Premium dog food at the pet store has a very low markup (sometimes less than 20%) so the price you pay is actually pretty reasonable. When it goes on sale this is usually always brand funded, with rebates provided to the retailer. food is to get you in the door, treats and toys is where the profit is.
Just because it’s sold at a pet store doesn’t mean it is safe, ethical or good for your dog.
Agreed - there’s so much just blatant lying that goes on in the advertising, along with the extremely low standards we set for a “complete diet”. People are purchasing a product being told that it is good for their pets when it’s just not the case. doesn’t help that unconscionable celebrity vets endorse these brands
Australia's biggest sandalwood grower uses Lorsban, off-label, to kill native rats (status : endangered) around Kununura, WA.
Lorsban is an extremely nasty and highly toxic chemical. They then market their sandalwood as 'organic'.
There was a bit of research on effect on persistent pesticides on goanna meat, but because kununurra is such an isolated location, combined with heat and difficult terrain, its difficult to get funding. Also combined with fact that the entire town's economy depends on Sandalwood, any visiting researcher would not be Welcome.
Bonus fact : Did you know the Jewish homeland was going to be in kununurra before they chose Israel?
Also. There were many sites globally that were surveyed for tbis purpose including more than one site in Australia.
Edit: just realised my comment was so vague. I was referring to the sites for the jewish homeland
I heard about a guy who was a friend of mine's supervisor, who left his wife to marry one of his PhD students, had a kid with her, then left *her* to marry another one of his PhD students. Brilliant scientist, outstanding in his field, brings in all sorts of grant money and fame to the institution, many a blind eye is turned.
I was an academic for years and you are absolutely right - terrible job, with appalling management at all levels. The people who persist doing good work - and they do exist - are truly dedicated and amazing, given the toxic conditions
Sleeping with the students is a tale as old as time unfortunately. When my mother went to University she had a housemate that would bang the professors for grades.
If you work in the medical field you might have seen a disinfectant called 'Viraclean' or 'Instramax Pink'. Please do NOT purchase Instramax Pink, it comes from the same manufacturing tank as Viraclean. It just has a different label and costs more.
- definitely not a scorned, former employee
I was working an event and this ice cream place, that used nitrogen to freeze the ice cream as some marketing gimmick just sold store bought tubs of streets ice cream & sold it for a pretty penny.
---
A lot of businessmen do not wash their hands.
N² in Brunswick St was pretty good. Nice vibe and even if it was tub ice cream they did enough to it to disguise and improve it. I still miss it.
But Messina still exists if you like lines of people. Lavezzi always slaps. Brunettis tends to have great ice cream and across the road there's plenty more good stuff.
Fun, unrelated fact but in the Australian DVD release of Shark Tale Tracey Grimshaw voices the news fish. She does more journalism in a children’s movie than she does in real life
Every engineer wants to replace it but nobody is certain about how it's supposed to work, the people who originally made it have long since moved on (and possibly died of old age), and if you fix the bugs then customers will complain that stuff changed.
I've seen a major system upgrade for a system handling billions be delayed for a year so that the one remaining person in the business who configured it could return from maternity leave.
Subway franchisees are the dodgiest people around. My boss got a “good deal” on some veggies that were literally mouldy and then got mad at me for throwing out the mouldy ones because they were “fine”.
Also, everything comes frozen and the tuna is mixed with a whole bag of mayo, usually by a teenage boy with questionable hygiene.
I knew a teenage boy who worked at Subway and was appalled by the hygiene practices. It was a bit confusing for a kid in their first job to be told the rules and then be trained not to follow them.
I mercifully had a pretty good store owner who paid well and looked after the stores (he used to own 3 or 4 in eastern Melbourne). They used to give us free soft drink so when someone left their Coke unattended, to fuck with each other, we'd pour the olive juice into it
I had to tell my friends a few days ago that the childcare industry I was in only required a background check. That's it. Nothing else to work around kids.
A lot of infrastructure often requires 120+ year design lives on component (think bridges etc.).
Not a problem when the mentality of everyone at the company is "She'll be right, we'll all be dead by then anyway. How long do you need on the certificate?"
I used to do paycheques for political figures and let’s just say the expense recipients are a joke. I’ve seen strippers, booze random cash amounts that are obviously drugs all claimed under the tax payers dollars. The worst part, I lost my job for questioning these amounts.
