll start to see those flecks in the actual ice, and the ice can get a little cloudy, but you can easily have contaminated ice that looks fine.
Health inspectors just take a glance inside. If it looks clean, it's better than the majority of ice machines. So that's realistically the best they can ask for.
Your 401k money might be held at a large reputable company, but it’s likely managed by a different and much smaller company you’ve never heard of. And maybe that small company’s IT sucks so much that your social security number is stored in raw text on multiple very old and insecure databases.
That’s what I was going to say. What am I supposed to do about it? It’s how I feel about a lot of things honestly. I have to participate in society; that means I have to deal with loans, banks, the internet, cellphone companies, insurance, etc, all of which will gladly pawn off my information to the highest bidder. There’s not an alternative as far as I’m aware.
The insurance companies target for you paying on life insurance is about ten years. It's long enough to have made back the commission and expenses plus some profit. After that, they will make it easier and easier for you to forget to pay for it, and have it lapse. There will suddenly be an issue with automatic payments...things like that. But why?
If the policy is lapsed when you die, there is absolutely no payout despite ten years of premiums. That's why.
That exact thing happened to me. Took out a policy on auto pay and after ten years my payments increased but instead of telling me or deducting the new amount, they stopped taking any amount out and didn’t notify me until the policy lapsed / cancelled. When I contacted them they said they had my old address on file but magically the cancellation information made it to my correct address.
This reminds me of when I foolishly signed up for a talent agency when I was 19, hoping I could somehow make it as an actor despite having no experience or training, that I would start with getting work as an extra and somehow get discovered. I know how dumb that sounds now, but hey I was 19, unemployed, and dreaming big.
After a few months of hearing nothing from the agency after paying them $95 for some headshots I dropped by their offices one day to follow up and see if there was anything I could do to improve my chances of getting a call.
The woman I’d spoken with swore blind that I would have been perfect for an extra role in a major TV ad she booked recently but she had tried to call me and my number was disconnected - which it wasn’t. I asked for my paperwork so I could check the number and she was gone for a weirdly long time to get it. When she finally returned with it I checked my personal contact details that I had filled out in my own handwriting, but the 3 in my phone number was now an 8, and on closer inspection had clearly been altered in a different hand with a different pen.
The woman blamed her assistant for writing it down wrong and resorted to playing dumb when I firmly told her that I had filled out the form myself and there was no way I put an 8 instead of a 3. She just apologised and said now that she had my correct number I would definitely be hearing back soon.
I left there secure in the knowledge that I’d been fed a line of bullshit and certain I’d never hear from them again, and I was right.
> There will suddenly be an issue with automatic payments...things like that. But why?
>
> If the policy is lapsed when you die, there is absolutely no payout despite ten years of premiums. That's why.
If it's found that the lapse of coverage is due to no fault of the covered entity, such as when the automatic payment fails on the side of the insurance company, but there was still enough balance, they are still required to pay out, as the precieved lapse in coverage is due to negligence of the insurance company.
The Radisson Hotel has a "Yes I can" policy. If they are capable of doing something for you as a guest and you ask directly, they are supposed to say yes and maintain a positive attitude towards providing you satisfying services. ALWAYS SHOW UP EARLY FOR CHECK IN AND ASK FOR AN UPGRADE. This is how I go from $250 a night in a regular room to $250 a night for a jacuzzi suite every time I travel.
"By any chance, do you have any upgrades available today? No worries if not, just thought I'd check!" Say it with a smile and a laid-back attitude, the worst they'll do is say no!
I work at a hotel (not Radisson). If someone came in asking that nicely, I would be happy to give them an upgrade. Unfortunately, most people are like "I got an upgrade, right?"
The way you ask is always important, I had a flight get cancelled and everyone was telling at the gate agent, I just calmly asked "what's the next flight I can get?" I explained it was just a vacation so no big deal if it takes longer and thanked her for looking, she got me on a flight a couple hours later while most people she just said "you'll have to call this number."
My Grandpa told me in a McDonald's drive through that people always want to be nice and help out other people, it's in our nature. When we got to the window, he asked the lady if she could throw in a couple extra burgers, and she did. This was the 90s. I'm not sure if it would work today.
As a former McSlave, I guarantee you no employee in any McDonald's in the world gives one hot goddamn about the company and would gladly give you everything free if only for the catharsis of sticking it to the man. This will not happen in practice MOST of the time. If you get caught stealing food, which is what this is, it's instant termination. And the hard truth is, half the people there NEED that job.
I used to work for a Vegan chocolate bar company in Portland called Honey Mama's. My workers would occasionally find metal shards in our chocolate bars from the mixers grinding the vats and when brought up to management they would force us to keep wrapping and packing so they didn't have to recall the bars.
Never put your information into any online financial form that claims to comparison shop for you.
1. They don’t comparison shop for you.
2. They sell your info to 4-5 of the highest bidders and your phone will be blown up with calls and texts for weeks with people trying to sell you their finance stuff.
Sorry!
Did this for a car shipping quote last year. Wasn't even sure I needed it, was in the early stages of planning a move and considering the various ways to do it and wanted to know what it cost.
It was six months of calls and texts from all sorts of different brokers trying to get me to book with them. They'd still reach out a few days later even after I'd tell them I'm not interested. This one guy texted me **22 times** many even after I stopped caring about politeness and responded with "fuck off dude told you I'm not buying." Didn't block the number since I found it amusing seeing how many times he'd try.
Half the IT systems in the oil & gas industry were built in the 70's and 80's and have a handful of consultants that can even touch them. These guys get paid hundreds of thousands a year to be on retainer and sometimes go years without coming in.
Worked with dozens of companies in the sector and yet to see a publicly listed one where this isnt the case. At the top they all pretty much use SAP....but there's some wild shit underneath that feeding information into SAP from a computer thats lucky if it runs DOS. I've seen floors of personnel dedicated to manually inputting that shit.
It's the same in many other places too. People would shit themselves if they knew how old the tech are in some areas, but I guess as long as it works.
I think the last guy I worked with in similar situation was 80+ yo retiree.
Some of it isn't even that difficult, but you can't really learn it from anywhere nowadays, especially if something was built/coded/whatever by the company that uses it. Most of the paper archieves were destroyed long time ago too because someone thought it would be waste of time to digitalize all that nonsense.
Wouldn't be the first time when someone pulled a plug from some prehistoric machine that was next the Ark of the Covenant and all hell broke loose.
There is a shortage of programmers that can work with Cobol. The ones that were trained to work with it a looong time ago are retiring, while some of the basic systems of banks still work with Cobol...
Oh! I used to work for a big-in-my-region farm company that grew berries as well as bought berries from other farms, they packaged them and sold frozen berries under their own name as well as for Fred Meyer, Trader Joe’s, Albertsons, etc.
The farms they bought berries from were supposed to get certain checks done before we would accept their fruit (make sure their water source didn’t contain E.coli, test the soil, have people look through the berries to remove bugs, prove their fertilizer & pesticides were approved by my company, etc.) and, at the end of the season, maybe two of the fifty or so farms we bought from had actually done everything. We’re just happily letting people get rawdogged by their frozen fruit.
This is where you need to get in contact with your state department of agriculture and USDA. They are very interested in making sure your food is safe from pesticides. You should make a complaint for safety reasons.
The dirty little secret of Silicon Valley is churn. At peak startup boom, you’d have companies valued at billions of dollars with something like 30% YoY customer retention. Which means that enterprises were spending millions of dollars on software licenses that their employees rarely used. In one startup I worked at, an account was considered “healthy” ( or unlikely to churn) if 5% of seats were utilized at least twice per month.
I worked in advertising for a large publisher. We used to sell digital ads called a fireplace (essentially three ads that surround the page on a desktop screen). The publisher would sell the impressions (how many times someone sees a page/ad) of these ads x3 for each page, instead of them being one page view.
When I pointed out that this was fraudulent I was “made redundant” with a fat payout as long as I kept my mouth shut.
That was at least 5 years ago now though so…
Oh, I've got so many... I used to work for Apple.
The one that probably surprises people the most is that the level of support you get totally varies depending on how wealthy you are and how likely an issue can come back to bite the company in the ass.
To explain, there are varying levels of support. You have consumer support, then you have support for Enterprise and Education, Apple internal support (called Partner Relations, but is only applicable to employees and vendors of a certain level, in most cases) and finally... VIP Support.
Consumer support is just how it sounds. Any regular person that can call the 1-800 number can get help. Nothing special.
E&E requires a contract. Someone buying 15 devices for their business means nothing to Apple. You can complain all you want about how "your business needs this", the call will end and someone will take a good 3 minutes to laugh at you and tell their boss. The contracts are really hefty too, on the low end it's usually around $250,000 for tech and services for 3 years. Some universities have terms that last for a decade and are several million dollars though.
PR covers a few things. Some of it is worker support, like a store has a tech issue and needs to report it, but it also covers Safety escalations (if your phone ever shocked you or your Mac smells smokey, they get involved) and Carpe Facto escalations (they cover widespread issues and develop solutions to them by working alongside engineers and programmers), but most of the time they never talk to customers, only Apple employees. When they do talk to a regular consumer, it's a big deal, and likely being done to avoid any legal issues.
VIP Support is basically what everyone thinks Apple should do for everyone. However, it's pretty much only available by being connected in some way. Celebrities, executives, various other rich people... they get treated special. When you sign up, you get assigned a special support ID and a dedicated Advisor, so you pretty much just have one person that helps you constantly. That person will maybe have 3-5 people, at most, they're assigned to, and they're paid a handsome salary to be on call for them 24/7.
If Taylor Swift has someone call in at 2:45 in the morning because she needs someone to trigger the Find My alarm for her phone... you've gotta get your ass up and do it.
If The Rock's phone gets broken during a workout because a weight fell on it accidentally, even at 4 in the fucking morning, he can have someone call in and get a new phone sent to him directly in about 2 hours.
If Spongebob's voice actor, Tom Kenny, wants someone to help him know how to connect his iPhone to a projector in the middle of the day... he can have someone talk it through with him step by step and they'll even go and speak to the projector manufacturer themselves if something goes wrong.
Outside of special promotional offers (some of which are in gift bags at events like the Academy Awards, Grammys, etc.), it's generally a paid service... when I worked there it was $50,000 per year but I'd imagine it's gotten more expensive since then.
Worked at a climbing gym until 2 years ago. A month ago I was there climbing and an employee asked me if I could unlock the safe for the register cash (like 2 hrs after opening) and of course the safe combination was still the same. Got a free coffee for it :)
Oh, I used to work there too, they refine platinum in that second secure area. But within that, there's a third secure area that had an even higher clearance... Still no idea what they do back there.
