Every industry has secrets. Some of these could make you a better consumer, some show you what to avoid completely and some are just fun or frustrating!
Buy Smart!
“Jewelry retailer here.
If it’s a gemstone, odds are that it’s been heat treated/irradiated at some point before it was set in the piece. The clarity of rubies and sapphires (as well as some other stones) can be improved by exposing the stone to heat. The color of certain stones can be changed by heating them or exposing them to radiation: most citrine and green quartz on the market is heat-treated amethyst. All blue topaz on the market is heat-treated colorless (i.e. clear) topaz. The highly prized topaz variety called “London blue” is created by heat-treating colorless topaz AND bombarding it with radiation in a nuclear reactor.
If it’s a pearl and it’s not white or slightly off-white, it’s most likely been dyed to achieve whatever color the pearl is. This should be obvious with bright, goofy colors like Kool-Aid purple and lime green, but more popular pink, grey, and black pearls have likely been dyed as well. This is one reason why South Sea pearls are so expensive: those vibrant colors are pretty much all naturally-occurring.”
Lumpy Mattresses Are The Worst Thing In The World
“Work in the mattress industry here. The bottom 73% of a mattress (for the most part) is garbage in a memory foam mattress. Get the cheapest concrete POS mattress you can and then go get yourself a nice mattress topper. A nice high end topper on top of a s—ty mattress will be 20-40% cheaper than a high end mattress, there’s a lot of room to move because toppers can get pretty expensive themselves.
Don’t be a chump.”
And Your Hands Too!
“I work on a farm. When they say you should wash your produce thoroughly at home, they’re not joking.”
Just Get It Right!
“Sometimes surgeons Google how to do things while they’re already in surgery. You’re welcome.”
Cough Up The Cash!
“Mobile videogames are literally designed to be frustrating instead of fun.
A great many mobile titles make use of mechanics that are put together with the intention of nurturing habitual behavior, frustrating a user, and then offering a slightly more enjoyable experience after money has been spent. This tactic has proven to be a more profitable model than actually offering entertainment, to the point where some companies take very careful steps to ensure that their games don’t accidentally end up being fun.
That sounds like satire, I know, but it’s actually true.
Let’s suppose you had a game like Galaga, for instance. A mobile game version monetized with in-application microtransactions would probably give you the option to upgrade your ship and your weapons, purchase additional lives, and other such things. You’d be able to earn “soft” (or “grind”) currency by killing enemy units, with small amounts of “hard” (or “premium”) currency being awarded when you advanced in level or something.
Now, that sounds like it would be alright, doesn’t it? Here’s where the manipulative part comes in, though: In this hypothetical game, it would be prohibitively difficult to make it beyond the third level without spending money, because there’d be a “recommended” item of some kind that could only be purchased with hard currency… and it’s usually impossible to earn enough of that from within the games themselves. This is called a “pay wall,” and countless mobile games take advantage of the concept, albeit to varying degrees.
There’s only one small problem with the game concept I just outlined: It might actually be kind of fun to play. As I mentioned previously, it’s a far better idea to frustrate a user, and then give them a marginally better experience after they’ve converted to a paying player. So, maybe what we’d do with our hypothetical title is have all of the enemies slowly become more and more difficult over the course of five levels or so. Then, when a user inevitably died, we’d show them some kind of pop-up message:
“The aliens are advancing!” it might say. “Spend 15 SPACE CREDITS to revive?”
You’d be given the option to spend 15 hard currency for a single life… or to buy a pack of lives for only 50! Either way, immediately after you made the purchase, the game would become easier and more satisfying. If there were random items dropped by destroyed enemies, you’d see slightly more of them. Your score would increase more quickly, and there would be more explosions (or in the case of a game like Candy Crush, more flashing lights and noises).
After the level was done, you’d get bumped back into the typical difficulty and the same frustrating experience… until you spent more money, of course.”
Well, Tell Us How You Really Feel!
“Half of the so claimed ‘services’ they offer at Jiffy Lube never get completed, either by laziness or it may be impossible to do it the proper way on certain cars. The store’s hours distributed for employees are directly affected by ‘average ticket sales’, which means (at least when I was store manager at one) that if we didn’t have an average of $65+ at the end of the day per car, then we got wrote up. Jiffy Lube is a dirty, evil company that takes advantage of people, and that’s why I left to take a lower position elsewhere. Even though I made less money, I knew I wouldn’t be selling people things they didn’t need. Felt good quitting that f’ing place.”
Oh Come On! Don’t Ruin Everything!
“Here’s another tip from a guy who worked at a pool for five years.
Walk into a pool area and smell the chlorine. Hey, that means the pool is nice and chlorinated and is clean, right?
Nope. If you smell chlorine, don’t get into the water. A properly chlorinated and chemically balanced pool will not smell like chlorine. If you smell the chlorine, it’s either because the pool has been chlorinated to a frightening and dangerous level, or because the chloramines are getting out of control. Basically, what you’re smelling is not the chlorine, but the chloramines and those are bad. Those are what irritates your skin and eyes and causes other problems. Our facility had a room that had two swimming pools with 1.5 million gallons of water between them and it rarely smelled like chlorine despite being properly chlorinated because we had a UV system that kept the chloramines in check. Smell chlorine? Stay out.