Pure Peninsula Honey in Victoria uses and abuses workers on 457 visas. Their 'local' brand of honey comes from bees that are fed sugar water. I'm 30 and they paid me $17/hr, no super.
They also use the old school (and illegal) jaw traps to control possums around their property.
You can get this honey from Woolworths, but I would advise against it.
Edit: I think the traps are no longer in use because I reported the company to DELWP.
>no super.
I worked for the ATO for a while and employers who never paid super always had 457's. I hope you reported them for that, the tax man loves businesses who don't pay super because they get a fortune and get to rip businesses apart lol
Not exactly a secret. I used to work at KPMG and they used to run regular seminars getting people to move to the Cayman offices to expand their tax mitigation department there.
Your level of service at a hotel is directly tied to greed. Some properties see staffing as a corner than can be cut and the quality of service drops as a result. Having extra staff means having concierges available, housekeeping able to turn the property quick enough and with enough extra done to properly prepare for any last minute bookings. Front desk don’t just check people in, they are tour guides, administration, social media people, online/phone bookings, dealing with requests/complaints, and room service in some places. Shit properties cut front desk first for some reason.
I watched a 5 star resort drop to a 3.5, which is a huge drop. All the property got was a slightly better profit from gutting staff. It went from the most desired property to work at in the region to being a shell after waves of resignations of the staff that made it the place to work. I saw 3 supervisors quit from the front desk, leaving it staffed with 4 staff total, all in the one weekend in protest to the GM firing a well-loved manager.
The industry is rotten to the core, a place that is great to work in is a dream and I’ve had that pleasure a couple of times. But when they chase a quick buck and cut payroll staff, the whole property is worthless in a couple of years.
It took the company too long to act on firing that GM. She was hauled out very quietly on a Friday night by the state manager. By then the damage was done. Being a strata property meant she was also having to work with a heap of owners that watched their investments collapse due to the poor performance of the resort. They all went private, or hired small boutique companies to manage their properties. Last I heard they had lost 60 owners in 3 years, all because she just wanted to cut some corners.
No resort gives a fuck about your perfect holiday. Some places are worth staying in, but never think they are going to give two shits about their role in that. It’s the result of the fish rotting from the head, greedy cunts lining their pockets and using KPIs as a way to pretend they are doing a great job.
Went to a favourite place recently, boy what a shocker and a let down after having great previous visits. Spiders and ants in our room when we checked in, a micro shit in the toilet..... woulda been worse if it was on the floor or the bed, I spose.
Yeah, hotels are going downhill. There’s one in Melbourne with a tiny high end restaurant and wine cellar that you’d think would hire experienced staff and pay them well, but it’s far from reality. They barely pay just above minimum wage (level 3?) for floor staff and hire staff with barely any experience and if staff have previous experience they’re pushed to utilise all their skills for the same pay. GM are penny pinchers and charge staff $2 for coffees, even $1 for chocolate powder if you bring your own milk(!!). They only have a double shot portafilter so whenever a single coffee is made 1 shot is wasted. Asked if the shot could be given to the intern working for free. Manager said no.
I worked night audit at a place that had negotiated that the night team are allowed to have food and all the coffee they wanted. It was ordered by the exec chef and f&b managers because we did a lot of their late-night service and opened it all up for them in the morning so it was a fair trade.
GM caught wind of this and decided the 2-3 coffees we had with the bowl of chips we’d sometimes make was too much. It took 3 managers to step in for us and tell her that it won’t be happening.
A month later all three of us quit when she tried to make a 3 man team downsize to one against all protests that the job was impossible for one person.
While the TV current affairs cameras were out the front with some PR hack telling them that the organisation doesn't use dangerous chemicals, the aforementioned chemicals were being loaded onto a ute out the back for "disposal". Still, it was strictly true - the chemicals hadn't been used anymore for almost 24 hours.
You would have gotten snow chains with your car rental regardless of whether or not you paid for them (this was in NZ). It's too much admin to haul them in and out of cars based on who paid or not; they just stayed in the cars.
Ha, we went through this hiring a car in Germany.
Snow tyres were an optional extra but they're are a requirement of German road laws. Took out chances without option and still got the car with snow tyres.