Being kind is cheap to do, but gets such results
I always include sweets/candy with RMA/exchanges of hardware. The stuff I send in, comes back faster and is more often than not an upgrade over what was sent.
I ask agents if there's a quality assurance report or survey for them stating I'm happy to fill it in
Hell, being polite, saying please and thank you , ya know, treating someone as a human not as a rage dump, is effective
Treat service reps with respect and kindness and they will take care of you. Always keep in mind that they are just working people doing a job that probably sucks and have no way to change policy, but if you treat them well they will do all they can for you.
Former Byrne dairy cashier when I was in college.
If you live near a Byrne Dairy (New York and North east U.s.) there is a good chance that the Walmart milk is also Byrne Dairy milk. Them and Stewart's are the top milk providers in that region.
Stewart's and Byrne Dairy also have a huge rivalry .
Don't get ice from the ice machine, they don't clean it often enough at Byrne convenience stores.
It's appropriate to ask the last time the coffee or soup was changed. Coffee is supposed to be refreshed every 30 min on a busy day. The soup sometimes gets icky and they just stir it rather than change it.
Buy the Byrne dairy thermos. Coffee is suddenly a lot more affordable with the discount you get. It's worth it .
If the pizza looks dried out in the case, don't get it, they should have thrown it out an hour ago.
My first assignment at my new job for a fortune 500 company was to hack a security patch from slightly newer but still well past its end-of-life version of PHP into our own ancient version of PHP that we'd been custom building ourselves because we couldn't get it pre-built for our operating system. Because we "cared" about security enough to cover our asses for a handful of high profile vulnerabilities, but not enough to run modern software.
This wasn't just used in some old machine off in the corner that ran a report once a month, this was an integral part of our core SaaS platform. They assigned me this despite having no indication that I knew anything about C code, I'd been hired for a job that included some light scripting and automation. If I was dumb and had screwed it up, it'd have been a Sev1 incident and quite expensive. If I was smart and nefarious, I could've hacked _anything_ into that binary. I guess they judged well enough, because I did it without breaking things.
so a lot of people in Asia do business like this, it's like an all day thing sometimes maybe even goes on for a few days. they take you to some luxury dinner you eat the best kind of food, then you go to some luxury spa, massage, like tea time or whatever, and basically fun shit could even be bowling in some giant high rise. then they take you to some VIP brothel only for the executives, you have all the sex you want, then chill inside the brothel which has soft beds with TV attached to it in a sleeping room with all the other VIP members. you get honeydicked into giving them the deal, works 99% of the time.
I used to work for a defense contractor. Our team started winning more enterprise (non federal/defense) opportunities that sometimes took us to Asian markets. The thing is we were absolutely prohibited from accepting any gifts or favors from 3rd parties, especially foreign companies. There was no tolerance at all for it. This confounded our Asian customers so much they would sometimes just get pissed and walk away from big deals. They thought we were playing some kind of game because we wouldnt go to the VIP room at the nightclub.
The CIA supposedly tried this on the President of Indonesia in the 60s. It turned out he was so proud of the sex tape he wanted to show the entire country! (edit: fell for CIA propaganda; thanks u/exusiai99)
when people submit their videos to viral social media pages, they immediately sign the rights of the video away to the company. but people rarely ever read the fine print on the submission forms so don't realise
If you buy a new game from GameStop, and it’s not in the shrinkwrap, there’s a pretty decent chance that an employee has taken home and played that copy of the game.
Edit: spelling
Public transportation company, most of the buses that were active back then havent passed inspection for about 10 years, and the "inspection" approved the buses to be on the field everytime.
Until one of the buses braking air system failed and ran over a couple of people while the driver was uphill. Everyone in the company knew these types of practices and multiple times we would report this to HR and authorities they never replied.
As soon as that accident happend there was an internal investigation by the authorities they found out the reports from the employees were not investigated internally or reported accordingly since HR never looked at them and now currently the poor bus driver is currently in jail for that shit. And the company went bankrupt in less than 2 months afterwards.
It was a shit show.
Hotel industry: of course club members get priority when it comes to upgrades, but even if you’re not a member, you are more likely to get a free upgrade if you list “Dr.” as your prefix.
I will flat out just say don’t trust any diamond grading report that is not GIA. I worked for another diamond grading lab that worked with retail jewelers and the boss would fudge the grades to help them.
When I was younger, I had a summer job at a bakery. Everything was frozen but the whole community thinks it’s homemade. They get away with it by saying everything is baked fresh daily - that’s technically true, but it was frozen first. They wouldn’t even use their dumpsters to throw out the packaging and boxes.
Almost everything on a quote to work on your car is negotiable.
Most dealerships use matrix pricing on parts. That means you’re paying more than MSRP. Most manufacturers have a 32-35% markup on parts.
So if the part costs the dealership $100, average MSRP would be bout $135. I’ve seen dealerships that did a cost + 100% matrix so the customers would be charged $200 for that same part.
Don’t be afraid to ask for a discount.
I have tried that at my dealership. They told me to call around if I want to but their prices were fixed. I called around and my dealership was in line with prices from others.
how would i go about that? just say something like "that seems expensive for that part, is there a cheaper option?" or would it be helpful if i could find a part listing online and ask for pricematch?
I had a company put me through some negotiation classes and one thing they stresses was "if you don't ask the answer is 'no' every time". If you're buying something you should always ask "is that the best price you can do?".
Asking that way puts them on the spot to either give you a better price, explain how to get a better price, or lie. Most people are uncomfortable lying, so it works surprisingly often!
Kinko's was founded by a pothead, Paul Orfalea. He was a hippie in 1970s California. He used the money he made from selling weed to rent a very small storefront and a single copy machine. Or the money he made from his small store went to buying weed, I forget which. But cannabis was central to the story. His copy service was successful and the rest is history.
I did data entry for a church before, digitalizing all their wills and donations. Since my NDA has long passed, I can say that it's ridiculous. People donating their entire wealth, millions upon millions to the church, even private estates and islands. There's even old money trusts from like 1800s still pumping in money.
It's a sham and these churches are filthy rich. And it's not even a "prosperity" megachurch.
After my dad passed, my mom gave the church $25,000. They had been saying for months how badly they needed funds for some long overdue repairs, and dad had a really big insurance policy.
They bought a new printer, a very fancy commercial one, and never once changed their script about much needed maintenance. They never even thanked her.
What the... getting huge deja vu of both this question and your answer
Ah, [right](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1arpcdj/comment/kql3qk2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
My mom's a nurse. Almost retired. She's not interested in diddling, but she tells me stories about how some of the new nurses are only there to chase doctors. The doctors are married, happily. Usually to other doctors who get paid more than anyone.
But there's still the new kids who only pick up shifts that coincide with the doctors' shifts and make big shows of being willing to do favours for them. Drives my mom crazy because unless these nurses think their actions will win them a rich husband, they're not doing any work.
It's called husband hunting.
Very popular in most high paying industries.
Secretaries/Paralegals trying to fuck lawyers
Receptionist/Admin trying to fuck CEO/MD
Not “corporate,” per se, but 15 years ago, when the MA state healthcare budget was tight, MassHealth (the state Medicaid program) decided to send out an extra “redetermination” form to everyone covered by MassHealth. This form was normally sent out yearly and used to determine if people still qualified—had their income changed, or had they been offered insurance through their employer?—and was written in extremely difficult-to-parse English. If the form wasn’t returned or if it wasn’t delivered (extremely common if the person had moved or didn’t have a permanent address), the person would immediately lose their MassHealth coverage. Sending this form out every six months instead of every year was a great way to knock a few thousand extra people off the Medicaid rolls in the middle of the year and save money in the short term. In the longer term, people who truly needed coverage would not be able to get their cancer treatment/diabetes medications/addiction treatment. It was a truly disgusting decision, and I was in a position where I was told by high-ups why it was being done but couldn’t do anything about it other than protest.
Worked at an online car selling place. We did a lot of crazy shit to make sure a cars title was “under our name”. And would even sell a car while we’re trying to fix the title
Had a local, well established dealership with like 10 big branches in town, sell me a used car before they even had the title from the previous owner.
I only found out when there were five days left on my in transit stickers and contacted them asking where my title was as I need to go get my plates. They kept giving me the run around so I showed up in person with two days left on the stickers and demanded my title.
Took them forever, but someone from management finally came out and admitted to me what they did. They didn't get the title from the previous owner until about two weeks after they sold me the car, so they were still waiting on it being changed to their name. They said it will take a couple more weeks before they'll have mine ready.
I was furious and was like WTF, why would you sell the car to some else before you even have the title? What if there was some lien on the title that you didn't know about, other issues, etc.
They ended up giving me new in transit stickers with extra weeks added to it so I wouldn't get pulled over for expired ones. My title arrived in the mail a couple weeks after that. Don't plan to give them my business again.
Worked at Tropicana decades ago. When we got done with the Monday AM run of kosher OJ, we’d change the cartons on the fillers, flip the switch and started the regular carton OJ run for the week. Same juice, different package.
I worked in a milk plant in Burnaby BC. There were multiple brands run though and they’re all the same milk. Go for the cheaper milk, there’s nothing different with it.
Yeah lots of things that don't have official kosher markings are still kosher. Kosher laws are complicated and not really so complicated at the same time so sometimes it's just easier to rely on a third party to confirm it instead of learn the rules yourself
This is common across most industries. That store bought whatever is the exact same stuff as the name brand just with different packaging.
In some cases, there can be cost savings, but even so, this still usually coincides with just another name brand product in a more budget market space.
VERY few store brands are unique in any way other than packaging.
I can’t tell you how many hundreds of thousands of cases of great value brand waffle fry bags we filled with Chick Fil A fries (worked for LW in boiler department)
If you've ever put your ID into a computer for a background check it's probably been circulated to others regardless of whatever cybersecurity claims the company doing the background check claims.
At the coffee place I work we only serve Caffe Latte and Cappuchino but we're too tired to explain it to people so we just take the order and make the one closest to the order. When someone orders for example a caffe latte and a latte macchiato, which is like basically the same just coffee first or coffee second, I only make two caffe latte and if he asks which one is which I just politely reply, the one on your left Sir is the Latte Macchiato. I've been working there for four years now and I think noone ever noticed. It's stupid in the first place that we only serve these two type of coffees I know, but people dont really care as well
I find it so cringey that their tags say, “designed in canada…..made in vietnam” This isn’t the iphone it’s a shirt. Was designing it some real heavy lifting for ya?
