Ever worked for a shady business? These former employees share the shadiest thing that they witnessed on the job. And some of these places you may know. Content has been edited for clarity.
Waffle House
“I used to work at Waffle House. I had just come in to start my overnight shift and I was doing my walkthrough, making a list of things for 2nd shift to finish before they left.
I checked the steam tables and found sausage gravy and chili in it. Sausage gravy shouldn’t be in the steam tables as long as this had. It gets too runny. Whatever, happens all the time, they don’t usually serve it, they’re just too lazy to clean it out because it cakes to the sides.
Then I take the lid off the chili.
Gross white fuzzy mold on top. And it’s the stinky type. You could smell it the moment the lid came off. I called my manager over to show him. There was obviously something wrong if it was growing mold. Either sat there way too long, or the steam table temps were messed up. Don’t know, don’t care. His job, so I called him over.
He immediately stirs it up and says it’s fine.
Ummm. WHAT?
He says it’s not a problem, go ahead and serve it. I told him there was no way I could do that. He pulls me in close, like he’s telling me a secret, and says we have to sell that chili because we have no chili made to replace it, and, anyway, food costs are too high. I told him I didn’t care, and that I’d be throwing it away.
He’s insistent. ‘Throw it away if you want, but it’s fine. I’d sell it. You’ll just be upsetting customers if they want it and can’t have it.’
One more time I look him in the eye, raise my voice so the customer about 5 feet away can hear me, and say, ‘I’m not selling moldy chili.’
He just says, ‘whatever’ and storms off.
I immediately texted my store manager and district manager. No answer.
The next morning I e-mail corporate. No answer.
A couple of days later, I e-mailed the Department of Labor and the Health Department. I got a ‘Thanks for the head’s-up’ e-mail.
Nothing ever happened to the guy. As far as I know (still friends with many of the employees there and the rumor mill is worse than middle school) no one (corporate, DoL, HD) even contacted the store or management.”
Wal-Mart
“Wal-Mart. This isn’t really a huge one and I bet most people have already figured it out, but in case anybody wanted confirmation. At least at the location I was working at, we’re encouraged to do a few things that don’t seem really in concordance with how sales associates and customer service should act.
We are openly discouraged by management from helping customers. If a customer asks if he has any items that are not on the shelf, the one and only answer is ‘We’re out of stock’ even if we do have those items in the back. I was actually reprimanded by two of my managers for checking the backroom for items when customers asked and were told, ‘You’re wasting time on helping customers.’
During training, we were informed of the ‘six-foot rule.’
In other words, if a customer is six feet away from you at any time, you should be asking them if they would like help. This rule goes out the window on Day 1, or, rather, in the first few hours you are on the job.
Another thing is that we will re-shelve anything. If you, as the customer, are returning food, broken items, over-the-counter meds, and even car batteries, we will make a point to put as much of it back on the shelves as possible, even when the product is clearly damaged beyond repair and it values is depreciated. My department manager found a bunch of fishing rod and reel combo packs that had the reels stolen. He rewrapped the rods, slapped a random price tag on them, and sold them as rods. Clothes that people have worn and returned go back up without being washed or even steam cleaned. This includes lingerie and underwear.”
Assisted Living Home
“I worked at an assisted living home for a few years as a server.
The nurses don’t care about your loved ones. They just stick pills in a cup and say, ‘Eat them.’ Then they would walk away, not making sure they were being consumed.
We used to sweep up pills on the ground all the time because so many people would spit them out.
Multiple people would sit at a table together so they could even grab other people’s pills.
If someone had a hard time eating, and needed help, well tough luck. Nurses would say, ‘Guess you aren’t eating today.’
Residents who were in wheelchairs, especially if they were not 100% there mentally, would sometimes be forgotten about. If they wet their adult diapers, it annoyed the nurses so sometimes they’d just let them sit in the pee for a while.
Families would come check out the place and everyone would be so friendly but it was so disgusting to watch how they were treated most of the time.”
Recycling Plant
“McGraw Hill makes practically every textbook allowed in America’s school. At the end of every year, they throw away tens of thousands of books for the tax write-off because it’s going to a recycling plant.
I am talking textbooks from K thru 12, college books of every type, teacher editions, and class sets of short stories and books for kids in the process of learning to read. A normal textbook costs a school 60 to 80 bucks a pop, but they throw enough away to educate every child in Africa.
When I worked at the recycling plant, I wasn’t allowed to take them because it was considered illegal to distribute them.
I truly lost all hope for the future of humanity after that. And quit my job.”
Johnson & Johnson
“Big Pharma and Big Agro own the FDA. And there’s a hierarchy.
When I worked for J&J (Johnson & Johnson) years ago, we licensed sucralose from some foreign company to use as an artificial sweetener (brand name ‘Splenda’). Well, the FDA gave us the runaround for YEARS on approval. They didn’t even look at our studies and schedule a hearing until AFTER the patent on Nutrasweet ran out.
Another artificial sweetener called ‘stevia’ is all-natural and very safe. For YEARS, it was illegal to sell stevia and tell you how to use it. Warehouses were raided and stevia was confiscated and destroyed because a company was storing stevia and a stevia cookbook in the same warehouse. The ‘ban’ on stevia was only lifted when Pepsi and Coke wanted to test it as an artificial sweetener and lobbied Congress.”