After The Good Guys were bought by JB HI-FI, JB's business strategy was to intentionally Pitt the stores against each other. If customers didn't like the service at JB they would often take their business to TGG instead not knowing they were taking their money to the same company.
The number of times when I worked at BWS that people got cranky at the prices and were like "I'm going to Dan Murphy's instead!" in an indignant way was baffling.
Your $50 steak (sides and sauce are extra) was grilled by a person in a chef’s uniform with no formal training and who, just a few months ago, was working as a dishwasher.
Editing to add: the amount of food and plastic waste that goes on in restaurants is absolutely mind-blowing. Kilos and kilos of chips, rice and bread are thrown away at the end of the night. Hundreds of pretty much untouched plates of food end up in the bin. Single use plastic is so common, I’ve seen back of house staff grab a plastic container, fill it with water, drink the water and chuck the container. Food is pre-made and portioned into containers that are thrown in the bin, literally hundreds per day.
The crazy thing is that people come back again and again. I’m convinced that there’s some psychological phenomenon where people who have paid a hefty fee for a meal convince themselves it was worth it, even when it wasn’t. There are some people who are fussy because they’re paying so much but I feel that the majority of people want to believe they’ve had a great meal, even if it was average at best. Oh and I also think another reason people enjoy the steak is that it’s heavily seasoned.
Another not so juicy secret is that most of the seafood is frozen (even if advertised otherwise) and the lobsters live in filthy, stinky tanks and often die in there and get eaten by other lobsters. Yum.
My bro is a marine scientist and lost his shit at a restaurant that tried to pull the old switcheroo of an expensive fish for a cheaper fish. He knew straight away when it was served.
Fish are often mislabelled to a certain extent, either it’s something obscure called by a more commonly known name (not that bad or predatory imo, people just want to buy something they’ve heard of), or it’s outright cheap fish sold as something more expensive (quite predatory)
Working for Harvey Norman is exactly as bad as you may expect it to be. Proprietors that don’t care about anything but making money, not a smidge of care for the well-being of their employees.
Deliberately preying upon certain age groups by making them scared to death of the internet and selling them $750 Norton subscriptions that make around $500 profit for the business.
Also Optus sales are a massive cash cow for the business. If you can, please go via Optus themselves or in some instances you’re giving Gerry up to $1000 profit instantly by signing up at a HN store.
Decided to boycott HN after GH successfully lobbied to have GST applied to internet sales. Fuck that guy, in the strongest possible terms.
Also heard from people in the industry that he mistreats his horses.
This includes Domayne and Joyce Mayne as well. Weekend sales selling a popular product for under cost value, so it drains the commission made through the week, then you only have to pay your poor staff minimum wage without any of the benefits.
Fuck Gerry Harvey. I did 2 weeks work experience in Harvey Norman at age 16, and the predatory shit I saw made me realise a lot of sales jobs are fucking scummy.
I don't know why nobody's naming names, gotta keep the bastards honest. Coles regularly "strongly imply" that you'll get greater consideration for management positions by clocking off at the end of your rostered shift and continue working for free. Plenty of people seemed happy to oblige while I was there. Also they short changed me on my long service leave entitlements. Do not work for Coles if you can avoid it.
Can confirm. When I worked for Coles, at the end of every shift it was requested/expected to work for free, post shift, for 1-2 hours, to "get the load done." If this wasn't done, the night fill team would get calls between 8am and 9am, demanding to know why performance was down. Half my team (the half who didn't work for free) were pulled into the manager's office during a mandatory unpaid Christmas party, and had our jobs threatened for our lack of commitment to the team.
I also lost any extra paid work from Coles as soon as they found out I was working in bars on nights I didn't work for them. It was an absolutely fucked experience, and it seems so normalised in the industry.
Your fresh from the boat seafood is frozen. Your fish of the day is yesterday’s fish of the day and also tomorrow’s fish of the day. Your fresh local Exmouth prawns are frozen in a box and definitely not local. Your ‘house made sauce’ is manufactured by Masterfoods.
My dad's mate was a prawn trawler captain in the 90s. The second they catch the prawns they go in the freezer and get hit with the first round of preservatives. Once they get back they get processed, hit with another round of preservatives, then get sent to the wholesaler who hits it with another round of preservatives. Dude estimated about 20 different preserving steps between catch and eat. We used to buy prawns directly from him out of the hold, and they were exceptional, far different from anything you can buy.
