Article created by: Gabija Palšytė
When employees walk out of the building for the last time, they often carry a lot more than a cardboard box with their belongings and goodbye cards. Many are also armed with intimate knowledge of the company’s workings, and are sometimes even privy to a few dirty, little secrets.
Despite some having signed contracts preventing them from disclosing what goes on behind closed office doors, more and more people are speaking out about their former workplaces. Social media has become a digital confessional booth, and netizens are not holding back. From gross revelations out of the kitchens of popular restaurants, to serious allegations of trafficking, the internet is awash with spilled secrets that were once well hidden by corporate executives.
Someone recently asked, “What’s a company secret you can share now that you don’t work there anymore?” And the responses might surprise you. Bored Panda has compiled a list of some of the most eyebrow-raising ones. Do you have tea on your former employer? Let us know in the comments below… Don’t miss the interesting chat we had with Resume Genius‘ career expert, Eva Chan. She unpacked Non-Disclosure Agreements and shared her advice on when it’s okay to talk about your former company and when it’s best to rather keep quiet. You’ll find that information between the images.
I work in public service. I don’t know if I’d call it a dirty secret, but when the government started stocking men’s rooms with free pads/tampons we all agreed to turn a blind eye to the one trans dude taking them all regularly and dropping them off at the local homeless shelter. He’s the only one affected, and he’s keeping homeless women well-supplied on the government’s dime.
I once worked for a polling company, the kind that runs surveys for elections and marketing purposes. I learned that numbers can be made to prove anything remotely plausible and to not trust election polls when they are too tight.
Health insurance companies will deliberately and intermittently slow down or completely stop claims processing to hang onto their money longer.
They also have days where they reject en masse across the board because it allows them to not pay out for an additional 30 days or maybe never pay if the claim is not resubmitted.
True stories.
A shocking number of retail stores force new employees to watch anti-union propaganda videos during orientation.
Also, to whom it may concern, products that claim to be made in the USA are actually just *assembled* in the USA. The parts are still manufactured elsewhere.
As a long-time probation officer, one thing that surprises people is how many **unusual**, “creative” sentences we have to enforce. Most people think such sentences are banned by the 8th amendment but that’s…not really how that works. For one, most of the time the offender takes the plea deal for the unorthodox sentence willingly to avoid prison, so they never appeal on 8th amendment grounds anyways since that would just result in re-sentencing and going to prison.
Occasionally such sentences make the news, but many don’t.
The most notable one I worked was in 2016, which did make the news, when a woman was being sentenced for a serious case of animal neglect. The judge gave her a choice – incarceration, or spending a day sitting in the “stinkiest, smelliest part of the county dump” to see how it feels to live in filth.
She chose the latter. We had to contact the dump and say “hey, judge’s orders – help us find the absolutely most revolting place here.” They didn’t believe us until we showed them the paperwork.
I took it seriously and found the nastiest place there for her. By the end…I think she was wishing she’d taken the jail time.
We’re shipping dangerously corrosive chemicals across the country in tanks that have repeatedly failed safety inspections.
Very few get pulled over, so it’s cheaper for the company to pay the fines instead of repairing the tanks or buying brand new ones. And with all the slashes to funding, firings, and relaxation of environmental regulations, it’s getting even easier to do so.
I work in a manufacturing-related industry. We tout how much effort we’re putting into making our consumer products “eco-friendly” and “green”- which really does have an impact – but the amount of waste our day-to-day operations generate is staggering. When I was working from home during Covid, receiving samples and contracts and other documents to review and sign, I was filling up 4-5 big trash bags PER WEEK with all the plastic shippers and Styrofoam padding that came along with those. Imagine that x100 people doing similar work across the org.
Now that we’re back in office, we have to have trash collection come by multiple times a day. And this doesn’t even touch on how many next-day international air shipments we send back and forth, how many pieces the factories scrap due to small defects, and how many unsold products go straight to the landfills after languishing in a climate controlled warehouse for a year.
I guess the point I’m getting at is: trying to reduce your personal carbon footprint is a noble goal. Don’t abandon it! But real change will have to come from holding corporations accountable for the waste they generate.
Skip the chili at 7-11. No one ever changes it.
usual7:
Can confirm. I worked there for several months, and I never touched it.