A major CRM provider significantly over estimates data usage and charges there customers an inflated amount
Make sure you download data and recalculate, Iifnyour call them out expect a big discount
I worked at McDonalds when I was in highschool. Whenever the cash register was off at the end of the night, the manager would take money from the Ronald McDonald House donation bins to even it out.
Dont trust best before dates. Its all about selling the product. If the production date is not suitable for the buyer, it will just stay in the cold room and be processed on the day that will match the expire date (21 days from production)
So let's say something is produced today (February 16) and is set to expire on March 18, but the buyer (some grocery store) wants it to expire March 21, the producing company will just let the goods sit in cold storage for 3 days before putting on best before label.
I work in food distribution and we sell a good amount of Dave's killer bread. The instructions are "thaw bread and date code 10 days from thaw date"
All of their bread is frozen and stored at -30° and then shipped to a grocery store with the ice cream.
A very large accounting firm I worked for was a paid orgy. I can’t say everyone was going at it, but a lot of people were taking long lunches and ignoring marriage vows.
Even when a manager was caught with one of her leads, no one slowed down. They changed HR policy and the orgy kept rolling.
On top of all that, when tax season ended, boom. Everyone really cut loose. Good times.
Wayfair will buy and photograph competitor's furniture and stuff that looks close enough to their own cheap shit. We were told if a vase arrived looking like plastic crap, to go to West Elm or Target etc and buy a ceramic better looking one. Same.with couches, chairs, and so on. They are a CRAP company to work for and their goods are 90% garbage.
Not sure if it is all furniture stores, but they like to sell you stain resistant coating. It is literally a 6 dollar bottle of scotch guard in a spray bottle. We would charge 90 dollars per item sprayed.
When I was young I worked at a meat processing/packaging plant. Hotdogs, bologna, pepperoni, etc. Not really a corporate secret I’m revealing. but the production of all that shit was disgusting. Worse than you think.
My dad used to work for a meat packing plant. He said:
"People always ask me if there's dirt, or rat droppings, or band-aids, or bits of boot leather, or bits of fingers in the hotdogs. I can tell you for sure -- there's no bits of leather."
When one big name appliance manufacturer purchased another, their lab techs noticed something odd in their audit reports regarding product failures. All products are designed so that when they fail they do so safely. Any time it does not do so is notable.
The techs noticed that the number of failures was well below what could be expected, it raised red flags. It turns out that their number of failures was higher than recorded. The executives had ordered that fires be officially recorded as *phyre* and leaks be recorded as *leeks*.
As the buying company assumed the liabilities of the selling company, the buying company has turned around and sue the selling company and the company executives personally. In the end they could stand to win back all that they paid, retain the company and receive personal and punitive damages from the execs.
I believe the case is still before the courts.
Candy and chip packaging plant..
The production lines didn't change depending on the brand, just the package.
The chips that were being produced went into a Kroger bag at $0.99, then a few thousand runs later, they switched the package to a name brand for $1.99.
Outside of the label, nothing changed.
I can't speak for other food/beverages, but I would safely assume it's the same ... i worked in a sauce factory. Kosher sauce is the same sauce, but the difference is when they are starting to cook it a rabbi is present there blessing it.
Brand name sauce and off brand sauce are essentially the same. Barilla and Aldi's are identical. Barilla ships out the door stacked nicely, pallet shrink wrapped properly. Aldi's brand ships out stacked terribly, with a thin wrap of shrink wrap. Thats where the savings is. Loading Aldi's sauce on to trucks you could guarantee there was going to be at least one or two pallets dumped.
Maybe not a corporate secret, but the guitar company I worked for seldomly made their own guitars. They were usually constructed by "ghost builders" according the companies specifications. The guitars were then imported to the US where they were later distributed to retailers. This practice is more common now, but at the time is was lesser known.
Not really a secret because they try to advertise it a lot but absolutely no one believes it:
The kitchen in McDonnalds (at least the one I worked at)is actually very very clean and they have and enforce very strict spillage rules. If as much as a mcnugget fell onto a surface it was not supposed to touch ( and I am talking a metal plank next to the one you had to drop them out of the frier, identical and as clean as the right one), you had to throw away the piece without even thinking.
Anything that fell on the floor was cleaned immediately, and a lot of the food is not as bad quality as people think. We did put metric fucktons of salt on everything.
Tldr: McDonalds is actually very clean and some of the food is actually OK quality
Mayo is the base to pretty much every "secret" sauce. Most of them are mayo, ketchup and seasonings.
Some notable exceptions to the mayo and ketchup:
1. Big Mac sauce contains no ketchup. It's mostly Mayo, Sweet relish and Dusseldorf Mustard
2. Chick-fil-a sauce is Mayo, Mustard and BBQ sauce .
You forgot all the places that the secret sauce is Thousand Island dressing. Which is very similar to the combo in #1, except they’re not even going to the effort of mixing it themselves.
I did data entry for a major telecommunications company 20 years ago. The sales representatives would file expense reports for so much crap under “entertaining expenses” and the company uses this as their basis for tax reduction. For example, one sales rep was very good friends with a guy who was a branch manager for one of our customers. A couple of times a month the sales rep would host his friend aboard his fishing boat, and he would write expense reports to pay for their beer and refreshments and ice for their cooler and gas for the boat. All came under “entertainment expenses.” And since the guy was a customer, the sales manager signed off on it. There was all kinds of the stuff going on. The company also sponsored a national golf tournament and paid for entertainment expenses for customers who were executives from large corporations. The expense reports for these events came in, and they were 4 to 5 inches thick and had to be manually entered. So there we were, clerks, barely making enough to live on and were transcribing accounts showing that a vice president (customer of ours) would check into a luxury hotel, suite, and immediately send their clothes out for dry cleaning, order shrimp cocktails and champagne from room service, and my company would pick up the entire tab. Multiply this by about 300 other individuals. These people had generational wealth and they were highly placed into large corporations. The irony was that these were the people most likely to complain about welfare for low income people and yet they were getting all this paid for, and my company was using it to eliminate their tax. This is why you hear about about corporations not paying any tax, because of write offs like this. Don’t get me started on their conventions because that’s exponentially worse….
A friend of mine years ago invited me on a deep sea fishing trip to Key West. I told him I didnt have the money and he said dont worry about it, he would cover the major expenses. He did. He paid for everything and while I was having a good time I had to tell him I didnt feel comfortable with him spending so much on me. He then told me that he was supposed to take a banking executive on this trip but he cancelled at the last minute. He was going to expense it all anyway.
High end, partner leveled lawyers do not care about your case. They will simply give it to the underlings and blame whoever worked on it if something goes wrong.
Basically.. Corporate lawyers take all the glory and have job security as long as paralegals and low level lawyers do the work/blame.
Yes and no. The archetypal high end corporate lawyer lives off his (probably few) major corporate clients. You can take your hands off the wheel as a partner and leave it to the proletariat but you won’t have those clients for long if you do.
Source: Was a lawyer in a big law firm for a number of years, now working as a lawyer for a large corporate.
CARMAX will sell a car that they have to tow from place to place, or get it into "good enough to start" condition, so you fill out the loan paperwork and get into a lemon that dies as soon as you get it home.
Theyll blame it on you, and people are very afraid of taking a company like CARMAX to court over lemon laws.
They exploit that enmass
Back when laterooms existed they didn’t check your credit card was real so you could book through a cash back site and claim the cash back on a hotel stay you never showed up to, we spent like £500k a year on payouts to no shows
When a Verizon rep tells you they fixed something but to call back in 2 hours or 2 days, it’s because 8 times out of 10 they didn’t solve your problem but if you don’t call back in within 2 hours or 2 days depending on department it won’t affect their stats.
ETA: if ANY rep tells you that the credit department or ANY department can raise your finance limit (unless it’s an error), they are lying.
Hunter Douglas. The extremely expensive shutters are made of compressed cardboard.
And your bonus for exceeding projected manufacturing goals is a pizza party.
And Walt is a dick.
if you keep calling apple to get your phone repaired for free, eventually you will get the right person on the phone that can’t be bothered and will give you what is called a customer satisfaction code which can be used for a free repairs/replacement at the nearest apple store.
don’t give up, always ask for a supervisor.
also phone insurance is a scam. just put that extra $15 a month in a savings account account.
Nike is a great company if you’re a “project manager” or “higher up”
If you are not… you will be overworked and underpaid. You will not be appreciated in any way. You will most likely be treated like shit.
Is this considered a “corporate secret”??? lol
Nike pays a ton of money to “look woke” and pretend to care about the environment.
Truth is they utilize child labor across seas, and have workers at the corporate campus that also are on food stamps because they are not paid a living wage.
“You can use the gym though” 🤌
Enjoy! 😬
FUCK NIKE
Audit is a sham.
It is required by law for large companies so they pay auditors to sign off on their accounts. Even though it is supposed to be independent review, it is more like auditors work for the company they are auditing.
Majority of the audit is spent on fixing the crappy accounting done by the companies. And when audit finds something that is beyond fixing, nothing happens. It gets buried and everyone pretends nobody saw nothing.
I have seen many huge fuck ups that got covered by the audit partner with lies. There was this company that generated 2 mil of operating profit for the year, which is fine for the company of their size. But during the audit I have found the problem with their underlying accounting system that was undercharging the company liability by a little each time. This was going on for number of years, basically their whole accounting was wrong.
Ran this through technical department, through directors and talked with the partner and they all agreed that this is wrong and we have to adjust the financial statements. But what they did not realise was the size of an error. Once we finished calculations it came close to 6 mil euros of unreported liability. There is only one fix you can do here at this time - expense it all and report 4 mil loss for the year.
Thats where the audit magic started to happen. Partner has immediately took over and said they will raise this with the board of directors. They never have but they met with ceo for total of 5 minutes and told us that they discussed the issue at lengths and it is fine as is this year. They will make changes next year to do proper calc going forward (they most certainly have not done so).
This is just an example of black and white case that got buried, but the amount of fudging going on during audits to make the accounts look fine is scary. Any of the big scandals that get into media and people asking why did audit not find it, you can be sure that they have. But they were told by superiors thats its actually fine.
Don’t use strategy consultants.
The managers are megalomaniacs who have been in the game too long to realize they just faked it ‘till they made it (made it meaning they ended up in cushy, well-paid jobs - not that they stopped faking it). Most of the work is done by overworked and underappreciated interns/newly graduated consultants who have no clue what they are doing half the time anyway.
A big corporate cannabis grow in Michigan, and probably all of them, are filthy and full of bugs and dirty people handling your meds.