When companies sell stuff in factory outlets, they are sometimes inferior versions of the stuff they sell in their retail outlets.
Like a shoe you might find in the retail store is made in Italy but the 'same' shoe in the outlet store is made in china.
I was literally about to ask if it was Greencross.....I had a very sick cat a few years back who's kidneys were failing (we didn't know it at the time) and they snapped on the phone "we're all booked out, sorry" and when I asked about emergencies, she harshly said "I said, we are ALL booked out. Go elsewhere." So we did, and they were all booked out too but agreed it was an emergency and said "come in immediately." Greencross are NOT for the pets, they're for their pockets.
JB Hi-Fi. They teach you how to prey on senior citizens. One of the sales techniques I was told during training was to tell them that "" I use this (insert the pic/phone you wana sell) at home and it is very good". Most elderly people would fall for that.
This isnt limited to JB. This is an extremely common strategy in most sales positions.
Not even close to the worst. One tactic I was taught was with Boomer couples to immasculate the man in the relationship(very subtly) by always deferring the wife for decisions. The bloke often gets a quickly bruised ego and will then make rash investment decisions like buying a house to show how in charge they are.
Worst ones Ive seen are the "charity" people and gas and elec, both door to door. These businesses exist almost solely to exploit the elderly and ignorant. As a sidenote if "charity" people doorknock or approach you ask if theyre working for free. They never are.
> One tactic I was taught was with Boomer couples to immasculate the man in the relationship(very subtly) by always deferring the wife for decisions. The bloke often gets a quickly bruised ego and will then make rash investment decisions like buying a house to show how in charge they are.
lmao. That's actually hilarious
Reminds me of the time I went to JB. First time the salesperson showed me a soundbar for a tv and said they use it at home and it’s very good. I came back the next week and spoke to the same person and I asked about a different one. Salesperson didn’t recognise me (I was wearing a mask) and gave me the same line from the previous week lol
I hope they’ve changed it now but Wendy’s choc dip was literally a vat of chocolate that would be reused every day, it would get topped up and cleaned but never completely changed… although this could have just been the owner of my store. She was so cheap. She doesn’t own them anymore.
The chocolate ganache for icing mudcakes at Woolies lived under the bench in an uncovered giant pot. We heated it up and used it then shoved it back under the bench
The freezer industry temperature metering that goes to food standard Australia for monitoring of frozen perishables is doctored before it's handed over to save the owners a few hundred thousand every year.
Look up The Old England Food Poisoning case from 2003. They had good records that showed the fault lay further back in the food chain than the kitchen.
A supplier had ordered a driver to drive around until the turkey that has been sitting on a dock for too long got down below 5c and then delivered it.
The 2 worst times for food poisoning are December before Xmas and the week between Xmas and new year's.
Anyone use the Redcycle plastic recycling?
Surprise surprise, it often ends up in the landfill bin out the back. Usually because of broken bags or because we can spot something in there that shouldn't be (usually milk bottles).
In that War On Waste show they put a GPS tracker into a bag then dropped it off at a store. Then followed it to a regular tip where it all got chucked in landfill
Former Woolies worker here.
If that bag didn't, end up on the last truck of the day - it was in the skip.
If it ended up on the truck - it probably landed in the skip shortly after.
Redcycle is just greenwashing.
Working at a servo. Manager would call other servos from other chains and ask “what’s the temperature” as code for fuel price and make sure prices all matched within a cent or two. This was back before mandatory online reporting of prices etc.
The cost at the pump had no bearing on what we bought the fuel for two weeks earlier etc.
Oh yeah. I worked at a servo in the early 2000s - my store manager would drive around to check all the other servo's prices, phone them in to head office, and later in the day I'd get an automated call from pricing telling me what to change our prices to.
Often we'd jump 10 or 20 cents in the middle of the day for funsies. Catch all the people out who saw the nice price on the way to the work and decided to fill up on the way home - suckers.
We also once settled a lawsuit very quietly from one customer who bought a bottle of orange juice, not realizing it was very out of date, drank it, and got pretty sick. (The fights I had with my SM who kept putting all the expired food/drink I took off the shelves, back on the shelves...)