No longer employed there, but when I worked at a certain big box retailer of home improvement products we would occasionally see hopeful strangers sitting in our lobby with boxes or other packaging waiting for meetings. These people were small-time inventors of new products and were trying to get them on the shelves of our retail locations. What they didn’t know is that, as condition for consideration of carrying the product, they would be required to turn one or more samples over to the company to be examined by the product teams. If the product showed promise, one of those samples would be shipped to another country where it would be thoroughly dissected and analyzed so that an equivalent product could be developed under the house label (with enough modifications to not infringe on any patents, of course) and *that* product was what would end up on the shelf. From what I heard, a lawsuit pretty much ended the practice and now they don’t allow pitches from independent producers any more. They just wait to see what other retailers are already carrying (and selling well) and copy those.
The United States military spends so much money on useless stuff. We would spend $200 on a single bolt I can get a 20-pack at Home Depot for $8.
Major companies patent new technology they have no interest in developing just so others can’t develop it.
IBM is a traitorous company.
They routinely lay off whole teams of their American employees, keeping just a single token worker to interface with the client while outsourcing the rest of the work to H-1B visa holders or teams in India via remote work.
Multinational pizza chain infamous for low quality.
A local luxury hotel contracted us to provide their room service pizzas. We charged them $6+$2 tip per pizza, and we would deliver to the back entrance of the hotel in a plain white pizza box.
We would normally charge $10 for the same pizza, they were selling it for $28.
Our drivers loved it when they’d get multiple room service orders, plus a couple of direct-to-room orders. Raking in the tips to drive 2 blocks away.
I worked for a medical research company. All those research methods that they’re not supposed to do because it’s illegal here? yeah, they just go to other countries to do that. I had to take care of the machine that had all the research and information on the experiments they were doing in South America.
Everything from panera is frozen, bread dough isn’t mixed on site, all the sweet treats are frozen, smoothies are made from a very syrupy purée, no fresh fruit at all.
Recycling is a lie. I won’t say no one ever recycles anything anywhere. I’m just saying that when you take the time to put a plastic bottle in the blue bin or whatever, all you’re doing is making yourself feel a little better. It’s ending up right next to all that paper trash you walked by in the end.
TJ Maxx makes employees shuffle clothes around so customers have to search through everything for different sizes of a particular clothing item or matching sets of suits.
A lot of tech consulting firms in the US are running immigration/trafficking schemes. They sponsor people to come over from India, or students who graduate and are about to lose their student visas. They do grunt IT work with ridiculous hours and little to no pay. I’ve even seen the students family pay the company to sponsor their child and have them work for free until they find a paying job.
I work in a plastic bag plant. Everything in here runs on electricity. The owners tapped into a power line that runs through the property and for more than 10 years they didn’t pay a dime. They made tens of millions. When the fraud was found out they blamed an employee (who was from latin america) and were given a 200K fine. You can’t find the story online any more, they used their community connections to have it erased. And flat out deny it ever happened.
Who says “crime doesn’t pay”?
Don’t ever buy anything marinated from a butcher/meat case. It is how the older meats are sold, the marinade covers the smell.
The Disney College Program is just a pixie dust coated excuse for cheap labor. I was a Professional Intern with the company and saw this first hand.
Interesting_Tea5715:
This. My wife did the internship at Disney World. They totally exploit young professionals.
You get no time off and they are crazy strict about breaks. My wife would ask for a break when it was extremely hot and they wouldn’t give it to her. She had several cases where she thought she was gonna pass out in the Florida heat.
This was about 15 years ago though, so things may have changed.
When it comes to delis (i worked in a few supermarkets), even if the company has strict policies, rest assured that there’s always a few employees not following the food safety rules.
Cross-contamination is a constantly broken rule, I have seen people open meats with box cutters they keep in their pockets that they use for an indefinite amount of time (weeks, months). They will drop entire hams on the ground and quickly pick them up, hoping no one notices. Those are NOT clean floors.
Some won’t change their gloves for hours. They’ll be in the back throwing garbage out or having a smoke, or they’ll clean the deli using nasty broomsticks and mophandles, and jump right back on the line and cut your cold cuts for you.
Chipotle loves to portray itself as fresh.
In reality, they serve leftovers. Everything at the end of the day is saved, and heated back up the next day. So, if you go in the evening, you’re much more likely to get steak that was just cooked whereas if you’re in the early part of the lunch rush, you’re getting yesterday’s leftover steak heated back up in a warmer.
When I worked in a service department at a car dealership I noticed a lot of recalls, so I said to my boss, “I have a conspiracy theory, I think all the recalls are made up just to get costumers in the shop so we can sell them more stuff” My boss replied with, “that’s no conspiracy theory”.
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