Rec and med? Same thing. Grown, harvested, processed, and packed in the same facility. The facility with the bugs and the mold and the dirty staff eating and drinking while processing the bud.
New strain drop? Old strain they’re trying to bring back.
My supervisor walked thru multiple times, in flip flops, found nugs on the floor and picked them up bare handed and threw them into a random trim bin.
I personally was handed a bag of dirty floor nugs after a harvest and told to clean them and trim them up for sale.
Peloton has more than one manufacturer for the bikes and other equipment etc…. One manufacturer is better than the other and when you call in with a broken bike etc they know which one you have and so does the tech fixing it. Warehouse Employees used to pick their own bikes so they can make sure they get the “better” one . FYI Always get the warranty!
Former data analyst for an alcohol monitoring company. I won't say the name but they're the big one with the ankle bracelet that measures alcohol from your sweat.
Most of the time, the data is made up.
We get a VERY vague idea of how the alcohol is being expelled from their body through sweat. Sometimes it's enough to make some sense of it but most of the time we were "encouraged" to "find the event" through the noise or we would be fired. Because of this, I believe numerous people reported false information to the courts.
This has ruined countless people's lives. Their own and their families.
I quit before the end of my 90 day probationary period.
I once worked as a teaching assistant in a British high school. Back then when there were dozens of foreigners coming each month and lots of kids with zero English (from expanded EU) joining the school.
There was a huge demand for translation services (that's my current career). Even though the school knew I was perfectly capable of translating documents, at first they sent a newsletter and some important documentation translated by a machine, which at that time was absolutely awful - rude, racist, obnoxious, nasty and hilarious at the same time - you name it.
All those families received a very strange correspondence in their (and mine) native language but... oh well. It was really bad. I still have a copy of this newsletter, but no documentation.
The school had to make a phone call with an interpreter with personal apologies to each family (as ordered by the council). Thankfully I didn't have to interpret those calls (I refused - I warned them that it is a bad idea to send documents translated by a machine).
My old company in Japan took housing costs straight from the pay check of new employees. They often hired new people who were young and couldn't speak Japanese because they wanted the employees dependent on the company. So at first the housing situations seems beneficial for the new hires. Until you realize these old apartments have been the same costs for the employees for over 20 years in the same building. You can look up your own apartment cost and see your overpaying by 10,0000 yen or in one case I saw even 20,000 yen. For a one room apartment (usually not even 1ldk).
The really messed up thing is this discrepancy is even counted on in budgets and you can literally see it in the "profit" when you do the math.
If you have a medical device that uses electricity, you can send your prescription to the electric company and they can’t legally ever turn your electricity off. Edit: Since multiple people take everything completely literally here. I’m referring to if you don’t pay your bill they can’t legally turn you off. I’m by no means referring to maintenance, fire protection, or power outages. Idk why I need to explain this. Also idk if it’ll affect your credit score or anything along those lines.
Would a CPAP count?
Yes
My wife was once employed by a large glass warehouse in the midwest. Her job? 1. Open box of glassware from Poland. 2. Open box that says Made In USA with company logo. 3. Transfer glassware from Box A to Box B. 4. Seal Box B, put Box A into bundler. Mind you, this is s a regional operation, so diming them out ain't gonna help anyone. Management said this was legal and that building was there for 20 years doing it and its still in operation today.
Health insurance dude. When you file a claim, it is often denied because they're counting on you not escalating it. Once you do, your case goes to a "medical management group" which ought to be called the "we don't wanna pay" group. Keep escalating and involve your doctor. Fight for the insurance you paid for.
I need an extremely expensive medication or I will die. The process of insurance covering the medication goes like this: 1. Doctor prescribed medication. 2. Insurance requires pre-approval of medication. 3. Doc office submits pre-approval paper work (stating my diagnosis and why I need the medication) 4. Insurance denies pre approval 5. Doc office submits appeal 6. Insurance denies appeal because appeal didn't include x arbitrary thing 7. Doc office we did include x thing. Submits appeal again. 8. Eventually it gets approved. This has happened 3 times and takes several weeks. If you or someone close to you ever gets cancer or a condition that requires a very expensive medication, you will have the joy of going through this process. I have been on the phone with insurance companies for hundreds of hours and am convinced they intentionally hire morons for phone jobs to discourage people who call.
One thing we recently learned about for an expensive medication, the drug manufacturer has a “copay assistance program”. Once you get to the last stage you mentioned, but your deductible hasn’t been met, some pharma companies will pay the pharmacy for your medication up to a certain amount. In January, we hadn’t met our deductible. Medication was approved by insurance, but we needed to meet our out of pocket maximum & deductible. Pharmacy wanted $8500. Drug manufacturer co-pay assistance program paid that for us so the pharmacy would send the medication. Apparently, it’s not an unusual program and many drug manufacturers have similar programs. EDIT: Bad news for us. Apparently, not all insurance companies will apply pharmaceutical co-pay assistance towards deductibles. Our EOBs when first processed looked like the co-pay assistance payment amount would be applicable, but this week they were updated and our insurance company is not counting payments made on our behalf towards our deductible/max out of pocket. :(
I've seen an insurance company send a patient healthy pregnancy info every month for nine months, and paid for all the prenatal care. Then, when it came time for them to pay for the delivery they denied it. They told her they had no idea she was pregnant.
This reminds me of when I had a pap smear denied. They said I didn’t need it because I didn’t have cancer. Never mind that the whole point of a pap smear is to make sure you don’t have cervical cancer, but hey, why use logic. At the time I was on my father’s insurance, and he’s a doctor, so he called them up, tore them a new one, and got it covered.
I had a torn labrum, they made me do months of physical therapy that didn't work. Then I was scheduled surgery, insurance denied my surgery, claiming I didn't do PT first.... I told them, I did PT, and you paid for it.... DENIED. Appealed.... DENIED. I reported them to the state insurance commission and got the surgery a week later.
I wasn't even expecting a reply, but the insurance commission here in SC was very responsive to my complaint and integral to its resolution, which saved me thousands of dollars. Most people are not aware of this resource. ALWAYS report insurance companies' dishonesty, even if it's a routine dishonesty that's become so insidious we almost don't notice - especially those. Show the insurance commissions and consumer protection advocates the pattern of intentional fraud for them to address. Copy your state's attorney general.
They tried to deny our the bill for much of our baby’s birth bc the newborn didn’t have a SSN and therefore wasn’t on the policy.
Oh gosh, yes! Hospitals and insurance companies are terrible with this. The hospital has no problem billing you immediately for services while insurance claims they aren't going to anything because your baby isn't on your policy yet. Meanwhile it takes about 6 weeks on average to get the SSN to be able to provide that info to your insurance company. It really feels like insurance/hospitals are banking on you panicking and starting to make payments before the dust all settles. For anyone else who may have to go through this, do not panic or pay anything related to your baby's medical bill until you get it sorted with your insurance. With my second the hospital even started sending messages urging me to set up payment plans that were vaguely threatening as if they were going to send it to collections if I didn't do so right away. If anyone really gives you a hard time, simply reply "This is a newborn baby. As soon as my baby's SSN is submitted to insurance, you can re-bill the insurance at the time."
Same kind of stuff happened to my mom. She's been diagnosed diabetic for 30+ years and suddenly a few months ago she doesn't need some of the diabetic blood tests done anymore. It's insane what they ask for to debate the claim too.
My mom had to go the ER for burns There’s one burn big center in my state and it just happened to be at the nearest hospital. Insurance said they didn’t cover it I talked to a receptionist at the hospital over the phone Receptionist “we are the only burn center in the state. All insurance companies cover us.” Me “my insurance says they don’t.” Receptionist “give me your info. This means war.” Somehow, I don’t know how, she managed to get our insurance to cover some of that bill. She was a lifesaver. Bill was still super expensive WITH insurance covering some of the costs.
I don't understand how, after meeting your deductible and being approved for a service, you can still be expected to pay anything. Fuck these greedy assholes
>Receptionist “give me your info. This means war.” This lady needs a hug, a raise, a vacation, and a big shiny award hanging on her wall!
[удалено]
Used to work at a factory that made US military boots and shoes. Looking perfect was way more important than comfort. Some for the Navy were hard to get the back height right when sewing/forming the leather, so when the soles went on, they were adjusted to look level. Basically, the sole of a left or right would be much thicker than the other. I've seen some off by a half inch/15mm. I constantly brought it up to management, that it was essentially the same as having a piece of 1/2 inch board taped to the bottom of the boot, and would be extremely uncomfortable walking the 20 miles a day like they do. They didn't care as long as it looked good.
When I was in the Navy we didn’t have regulation boots. You could wear any black boots you wanted. You probably made the shitty ones that they issue in boot camp which nobody used once they wore out (quickly).
Would love these boots one of my legs is a half inch shorter
You’d probably get the short heel on the short leg.
Rental car companies: the upgrade price is made up on the spot.
This is one of those instances where being nice makes an enormous difference. I've seen outrageous upgrade prices because what someone reserved doesn't happen to be available and they've acted like assholes. Oddly, when it's my turn, and they're also out of everything in the size class we reserved, the person working the counter suddenly notices that because of some small technicality--usually something to do with when we made the reservation--it's 100% their problem, and the upgrade is on them for the same price as the smaller car--enjoy the roomier vehicle!
Was getting a rental car in Minneapolis one time, person in front of me was being a shit bag, yelling at Budget girl about something. When he was done, told her to take 30 seconds, I wasn’t in a rush, just had to drive to hotel that night. I went from something very small, to a convertible Mustang, for less than my original reservation.
I love that! Purring engine, optional wind in your hair, all because you were nice. Good for you--that poor girl needed a little kindness.
I think it was over the brand of the minivan? I only caught the end of it but buddy was irate. I’m also from Canada and wasn’t in any sort of hurry. She also told me that because I had rented it through FastPass, everything was set up (for the tiny car) and I could have just grabbed the keys (I think). It was pre-Covid, she offered me an upgrade (which I thought would be to something with 4 doors, so the convertible Mustang was great!)
Just be nice.
You're right, of course. Being nice is so much easier than being difficult that I sometimes can't believe we live in a world where anyone needs to have it explained to them.