(To the best of my knowledge this chain of servos does not exist in Victoria anymore)
I worked for a well known luxury clothing brand, I won’t say which one because I don’t want to doxx myself, but I know for a fact that they all do it anyway...
Tonnes of perfectly good clothing every quarter, simply destroyed. Not recycled, not donated... incinerated. They do not want to sell at too much of a discount, to avoid ‘cheapening’ the brand.
Then they also have the nerve to have labels all over their clothes about their “sustainably sourced cotton”. What a load of greenwashing shit.
Bariatric (weightloss) surgery in australia is not independently monitored. The statistics used for the yearly reports are sent in by the surgeons.
I have checked the adverse reporting personally and it doesn’t add up to my on-the-ground experience.
If you are considering a gastrectomy or gastric sleeve please talk to people who are at least two years post-procedure. It may still be for you, but the outcomes and complications are a lot more to deal with than you will be told.
I don’t know if they ended up doing it but a very, very big, religious aged care company I worked for was trying to get into the funeral business in order to make money off the oldies even after they were dead. Like it was literally sold to us as “increasing profits” as opposed to “this is something nice we can do for our residents and family”
When you call a certain second biggest Telco’s customer service and the IVR hangs up on you or it’s so complicated you give up…. That was the intentional outcome of a call diversion project.
Nail in the coffin for me
They all do similar sketchy things.
Unfortunately it’s really hard to put the nail in the coffin of every telco and still remain a functioning member of society.
Curious to know why you all don't name and shame these companies, particularly if you don't work there anymore? Realistically they're not gonna come and disappear you and it's basically just an anonymous gossip box without naming and shaming. Companies will continue to be cunts until they're named and shamed.
Because the details expose the person themselves usually. I doubt people are worried about the companies themselves. They just want to be anonymous in general
I worked at woolies petrol and had pricing call me to raise prices 20 cents per litre and I asked why because we hadn't even had a delivery in the last couple of days. They said they were just raising prices because they could. For no reason. Just to rip customers off.
I believe this. When fuel prices go up there is always some bullshit new report on "global uncertainty" or some other dribble but in reality it is just the companies jacking the price up. then once there is a lot of public outcry about it, they come down then up, then down etc
I used to work at a chain in Perth that would store pancake batter for WEEKS. I mean I would always taste the pancakes before serving to anyone on the day and they tasted fine, just seemed hella nasty.
We'd do pancake prep for Sunday brekky...cause everyone wanted pancakes. Whenever I'd get questions or complaints that we'd be reheating pancakes right before serving, I'd always be tempted to ask them when they thought the batter was made. Then watch their faces as I would keep saying "earlier".
Work at a postal sorting company. No packages are treated with respect, even the ones labelled fragile. Often the delivery drivers can’t be bothered picking up the larger packages, so they are left in a freight cycle for periods as long as a month. Theft is also common amongst the smaller packages
The Australian government once deported a mentally ill Australian man of Turkish heritage to Turkey. When they realised their mistake (i.e this guy had never even been to Turkey in his life and was a highly vulnerable person and had family in Australia looking for him who were very worried because of his mental illness) they contracted the company I worked for to go look for him and bring him back. Someone from my company found the poor guy in Istanbul standing in front of a toy shop looking at toys
The most government departments are outsourced to cheap labour companies that grossly underpay and overwork their employees. The one I worked for people were being assaulted, stalked and harassed and the managers refused to step in. They forced a victim of DV to leave because her abuser worked there and it was easier to make the victim move along than the perpetrator.
Said perpetrator now has a lifetime DVO against him.
I got porn in front of the nation Fight Club style without them knowing. I worked in animation years ago and one project was the national nine news intro. It was a shiny globe made up of orange bars spinning around. The “reflection layer” was the Paris Hilton sex tape of hard core porn. Hard to see but we know it’s there.