After I said that, you may have just thought to yourself that most pools that you’ve been to smell like chlorine. Yeah. It’s because most pools do not have their chemicals well maintained and are absolutely filthy as I mentioned in this thread earlier.”
A Fish Is A Fish
“I used to work in a small fish market/deli in the early 90’s.
The red snapper you are buying could be any number of different fish but it’ll be sold as snapper regardless. Name changing is pretty common since few people can tell the difference between the different species.”
GAAROOOOSSS
“In some hotels the housekeepers do something called “popping the sheets.” They wipe off crumbs and straighten the sheets out to make it look like they made it with fresh linen. The thing is it just depends on the house keeper so no brand is immune to this. However, this is a big thing that most good managers look out for and the employee can get fired if they are caught.”
It’s Our Secret
“Your child may take his first step or say his first real word while at daycare. But we aren’t going to tell you that.”
Keep It On The DL!
“I used to work for a popular clothing retail company. We were told we weren’t supposed to hire people based on their looks, yet we would get in trouble for hiring unattractive people.”
ABC – Always Be Closing
“Even though it may be a “well duh” comment, I worked at Davids Bridal and I had a lady try on 2 dresses, a $900 dress that made her look like a bumpkin, and a $550 dress that looked beautiful. The lady asked me my opinion and I told her the truth. My boss was standing right behind me and fired me that day because I “lost her money” come on, this is somebody’s wedding day were talking about!”
Of Course They Hate Some Of The Little Brats
“When your kid says “the teacher hates me” parents generally don’t believe it. My wife works in education and says she regularly sees teachers that have dislikes of specific kids and treat them like crap”
Burn It All!
“Many retail stores have days where they just destroy a bunch of old merchandise instead of continuing to try to sell it.
I used to work at GameStop and whenever the store decided not to carry something anymore it got “pennied out” of the system and put in a box in the office.
Every couple months out district manager would come through and get a pair of scissors. He snapped game disks in half, cut the cords off controllers, smashed toys on the ground, cut holes in shirts, and then threw everything in the dumpster out back.”
“They Almost Always Pop”
“Don’t waste money on an expensive coffin, the one with the air pulled out… all that fancy stuff, as soon as the soil hits him they almost always pop..”
Oh You Sneaking Little…
“Little secret. When you buy carpet you usually need less square footage of pad than carpet. But most companies bill you the same square footage for both and often send less pad than you paid for.”
Always!
“Third party booking agencies like Expedia and Booking.com intentionally hide information and mislead people. And there’s not a whole lot the hotel can do about it.
BOOK DIRECTLY WITH THE HOTEL.”
Hmm…Like You, Right?
“Investment advisor here. Most financial advisors out there are only after commissions, half don’t know what they are doing.
Find a fee-only fiduciary advisor with significant education. This is your life savings after all.”
Pink, huh?
“I don’t know if I’m late to the replies but I worked for a company who dealt with breast cancer awareness. Without going into full detail, I can tell you that I personally raised over $20,000.00 in 2 months that I know went to pay someone’s salary rather than research.”
Rocks For Jocks
“I work in D1 athletics. Some (but not all) football and basketball players are told by the athletic department which majors they can and can’t take. A lot don’t even choose a major, but are given one. It all has to do with the NCAA academic requirements which are built around keeping a player eligible and have them progressing towards a degree. There are no checks for quality of the degree/program they take. As a result, underpaid and overworked academic advisors who risk getting fired if a star athlete doesn’t do well in a harder major, take advantage of the system to keep their jobs.”
Disturbing The Peace
“Freight train conductor. We have to blow the horn at EVERY street crossing. So no, when we’re coming through your neighborhood at 3am laying on the horn, we aren’t doing it to be dicks.
Also, we have speed limits too. So when we’re moving really slow through town holding up traffic, we’re aren’t doing that to be d—s either”
And $2 Primer!
“That 3/4 million dollar house you just bought from those cookie-cutter mutherf’ers was painted with 6$ a gallon paint.”
Stink, Stank, Stunk
“The only thing about your body that a Massage Therapist will judge you about is if your a– is stinky.”
What Can Brown Do For THEM?
“Overall the corporate management gives zero f—s about the union workers of UPS.
We had a driver that used to ride his bike to work everyday and one morning a guy fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into him causing all kinds of life threatening injuries. Collapsed lungs, broken bones, possible lifelong paralysis, weeks long coma, etc.
The district manager, during a meeting about a week after this happened, is passing around a get well soon card. We all sign it and pass it around until it gets back to her. She looks up and says, “I should really just be writing ‘we hope you don’t get well soon but it’d be great if you just died soon considering the headache this whole thing has caused the company’ “
A few snickers from other managers followed but it was obvious she was NOT joking.”
You Had To Figure
“I work in the coal industry in underground mines in WV. The secret people should know is that its not all about safety like everyone thinks. Its all about production. You will be fired for some reason if you don’t comply with what your told to do no matter how dangerous it gets. Look up Upper Big Branch Mine Explosion, that was murder for production when that happened. I worked for the company that owned that mine and many others in my area and it was only in favor of production. 29 good men died that day, those great guys 3 of who i knew, died due to being slaves to the company scared to lose a good job so their kids could keep shoes on their feet, some were still young and didn’t get to experience bringing life into this world, all for a black rock in the ground that was fetching some good money back then.”