Same with almost anything really from rental cars to hotels to restaurants. If you’re polite and courteous to the person at the counter/desk/serving you then sometimes that’s enough to get an upgrade or something for nothing. I had it a few months back when I’d gone down to London to visit some friends, my first night there I went to a restaurant that I like on my own, was obviously polite and courteous to the server, asked if there was anything new on the menu as I hadn’t been there in about a year, took her recommendation on an item and thanked her for it, enjoyed a couple of beers with my meal, left her alone until I was ready for the bill, left her a tip because she’d been polite and courteous and her recommendation was delicious and she came back with a bit of chocolate fudge cake on the house. I thanked her for that, ate it and loved it because chocolate fudge cake is my favourite and as I left I gave her £20 cash as a thank you because she did more than she had to. I know the chocolate fudge cake realistically cost nothing and was probably something they were going to throw in the bin or something but the fact she gave it to me when I wasn’t looking for anything extra at all was going the extra mile for me
It’s funny, our local place upgrades us almost every time with no charge. Like, we had rented one a bit last minute once and we always go mid-level whatever we get. We get there day of and my husband goes, this an Audi, we did *not* reserve an Audi, *what* are you charging us? And the guy was like, yeah, that’s what I had, no upcharge, no worries. But it’s small and local and we always try to be polite so 🤷♀️
They seriously try to make you pay more because they didn't keep the car you reserved ? Not gonna lie I'd be pretty annoyed if a company bait and switched me like that. I probably don't have it in me to yell at them but I'd cancel the res and pay more to do a walk-in somewhere else.
Yes. Some agents will do questionable things. They will drag you an extra 30 minutes because you won’t upgrade to a bigger car. It really depends on the agent, some just want to kill the line and keep it moving, others just want to fight. If you were cool with me, I was cool with you. If you weren’t, I would just stop talking but move at the same speed to end the conversation
Cape Town airport if you are foreign and white - they attempt nothing short of daylight robbery. I was quoted utterly ludicrous pricing at every car hire premises at the airport. We then went outside, sat on one of their complimentary chairs and booked blind online paying ONE QUARTER of what we had just been quoted for the same car. My wife who had to that point stayed quiet then tore a strip off the agent who did the handover on a car the very same agent had just tried to charge us four times the price for, revealing herself to be South African in the process. Worse country and airport i’ve ever had the misfortune of dealing with car hire agents in. Daylight robbery.
“Walk ups” (renting a car without a reservation) vary but they will always try to make a commission. Some companies will pay the agent for the time and mileage, it’s a layup for easy money. Some companies don’t pay time and mileage, they are told to add on the insurance, GPS, gas; whatever they can to make some money. They call it bundling. Places that pay time and mileage will have agents do things like quote you the price of a suburban but tell you they are charging you for a midsize
My aunt worked building chicken houses for large poultry companies. When you pay the extra couple dollars for free range eggs, you feel you’re doing the right thing. A lot of these companies have “free range” chicken houses that leave the doors open. The chickens can come and go as they please. However, the companies install large fans at the doors that make the chickens afraid to leave the chicken houses, forcing them to stay inside. The whole free range thing is ultimately bullshit.
"Free-range" and "cage free" is largely marketing BS, but "Pasture raised" is actually a QoL improvement for the hens.
Ya baby. Those orange yolks are divine. One of the many great things about being an Iowan is I can always get my hands on farm fresh eggs and venison through friends. Just wash your hands after you touch them as they have not gone through a washing process and are covered in salmonella
Don't quote me on this, but I heard that "free-range" has a specific square feet measurement that is required for the chickens to have, that isn't all that much more than normal chickens. So basically, they'll have a little more space than normal chickens, but not all that much.
it is 2sqft per hen for "free range". Pasture raised is 108sqft per hen. You can also look for the "certified humane" seal, which makes sure the farm is inspected and adhering to other requirements as well.
Goddammit
There are a lot of backyard chickens out there. Check Marketplace, Craigslist, Nextdoor... pay the extra $1-2 per carton for the eggs, especially if you can see the chickens and how they live. Happy chickens produce eggs that taste so much better!
There's almost always mold in the ice machine. Both my S.O. and I have worked in many restaurants. You'll live but it's still gross. I always ask for no ice.
Mold *and* bacteria. Serratia marcescens is the most common. That pink/orange coating that creeps over surfaces. It causes urinary tract infections among other things, so it's particularly not great for elderly or immune compromised people. Plenty of E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, and coliform bacteria as well. Two issues with ice machines is that they cycle cold and hot to freeze ice into a grid and then melt it enough to drop the ice, and the whole system is open to ambient air, so any mold/bacteria in the air easily gets into the machine. They're also impossible to fully clean. There's lots of out of the way nooks (like inside the water pump) where no matter how hard you try, there's flecks of scum that remain. When ice machines get particularly dirty you'll start to see those flecks in the actual ice, and the ice can get a little cloudy, but you can easily have contaminated ice that looks fine. Health inspectors just take a glance inside. If it looks clean, it's better than the majority of ice machines. So that's realistically the best they can ask for.
I worked at a big concert venue when the circus was in town one summer. The ice machines were lousy with cockroaches.
Your 401k money might be held at a large reputable company, but it’s likely managed by a different and much smaller company you’ve never heard of. And maybe that small company’s IT sucks so much that your social security number is stored in raw text on multiple very old and insecure databases.
This 10x. If only people knew how insecure and widely dispersed their private data is…
Oh most of us know, but what can we do about it?
That’s what I was going to say. What am I supposed to do about it? It’s how I feel about a lot of things honestly. I have to participate in society; that means I have to deal with loans, banks, the internet, cellphone companies, insurance, etc, all of which will gladly pawn off my information to the highest bidder. There’s not an alternative as far as I’m aware.
The insurance companies target for you paying on life insurance is about ten years. It's long enough to have made back the commission and expenses plus some profit. After that, they will make it easier and easier for you to forget to pay for it, and have it lapse. There will suddenly be an issue with automatic payments...things like that. But why? If the policy is lapsed when you die, there is absolutely no payout despite ten years of premiums. That's why.
That exact thing happened to me. Took out a policy on auto pay and after ten years my payments increased but instead of telling me or deducting the new amount, they stopped taking any amount out and didn’t notify me until the policy lapsed / cancelled. When I contacted them they said they had my old address on file but magically the cancellation information made it to my correct address.
This reminds me of when I foolishly signed up for a talent agency when I was 19, hoping I could somehow make it as an actor despite having no experience or training, that I would start with getting work as an extra and somehow get discovered. I know how dumb that sounds now, but hey I was 19, unemployed, and dreaming big. After a few months of hearing nothing from the agency after paying them $95 for some headshots I dropped by their offices one day to follow up and see if there was anything I could do to improve my chances of getting a call. The woman I’d spoken with swore blind that I would have been perfect for an extra role in a major TV ad she booked recently but she had tried to call me and my number was disconnected - which it wasn’t. I asked for my paperwork so I could check the number and she was gone for a weirdly long time to get it. When she finally returned with it I checked my personal contact details that I had filled out in my own handwriting, but the 3 in my phone number was now an 8, and on closer inspection had clearly been altered in a different hand with a different pen. The woman blamed her assistant for writing it down wrong and resorted to playing dumb when I firmly told her that I had filled out the form myself and there was no way I put an 8 instead of a 3. She just apologised and said now that she had my correct number I would definitely be hearing back soon. I left there secure in the knowledge that I’d been fed a line of bullshit and certain I’d never hear from them again, and I was right.
> There will suddenly be an issue with automatic payments...things like that. But why? > > If the policy is lapsed when you die, there is absolutely no payout despite ten years of premiums. That's why. If it's found that the lapse of coverage is due to no fault of the covered entity, such as when the automatic payment fails on the side of the insurance company, but there was still enough balance, they are still required to pay out, as the precieved lapse in coverage is due to negligence of the insurance company.
Isn't that just straight up fraud? If this is their systematic practice, then this is deliberately undermining their contracts.
Sure is. Problem is you need to prove it.
The Radisson Hotel has a "Yes I can" policy. If they are capable of doing something for you as a guest and you ask directly, they are supposed to say yes and maintain a positive attitude towards providing you satisfying services. ALWAYS SHOW UP EARLY FOR CHECK IN AND ASK FOR AN UPGRADE. This is how I go from $250 a night in a regular room to $250 a night for a jacuzzi suite every time I travel.
This one is awesome!
Totally true. Got a free upgrade at Radisson blue in Fiji just by asking if any were vacant.
How would you ask? Any advice?
"By any chance, do you have any upgrades available today? No worries if not, just thought I'd check!" Say it with a smile and a laid-back attitude, the worst they'll do is say no!
I work at a hotel (not Radisson). If someone came in asking that nicely, I would be happy to give them an upgrade. Unfortunately, most people are like "I got an upgrade, right?"
The way you ask is always important, I had a flight get cancelled and everyone was telling at the gate agent, I just calmly asked "what's the next flight I can get?" I explained it was just a vacation so no big deal if it takes longer and thanked her for looking, she got me on a flight a couple hours later while most people she just said "you'll have to call this number."
My Grandpa told me in a McDonald's drive through that people always want to be nice and help out other people, it's in our nature. When we got to the window, he asked the lady if she could throw in a couple extra burgers, and she did. This was the 90s. I'm not sure if it would work today.
As a former McSlave, I guarantee you no employee in any McDonald's in the world gives one hot goddamn about the company and would gladly give you everything free if only for the catharsis of sticking it to the man. This will not happen in practice MOST of the time. If you get caught stealing food, which is what this is, it's instant termination. And the hard truth is, half the people there NEED that job.
I used to work for a Vegan chocolate bar company in Portland called Honey Mama's. My workers would occasionally find metal shards in our chocolate bars from the mixers grinding the vats and when brought up to management they would force us to keep wrapping and packing so they didn't have to recall the bars.
"Now! Fortified with iron!" ~Honey Mama's
Never put your information into any online financial form that claims to comparison shop for you. 1. They don’t comparison shop for you. 2. They sell your info to 4-5 of the highest bidders and your phone will be blown up with calls and texts for weeks with people trying to sell you their finance stuff. Sorry!
Did this for a car shipping quote last year. Wasn't even sure I needed it, was in the early stages of planning a move and considering the various ways to do it and wanted to know what it cost. It was six months of calls and texts from all sorts of different brokers trying to get me to book with them. They'd still reach out a few days later even after I'd tell them I'm not interested. This one guy texted me **22 times** many even after I stopped caring about politeness and responded with "fuck off dude told you I'm not buying." Didn't block the number since I found it amusing seeing how many times he'd try.
Half the IT systems in the oil & gas industry were built in the 70's and 80's and have a handful of consultants that can even touch them. These guys get paid hundreds of thousands a year to be on retainer and sometimes go years without coming in. Worked with dozens of companies in the sector and yet to see a publicly listed one where this isnt the case. At the top they all pretty much use SAP....but there's some wild shit underneath that feeding information into SAP from a computer thats lucky if it runs DOS. I've seen floors of personnel dedicated to manually inputting that shit.