You’re welcome.
movie theatres pre-make popcorn during the week and leave it in large bags to warm up and sell on the weekend
all the food courts in/around cities have a rat problem
the casino pays off the press not to report suicides on premises
the flame grilled burger place uses parboiled frozen meat
not the individual cases but the volume and nature of the suicides should definitely be investigated
[this is an article from 2016 on the casino in sydney](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-01/suicide-attempts-at-casino-as-gamblers-encouraged-to-play/7895044)
its almost 6 years old and is still wildly relevant today
Had a paramedic say a similar thing, apparently they get called to a lot of people committing suicide by train by train but it doesn't get reported on because they don't want to give anyone else ideas
I used to work at maccas and even though we had separate bins for garbage and recycling it would all be compacted down together and thrown in the trash
I worked for a company that did retail management software. One of our customers was Just Jeans. At one stage we had to do a significant software change because Just Jeans has many products that they sell in several of the chains they own, i.e. Portman's, Jay Jays, etc. The products are identical and have the same stock codes, but some chains sell them for a lot more money than others.
Had a hiring manager ask if I was planning on getting pregnant and having a family in the next two years, while searching for a job. Pretty sure that's not allowed.
The big supermarket will close at the closing time, no sob story will change that.
The store is filled with dejected and exhausted, low-paid staff who have been waiting for the exact moment the store closes.
Any staff member who caves to a sob story pretty much commits social suicide.
We don’t care. Come back tomorrow or go to a servo and leave us alone.
I haven’t worked at a supermarket for 10 years but I can still perfectly rattle off the “good evening customers , the time is now 9pm and this store has ceased trading for the evening. We request that you finalise your purchases and make your way through to the front of the store. On behalf of staff and management we’d like to thank you for shopping with Monopoly Supermarket”
I closed the store once and left the roller door semi open… say enough to slip a shoe box under. This was so one of my workers closing the liquor store could throw the keys back under the door for me. Little did I know a woman then crawled through this gap and proceed to shop for half an hour at her own steady pace. We only noticed her as we were about to walk out the back security door half an hour later. Couldn’t believe the disbelief in her eyes when I told her the was no way we were letting her buy anything. Promptly kicked her out. Unbelievable.
Our award winning Key Lime Pie is made from the recipe on the side of the key lime juice bottle. Literally nothing is different. Yet it's been voted our town's best dessert for 4 years.
I worked for an IT company in Perth and whenever work got slow the boss would logon remotely to client's servers and break shit, so the client would have to call about problems they were having.
He would also flash the wrong firmware for a particular line of SMB routers which would cause WiFi to cease working and not be available in the web interface.
Easily fixable by putting the right firmware back on but he used it to justify replacing routers every 2 years.
He started a (false) rumour that an employee and a contractor were having an affair, while he was sniffing (unsuccessfully) at clients himself.
I am very glad to not be working there anymore!
Worked at woolworths in the bakery. We would bake things, bag them and then leave them for a day or two and whack stickers on them that said "baked today". Especially on weekends because paying the bakers to work Sundays from midnight to 7am apparently costs alot so they bake less on weekends.
The biscuits were sometimes 5 days old before they hit the shelves with a baked on sticker for that day.
Google has way to much money. They took the side of a building off in Sydney just to put a monorail car inside to use as a meeting room. They bought scooters to get around INSIDE the building. But the big take away is that unless you want to dedicate your existence to your work there, it's just a job, and in my experience not even a well paying one. Still looks good on the resume though
I'm surprised it's not well paying. A coworker of mine was recruited and was making over $300k. I wouldn't have called him exceptional from a technical perspective.
Having a family member working in a Covid quarantine hotel, the number of staff members caught (and quietly let go) sleeping with people in isolation at just that location was staggering. I couldn't even fathom the level of horn required
Many companies use run to the line for the financial year . What this means is they stop paying their bills for the last six to eight weeks of the year to make their financial performance seem better. Shareholders none the wiser.
Yep and they all did the reverse in early 2020 to qualify for job keeper. Was hilarious to hear bosses saying things like "I don't care if you haven't finished yet, just send me the invoice today" towards the end of some of those reporting periods.
TV news - took the ‘work chopper’ (yep a helicopter) and came back with a story - dead teen’s body on the side of the road. Interviewed police - drug overdose. Sad thing was she was 14, it was the next day and no one reported her missing. Chief of staff came out and wanted me to turn it into the lead story cos it was a slow news Saturday. I didn’t know what he meant. So he showed me. He rewrote my script to be a suspected murder. Because the editor was ready to go, I recorded the voiceover, cut the story then packed up my desk and left without formally resigning. Until then, I thought the news was truth. Rose coloured glasses fell into the dirt, crushed.