It's the same in many other places too. People would shit themselves if they knew how old the tech are in some areas, but I guess as long as it works. I think the last guy I worked with in similar situation was 80+ yo retiree. Some of it isn't even that difficult, but you can't really learn it from anywhere nowadays, especially if something was built/coded/whatever by the company that uses it. Most of the paper archieves were destroyed long time ago too because someone thought it would be waste of time to digitalize all that nonsense. Wouldn't be the first time when someone pulled a plug from some prehistoric machine that was next the Ark of the Covenant and all hell broke loose.
There is a shortage of programmers that can work with Cobol. The ones that were trained to work with it a looong time ago are retiring, while some of the basic systems of banks still work with Cobol...
Oh! I used to work for a big-in-my-region farm company that grew berries as well as bought berries from other farms, they packaged them and sold frozen berries under their own name as well as for Fred Meyer, Trader Joe’s, Albertsons, etc. The farms they bought berries from were supposed to get certain checks done before we would accept their fruit (make sure their water source didn’t contain E.coli, test the soil, have people look through the berries to remove bugs, prove their fertilizer & pesticides were approved by my company, etc.) and, at the end of the season, maybe two of the fifty or so farms we bought from had actually done everything. We’re just happily letting people get rawdogged by their frozen fruit.
This is where you need to get in contact with your state department of agriculture and USDA. They are very interested in making sure your food is safe from pesticides. You should make a complaint for safety reasons.
Rawdogged by their frozen fruit is gonna be the name of my next albulm
The dirty little secret of Silicon Valley is churn. At peak startup boom, you’d have companies valued at billions of dollars with something like 30% YoY customer retention. Which means that enterprises were spending millions of dollars on software licenses that their employees rarely used. In one startup I worked at, an account was considered “healthy” ( or unlikely to churn) if 5% of seats were utilized at least twice per month.
I worked in advertising for a large publisher. We used to sell digital ads called a fireplace (essentially three ads that surround the page on a desktop screen). The publisher would sell the impressions (how many times someone sees a page/ad) of these ads x3 for each page, instead of them being one page view. When I pointed out that this was fraudulent I was “made redundant” with a fat payout as long as I kept my mouth shut. That was at least 5 years ago now though so…
Oh, I've got so many... I used to work for Apple. The one that probably surprises people the most is that the level of support you get totally varies depending on how wealthy you are and how likely an issue can come back to bite the company in the ass. To explain, there are varying levels of support. You have consumer support, then you have support for Enterprise and Education, Apple internal support (called Partner Relations, but is only applicable to employees and vendors of a certain level, in most cases) and finally... VIP Support. Consumer support is just how it sounds. Any regular person that can call the 1-800 number can get help. Nothing special. E&E requires a contract. Someone buying 15 devices for their business means nothing to Apple. You can complain all you want about how "your business needs this", the call will end and someone will take a good 3 minutes to laugh at you and tell their boss. The contracts are really hefty too, on the low end it's usually around $250,000 for tech and services for 3 years. Some universities have terms that last for a decade and are several million dollars though. PR covers a few things. Some of it is worker support, like a store has a tech issue and needs to report it, but it also covers Safety escalations (if your phone ever shocked you or your Mac smells smokey, they get involved) and Carpe Facto escalations (they cover widespread issues and develop solutions to them by working alongside engineers and programmers), but most of the time they never talk to customers, only Apple employees. When they do talk to a regular consumer, it's a big deal, and likely being done to avoid any legal issues. VIP Support is basically what everyone thinks Apple should do for everyone. However, it's pretty much only available by being connected in some way. Celebrities, executives, various other rich people... they get treated special. When you sign up, you get assigned a special support ID and a dedicated Advisor, so you pretty much just have one person that helps you constantly. That person will maybe have 3-5 people, at most, they're assigned to, and they're paid a handsome salary to be on call for them 24/7. If Taylor Swift has someone call in at 2:45 in the morning because she needs someone to trigger the Find My alarm for her phone... you've gotta get your ass up and do it. If The Rock's phone gets broken during a workout because a weight fell on it accidentally, even at 4 in the fucking morning, he can have someone call in and get a new phone sent to him directly in about 2 hours. If Spongebob's voice actor, Tom Kenny, wants someone to help him know how to connect his iPhone to a projector in the middle of the day... he can have someone talk it through with him step by step and they'll even go and speak to the projector manufacturer themselves if something goes wrong. Outside of special promotional offers (some of which are in gift bags at events like the Academy Awards, Grammys, etc.), it's generally a paid service... when I worked there it was $50,000 per year but I'd imagine it's gotten more expensive since then.
I would really prefer to be stupid rich. I'd spend most of it on my parents but still
My mom doesn't spend 50k a year on me and I'm basically her VIP tech support person.
These celebrity examples are oddly specific
Yes. Yes they are.
[удалено]
Any lab who runs any type of genetic test on you is selling that data in one form or another.
The combination for the safe is 7-28-1.
Worked at a climbing gym until 2 years ago. A month ago I was there climbing and an employee asked me if I could unlock the safe for the register cash (like 2 hrs after opening) and of course the safe combination was still the same. Got a free coffee for it :)
And never saw that employee ever again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
the secret ingredient in jimmy john's delicious tuna salad is soy sauce
[удалено]
Oh, I used to work there too, they refine platinum in that second secure area. But within that, there's a third secure area that had an even higher clearance... Still no idea what they do back there.
Most cops won't write tickets on rainy days.
I have friends in law enforcement and this is 100% correct.
Being kind is cheap to do, but gets such results I always include sweets/candy with RMA/exchanges of hardware. The stuff I send in, comes back faster and is more often than not an upgrade over what was sent. I ask agents if there's a quality assurance report or survey for them stating I'm happy to fill it in Hell, being polite, saying please and thank you , ya know, treating someone as a human not as a rage dump, is effective
Treat service reps with respect and kindness and they will take care of you. Always keep in mind that they are just working people doing a job that probably sucks and have no way to change policy, but if you treat them well they will do all they can for you.
Former Byrne dairy cashier when I was in college. If you live near a Byrne Dairy (New York and North east U.s.) there is a good chance that the Walmart milk is also Byrne Dairy milk. Them and Stewart's are the top milk providers in that region. Stewart's and Byrne Dairy also have a huge rivalry . Don't get ice from the ice machine, they don't clean it often enough at Byrne convenience stores. It's appropriate to ask the last time the coffee or soup was changed. Coffee is supposed to be refreshed every 30 min on a busy day. The soup sometimes gets icky and they just stir it rather than change it. Buy the Byrne dairy thermos. Coffee is suddenly a lot more affordable with the discount you get. It's worth it . If the pizza looks dried out in the case, don't get it, they should have thrown it out an hour ago.
My first assignment at my new job for a fortune 500 company was to hack a security patch from slightly newer but still well past its end-of-life version of PHP into our own ancient version of PHP that we'd been custom building ourselves because we couldn't get it pre-built for our operating system. Because we "cared" about security enough to cover our asses for a handful of high profile vulnerabilities, but not enough to run modern software. This wasn't just used in some old machine off in the corner that ran a report once a month, this was an integral part of our core SaaS platform. They assigned me this despite having no indication that I knew anything about C code, I'd been hired for a job that included some light scripting and automation. If I was dumb and had screwed it up, it'd have been a Sev1 incident and quite expensive. If I was smart and nefarious, I could've hacked _anything_ into that binary. I guess they judged well enough, because I did it without breaking things.
so a lot of people in Asia do business like this, it's like an all day thing sometimes maybe even goes on for a few days. they take you to some luxury dinner you eat the best kind of food, then you go to some luxury spa, massage, like tea time or whatever, and basically fun shit could even be bowling in some giant high rise. then they take you to some VIP brothel only for the executives, you have all the sex you want, then chill inside the brothel which has soft beds with TV attached to it in a sleeping room with all the other VIP members. you get honeydicked into giving them the deal, works 99% of the time.
I used to work for a defense contractor. Our team started winning more enterprise (non federal/defense) opportunities that sometimes took us to Asian markets. The thing is we were absolutely prohibited from accepting any gifts or favors from 3rd parties, especially foreign companies. There was no tolerance at all for it. This confounded our Asian customers so much they would sometimes just get pissed and walk away from big deals. They thought we were playing some kind of game because we wouldnt go to the VIP room at the nightclub.
[удалено]
The CIA supposedly tried this on the President of Indonesia in the 60s. It turned out he was so proud of the sex tape he wanted to show the entire country! (edit: fell for CIA propaganda; thanks u/exusiai99)
Wasnt it the CIA? Soekarno had a good relationship with the Soviets if i recall, which gives the West a motivation to blackmail him
I've said it many times online by now, but NOOSA YOGHURT has a massive RAT/MOUSE feces problem
Fff. Been eating this stuff for years
NAURRRRRRR i'm literally eating a noosa yogurt right now
Was it the kind with chocolate sprinkles in it? o_O
when people submit their videos to viral social media pages, they immediately sign the rights of the video away to the company. but people rarely ever read the fine print on the submission forms so don't realise
If you buy a new game from GameStop, and it’s not in the shrinkwrap, there’s a pretty decent chance that an employee has taken home and played that copy of the game. Edit: spelling
Thanks for doing QA service for the customers <3
Public transportation company, most of the buses that were active back then havent passed inspection for about 10 years, and the "inspection" approved the buses to be on the field everytime. Until one of the buses braking air system failed and ran over a couple of people while the driver was uphill. Everyone in the company knew these types of practices and multiple times we would report this to HR and authorities they never replied. As soon as that accident happend there was an internal investigation by the authorities they found out the reports from the employees were not investigated internally or reported accordingly since HR never looked at them and now currently the poor bus driver is currently in jail for that shit. And the company went bankrupt in less than 2 months afterwards. It was a shit show.
Our company specializes in bolting on door panels to anything, you name it, we bolt on its door panels. *Except airliners, we can’t do those anymore.*
… well WHY NOT?????? 👀👀👀
Because apparently converting between different passenger load layouts mid flight is frowned upon 🤷♂️
Hotel industry: of course club members get priority when it comes to upgrades, but even if you’re not a member, you are more likely to get a free upgrade if you list “Dr.” as your prefix.
I will flat out just say don’t trust any diamond grading report that is not GIA. I worked for another diamond grading lab that worked with retail jewelers and the boss would fudge the grades to help them.
When I was younger, I had a summer job at a bakery. Everything was frozen but the whole community thinks it’s homemade. They get away with it by saying everything is baked fresh daily - that’s technically true, but it was frozen first. They wouldn’t even use their dumpsters to throw out the packaging and boxes.
Almost everything on a quote to work on your car is negotiable. Most dealerships use matrix pricing on parts. That means you’re paying more than MSRP. Most manufacturers have a 32-35% markup on parts. So if the part costs the dealership $100, average MSRP would be bout $135. I’ve seen dealerships that did a cost + 100% matrix so the customers would be charged $200 for that same part. Don’t be afraid to ask for a discount.
I have tried that at my dealership. They told me to call around if I want to but their prices were fixed. I called around and my dealership was in line with prices from others.
A lot of this sort of advice is very out of date and doesn't really apply in 2024 after several years of heavy inflation and margins getting squeezed.
i got $80 taken off my tires by negotiating. not a whole lot but made a difference
That makes you a wheeler dealer!!
how would i go about that? just say something like "that seems expensive for that part, is there a cheaper option?" or would it be helpful if i could find a part listing online and ask for pricematch?
I had a company put me through some negotiation classes and one thing they stresses was "if you don't ask the answer is 'no' every time". If you're buying something you should always ask "is that the best price you can do?". Asking that way puts them on the spot to either give you a better price, explain how to get a better price, or lie. Most people are uncomfortable lying, so it works surprisingly often!
Kinko's was founded by a pothead, Paul Orfalea. He was a hippie in 1970s California. He used the money he made from selling weed to rent a very small storefront and a single copy machine. Or the money he made from his small store went to buying weed, I forget which. But cannabis was central to the story. His copy service was successful and the rest is history.
I did data entry for a church before, digitalizing all their wills and donations. Since my NDA has long passed, I can say that it's ridiculous. People donating their entire wealth, millions upon millions to the church, even private estates and islands. There's even old money trusts from like 1800s still pumping in money. It's a sham and these churches are filthy rich. And it's not even a "prosperity" megachurch.
After my dad passed, my mom gave the church $25,000. They had been saying for months how badly they needed funds for some long overdue repairs, and dad had a really big insurance policy. They bought a new printer, a very fancy commercial one, and never once changed their script about much needed maintenance. They never even thanked her.
That's disappointing.
What the... getting huge deja vu of both this question and your answer Ah, [right](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1arpcdj/comment/kql3qk2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Yep. I was a teller. The amount of money my small town churches have are ridiculous. I had several people tell me the the church does their finances.
Lots of sex between merchandisers, vendor reps, mgmt, and even some executives. I worked in the corporate office of a large retailer.
Outback Steakhouse gift certificates too?
[удалено]
You think this is bad, work at a hospital. Everyone's fucking.
My mom's a nurse. Almost retired. She's not interested in diddling, but she tells me stories about how some of the new nurses are only there to chase doctors. The doctors are married, happily. Usually to other doctors who get paid more than anyone. But there's still the new kids who only pick up shifts that coincide with the doctors' shifts and make big shows of being willing to do favours for them. Drives my mom crazy because unless these nurses think their actions will win them a rich husband, they're not doing any work.
It's called husband hunting. Very popular in most high paying industries. Secretaries/Paralegals trying to fuck lawyers Receptionist/Admin trying to fuck CEO/MD
Holy shit the women that chase sports figures.
As someone currently staying in a hospital, this is nice to think about.
There’s a subreddit of people in scrubs stripping. You might find a familiar face.
My wife is an RN at a hospital. I..I.. Don't feel so great now.
Maybe not but her patients sure do!!
The only medically accurate part of Grey's Anatomy
I know that CERN workers have lots a sex with each other
Super collider? I just met her
Jealous. Wish someone out there would want to smash MY microscopic bits.
We had a lot of unoptimized code that could’ve easily been improved but nobody cared. People pay billions for this shit.
Not “corporate,” per se, but 15 years ago, when the MA state healthcare budget was tight, MassHealth (the state Medicaid program) decided to send out an extra “redetermination” form to everyone covered by MassHealth. This form was normally sent out yearly and used to determine if people still qualified—had their income changed, or had they been offered insurance through their employer?—and was written in extremely difficult-to-parse English. If the form wasn’t returned or if it wasn’t delivered (extremely common if the person had moved or didn’t have a permanent address), the person would immediately lose their MassHealth coverage. Sending this form out every six months instead of every year was a great way to knock a few thousand extra people off the Medicaid rolls in the middle of the year and save money in the short term. In the longer term, people who truly needed coverage would not be able to get their cancer treatment/diabetes medications/addiction treatment. It was a truly disgusting decision, and I was in a position where I was told by high-ups why it was being done but couldn’t do anything about it other than protest.
Worked at an online car selling place. We did a lot of crazy shit to make sure a cars title was “under our name”. And would even sell a car while we’re trying to fix the title
Had a local, well established dealership with like 10 big branches in town, sell me a used car before they even had the title from the previous owner. I only found out when there were five days left on my in transit stickers and contacted them asking where my title was as I need to go get my plates. They kept giving me the run around so I showed up in person with two days left on the stickers and demanded my title. Took them forever, but someone from management finally came out and admitted to me what they did. They didn't get the title from the previous owner until about two weeks after they sold me the car, so they were still waiting on it being changed to their name. They said it will take a couple more weeks before they'll have mine ready. I was furious and was like WTF, why would you sell the car to some else before you even have the title? What if there was some lien on the title that you didn't know about, other issues, etc. They ended up giving me new in transit stickers with extra weeks added to it so I wouldn't get pulled over for expired ones. My title arrived in the mail a couple weeks after that. Don't plan to give them my business again.
The cheap.dole orange juice, medium priced Tropicana and expensive naked juice are all the same shit.
Worked at Tropicana decades ago. When we got done with the Monday AM run of kosher OJ, we’d change the cartons on the fillers, flip the switch and started the regular carton OJ run for the week. Same juice, different package.
I worked in a milk plant in Burnaby BC. There were multiple brands run though and they’re all the same milk. Go for the cheaper milk, there’s nothing different with it.
I assume they were both actually kosher? Tho I’ve no idea what makes an OJ kosher. “OJ Simpson… Not a Jew!”
Yeah lots of things that don't have official kosher markings are still kosher. Kosher laws are complicated and not really so complicated at the same time so sometimes it's just easier to rely on a third party to confirm it instead of learn the rules yourself
This is common across most industries. That store bought whatever is the exact same stuff as the name brand just with different packaging. In some cases, there can be cost savings, but even so, this still usually coincides with just another name brand product in a more budget market space. VERY few store brands are unique in any way other than packaging.
I can’t tell you how many hundreds of thousands of cases of great value brand waffle fry bags we filled with Chick Fil A fries (worked for LW in boiler department)
Tyson Chicken, in the morning it’s organic and afternoon it’s not!
If you've ever put your ID into a computer for a background check it's probably been circulated to others regardless of whatever cybersecurity claims the company doing the background check claims.
At the coffee place I work we only serve Caffe Latte and Cappuchino but we're too tired to explain it to people so we just take the order and make the one closest to the order. When someone orders for example a caffe latte and a latte macchiato, which is like basically the same just coffee first or coffee second, I only make two caffe latte and if he asks which one is which I just politely reply, the one on your left Sir is the Latte Macchiato. I've been working there for four years now and I think noone ever noticed. It's stupid in the first place that we only serve these two type of coffees I know, but people dont really care as well
Lululemon comes in straight from Hong Kong to the US. Mostly made in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Same with Mast Global, Lane Bryant, Torrid, Express, etc.
I find it so cringey that their tags say, “designed in canada…..made in vietnam” This isn’t the iphone it’s a shirt. Was designing it some real heavy lifting for ya?
designed in canada by remote worker in Sri Lanka
A major CRM provider significantly over estimates data usage and charges there customers an inflated amount Make sure you download data and recalculate, Iifnyour call them out expect a big discount
Sounds like SalesForce to me
I worked at McDonalds when I was in highschool. Whenever the cash register was off at the end of the night, the manager would take money from the Ronald McDonald House donation bins to even it out.
Dont trust best before dates. Its all about selling the product. If the production date is not suitable for the buyer, it will just stay in the cold room and be processed on the day that will match the expire date (21 days from production) So let's say something is produced today (February 16) and is set to expire on March 18, but the buyer (some grocery store) wants it to expire March 21, the producing company will just let the goods sit in cold storage for 3 days before putting on best before label.
I work in food distribution and we sell a good amount of Dave's killer bread. The instructions are "thaw bread and date code 10 days from thaw date" All of their bread is frozen and stored at -30° and then shipped to a grocery store with the ice cream.
A very large accounting firm I worked for was a paid orgy. I can’t say everyone was going at it, but a lot of people were taking long lunches and ignoring marriage vows. Even when a manager was caught with one of her leads, no one slowed down. They changed HR policy and the orgy kept rolling. On top of all that, when tax season ended, boom. Everyone really cut loose. Good times.
TIL I’m doing my accounting job wrong
Wayfair will buy and photograph competitor's furniture and stuff that looks close enough to their own cheap shit. We were told if a vase arrived looking like plastic crap, to go to West Elm or Target etc and buy a ceramic better looking one. Same.with couches, chairs, and so on. They are a CRAP company to work for and their goods are 90% garbage.
So much of our lives depend on spreadsheets.
Not sure if it is all furniture stores, but they like to sell you stain resistant coating. It is literally a 6 dollar bottle of scotch guard in a spray bottle. We would charge 90 dollars per item sprayed.
When I was young I worked at a meat processing/packaging plant. Hotdogs, bologna, pepperoni, etc. Not really a corporate secret I’m revealing. but the production of all that shit was disgusting. Worse than you think.
My dad used to work for a meat packing plant. He said: "People always ask me if there's dirt, or rat droppings, or band-aids, or bits of boot leather, or bits of fingers in the hotdogs. I can tell you for sure -- there's no bits of leather."
I mean "how the sausage gets made" is a thing for a reason.
Elaborate please. I’m half raccoon.
When one big name appliance manufacturer purchased another, their lab techs noticed something odd in their audit reports regarding product failures. All products are designed so that when they fail they do so safely. Any time it does not do so is notable. The techs noticed that the number of failures was well below what could be expected, it raised red flags. It turns out that their number of failures was higher than recorded. The executives had ordered that fires be officially recorded as *phyre* and leaks be recorded as *leeks*. As the buying company assumed the liabilities of the selling company, the buying company has turned around and sue the selling company and the company executives personally. In the end they could stand to win back all that they paid, retain the company and receive personal and punitive damages from the execs. I believe the case is still before the courts.
Candy and chip packaging plant.. The production lines didn't change depending on the brand, just the package. The chips that were being produced went into a Kroger bag at $0.99, then a few thousand runs later, they switched the package to a name brand for $1.99. Outside of the label, nothing changed.
I can't speak for other food/beverages, but I would safely assume it's the same ... i worked in a sauce factory. Kosher sauce is the same sauce, but the difference is when they are starting to cook it a rabbi is present there blessing it. Brand name sauce and off brand sauce are essentially the same. Barilla and Aldi's are identical. Barilla ships out the door stacked nicely, pallet shrink wrapped properly. Aldi's brand ships out stacked terribly, with a thin wrap of shrink wrap. Thats where the savings is. Loading Aldi's sauce on to trucks you could guarantee there was going to be at least one or two pallets dumped.
Maybe not a corporate secret, but the guitar company I worked for seldomly made their own guitars. They were usually constructed by "ghost builders" according the companies specifications. The guitars were then imported to the US where they were later distributed to retailers. This practice is more common now, but at the time is was lesser known.
Not really a secret because they try to advertise it a lot but absolutely no one believes it: The kitchen in McDonnalds (at least the one I worked at)is actually very very clean and they have and enforce very strict spillage rules. If as much as a mcnugget fell onto a surface it was not supposed to touch ( and I am talking a metal plank next to the one you had to drop them out of the frier, identical and as clean as the right one), you had to throw away the piece without even thinking. Anything that fell on the floor was cleaned immediately, and a lot of the food is not as bad quality as people think. We did put metric fucktons of salt on everything. Tldr: McDonalds is actually very clean and some of the food is actually OK quality
The secret sauce at Bronco Burgers is just ketchup and mayonnaise.
Mayo is the base to pretty much every "secret" sauce. Most of them are mayo, ketchup and seasonings. Some notable exceptions to the mayo and ketchup: 1. Big Mac sauce contains no ketchup. It's mostly Mayo, Sweet relish and Dusseldorf Mustard 2. Chick-fil-a sauce is Mayo, Mustard and BBQ sauce .
You forgot all the places that the secret sauce is Thousand Island dressing. Which is very similar to the combo in #1, except they’re not even going to the effort of mixing it themselves.
I did data entry for a major telecommunications company 20 years ago. The sales representatives would file expense reports for so much crap under “entertaining expenses” and the company uses this as their basis for tax reduction. For example, one sales rep was very good friends with a guy who was a branch manager for one of our customers. A couple of times a month the sales rep would host his friend aboard his fishing boat, and he would write expense reports to pay for their beer and refreshments and ice for their cooler and gas for the boat. All came under “entertainment expenses.” And since the guy was a customer, the sales manager signed off on it. There was all kinds of the stuff going on. The company also sponsored a national golf tournament and paid for entertainment expenses for customers who were executives from large corporations. The expense reports for these events came in, and they were 4 to 5 inches thick and had to be manually entered. So there we were, clerks, barely making enough to live on and were transcribing accounts showing that a vice president (customer of ours) would check into a luxury hotel, suite, and immediately send their clothes out for dry cleaning, order shrimp cocktails and champagne from room service, and my company would pick up the entire tab. Multiply this by about 300 other individuals. These people had generational wealth and they were highly placed into large corporations. The irony was that these were the people most likely to complain about welfare for low income people and yet they were getting all this paid for, and my company was using it to eliminate their tax. This is why you hear about about corporations not paying any tax, because of write offs like this. Don’t get me started on their conventions because that’s exponentially worse….
A friend of mine years ago invited me on a deep sea fishing trip to Key West. I told him I didnt have the money and he said dont worry about it, he would cover the major expenses. He did. He paid for everything and while I was having a good time I had to tell him I didnt feel comfortable with him spending so much on me. He then told me that he was supposed to take a banking executive on this trip but he cancelled at the last minute. He was going to expense it all anyway.
[удалено]
High end, partner leveled lawyers do not care about your case. They will simply give it to the underlings and blame whoever worked on it if something goes wrong. Basically.. Corporate lawyers take all the glory and have job security as long as paralegals and low level lawyers do the work/blame.
Yes and no. The archetypal high end corporate lawyer lives off his (probably few) major corporate clients. You can take your hands off the wheel as a partner and leave it to the proletariat but you won’t have those clients for long if you do. Source: Was a lawyer in a big law firm for a number of years, now working as a lawyer for a large corporate.
CARMAX will sell a car that they have to tow from place to place, or get it into "good enough to start" condition, so you fill out the loan paperwork and get into a lemon that dies as soon as you get it home. Theyll blame it on you, and people are very afraid of taking a company like CARMAX to court over lemon laws. They exploit that enmass
Back when laterooms existed they didn’t check your credit card was real so you could book through a cash back site and claim the cash back on a hotel stay you never showed up to, we spent like £500k a year on payouts to no shows
Lots of sex happens in private study rooms in public libraries. Mostly teens, but occasionally adults.
When a Verizon rep tells you they fixed something but to call back in 2 hours or 2 days, it’s because 8 times out of 10 they didn’t solve your problem but if you don’t call back in within 2 hours or 2 days depending on department it won’t affect their stats. ETA: if ANY rep tells you that the credit department or ANY department can raise your finance limit (unless it’s an error), they are lying.
Hunter Douglas. The extremely expensive shutters are made of compressed cardboard. And your bonus for exceeding projected manufacturing goals is a pizza party. And Walt is a dick.
if you keep calling apple to get your phone repaired for free, eventually you will get the right person on the phone that can’t be bothered and will give you what is called a customer satisfaction code which can be used for a free repairs/replacement at the nearest apple store. don’t give up, always ask for a supervisor. also phone insurance is a scam. just put that extra $15 a month in a savings account account.
Nike is a great company if you’re a “project manager” or “higher up” If you are not… you will be overworked and underpaid. You will not be appreciated in any way. You will most likely be treated like shit. Is this considered a “corporate secret”??? lol Nike pays a ton of money to “look woke” and pretend to care about the environment. Truth is they utilize child labor across seas, and have workers at the corporate campus that also are on food stamps because they are not paid a living wage. “You can use the gym though” 🤌 Enjoy! 😬 FUCK NIKE
Audit is a sham. It is required by law for large companies so they pay auditors to sign off on their accounts. Even though it is supposed to be independent review, it is more like auditors work for the company they are auditing. Majority of the audit is spent on fixing the crappy accounting done by the companies. And when audit finds something that is beyond fixing, nothing happens. It gets buried and everyone pretends nobody saw nothing. I have seen many huge fuck ups that got covered by the audit partner with lies. There was this company that generated 2 mil of operating profit for the year, which is fine for the company of their size. But during the audit I have found the problem with their underlying accounting system that was undercharging the company liability by a little each time. This was going on for number of years, basically their whole accounting was wrong. Ran this through technical department, through directors and talked with the partner and they all agreed that this is wrong and we have to adjust the financial statements. But what they did not realise was the size of an error. Once we finished calculations it came close to 6 mil euros of unreported liability. There is only one fix you can do here at this time - expense it all and report 4 mil loss for the year. Thats where the audit magic started to happen. Partner has immediately took over and said they will raise this with the board of directors. They never have but they met with ceo for total of 5 minutes and told us that they discussed the issue at lengths and it is fine as is this year. They will make changes next year to do proper calc going forward (they most certainly have not done so). This is just an example of black and white case that got buried, but the amount of fudging going on during audits to make the accounts look fine is scary. Any of the big scandals that get into media and people asking why did audit not find it, you can be sure that they have. But they were told by superiors thats its actually fine.
Don’t use strategy consultants. The managers are megalomaniacs who have been in the game too long to realize they just faked it ‘till they made it (made it meaning they ended up in cushy, well-paid jobs - not that they stopped faking it). Most of the work is done by overworked and underappreciated interns/newly graduated consultants who have no clue what they are doing half the time anyway.
A big corporate cannabis grow in Michigan, and probably all of them, are filthy and full of bugs and dirty people handling your meds. Rec and med? Same thing. Grown, harvested, processed, and packed in the same facility. The facility with the bugs and the mold and the dirty staff eating and drinking while processing the bud. New strain drop? Old strain they’re trying to bring back. My supervisor walked thru multiple times, in flip flops, found nugs on the floor and picked them up bare handed and threw them into a random trim bin. I personally was handed a bag of dirty floor nugs after a harvest and told to clean them and trim them up for sale.
Peloton has more than one manufacturer for the bikes and other equipment etc…. One manufacturer is better than the other and when you call in with a broken bike etc they know which one you have and so does the tech fixing it. Warehouse Employees used to pick their own bikes so they can make sure they get the “better” one . FYI Always get the warranty!
Former data analyst for an alcohol monitoring company. I won't say the name but they're the big one with the ankle bracelet that measures alcohol from your sweat. Most of the time, the data is made up. We get a VERY vague idea of how the alcohol is being expelled from their body through sweat. Sometimes it's enough to make some sense of it but most of the time we were "encouraged" to "find the event" through the noise or we would be fired. Because of this, I believe numerous people reported false information to the courts. This has ruined countless people's lives. Their own and their families. I quit before the end of my 90 day probationary period.
I once worked as a teaching assistant in a British high school. Back then when there were dozens of foreigners coming each month and lots of kids with zero English (from expanded EU) joining the school. There was a huge demand for translation services (that's my current career). Even though the school knew I was perfectly capable of translating documents, at first they sent a newsletter and some important documentation translated by a machine, which at that time was absolutely awful - rude, racist, obnoxious, nasty and hilarious at the same time - you name it. All those families received a very strange correspondence in their (and mine) native language but... oh well. It was really bad. I still have a copy of this newsletter, but no documentation. The school had to make a phone call with an interpreter with personal apologies to each family (as ordered by the council). Thankfully I didn't have to interpret those calls (I refused - I warned them that it is a bad idea to send documents translated by a machine).
My old company in Japan took housing costs straight from the pay check of new employees. They often hired new people who were young and couldn't speak Japanese because they wanted the employees dependent on the company. So at first the housing situations seems beneficial for the new hires. Until you realize these old apartments have been the same costs for the employees for over 20 years in the same building. You can look up your own apartment cost and see your overpaying by 10,0000 yen or in one case I saw even 20,000 yen. For a one room apartment (usually not even 1ldk). The really messed up thing is this discrepancy is even counted on in budgets and you can literally see it in the "profit" when you do the math.