I don't know how much of a secret they considered it to be, but we didn't have many women at the company and the company would frequently plan social events that the women deliberately weren't invited to, or in many cases, told about.
I work in transport.
I have literally seen an entire train carriage be blocked off during peak hour because a state government minister was travelling on it and wanted the carriage to themselves.
Worked for the City Council of a certain Golden Coasted city. Mayors corruption is openly known and....admired? I worked in the contact centre and my co-worker bragged about being given rides in the Mayor's Ferrari.
Also, the tactics of this council are intentionally to delay and spin you around in circles, their business model is to transfer you around the contact centre until you give up, or to try and place the blame back on you. Overcharged for rates? you didn't read the bill. Public Watermain leaking in your yard? call a plumber, thats your fault.
The Marketting department was easily 10x the size of other much more important departments, you could openly hear people saying things like " How do we make the Council appear to care without doing anything? "
This council rakes in almost $1,000,000,000 a year and has outsourced everything. I was paid $28 per hour, with $10 per hour going straight to Hayes Recruitment.
Edit: kinda want to name and shame but I'm afraid to be doxxed and stuff so yeah, just figure the place out by yourself LOL
I used to work in this well-known fish market, already quitted because of toxic working environment.
For the record, maybe think twice before buying stuffs in this place especially the oysters and sea urchin products in the sushi bar. Their oysters are not fresh, they are all kept frozen inside their cool room. For the sea urchin, they are using a some kind of prepacked sea urchin imported from somewhere else and it is not fresh, it's frozen as well.
If u see the sea urchin sushi/dishes got displayed with their shells on, they are using the shells only. The actual sea urchin inside the shells are not used for the dish, we are switching it with the frozen one and the actual ones are being sold separately. We sometimes use the packed sea urchin that already passed expiry date by 1 or 2 days also, this also applies to the fish roe products.
So yeah if they said that all the foods are fresh, it's actually not. But if its fresh from the cool room, then yea it is.
Your furniture isn't delayed because of the pandemic. It's delayed because the company took more orders than they could fill, knowing you would probably accept the pandemic excuse.
Not sure how much of a secret it really is but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Ergon(huge Qld electricity supplier)won't disconnect your power (for failing to pay your bill) over the Christmas break).
Brunetti in Myer Melbourne CBD has an extremely bad rat problem to the extent that no retail staff on the level are allowed food or snacks on that level (break room on another level is fine)
Major optical chain caps the amount of patients they’ll see with irritated eyes and foreign bodies, because you won’t buy glasses. So if you get knocked back for an appointment it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have any available, you just won’t make them money.
I used to work for a company that was run by the Russian Mafia.
They wanted to push premium SMS services (like the ones you used to find in the back of men's magazines) but the telcos wouldn't deal with them. So they created a mobile aggregator service that the telcos would deal with, and therefore became both the premium service, AND the service that was meant to be regulating them.
Almost every weekend, while drunk, the big bosses would take a bunch of mobile numbers (literally hundreds of thousands) and just bulk upload them into their premium service. It would usually end up being 3 messages - an initiation message that looked like it came from the phone user ($3-$5) then an authorisation message (another $3-$5), and then another confirmation message that looked like it came from the user ($3-$5). So was an extra $9-$15 on a person's bill with no messages arriving on an end users phone at all. Then they got the bill.
Some people would then call the call centre for a refund when they got their bill. Which we would process. But the vast majority of people just paid the bill, which meant almost every weekend, they would pocket (based on an average of 500,000 numbers that didnt claim a refund) between $4.5 million, and $7.5 million for 1 night of work.
Not a bad little racket for them, but they got shut down and the owners fled back to Russia.
So yeah anyone who remembers the premium SMS scams from back in the day. That was these guys.
Many call centre staff have minimal/no life experience and yet they are hired to provide advise to customers (including financial information) and deal with customers with challenging life circumtances.... with zero training.
Fed Govt is just as full of corporate psychopaths as the private sector.
From the Ministers down (RoboDebt) the senior management (GM, NM, EL2's, etc.) are predominantly psychopaths who do not give a flying fuck about the workers nor the products they create that inflict cruelty on the public.
…and is allowed a tax free status. They also have a big influence with the health dept regarding nutritional guidelines and cherry pick their science to conform to their religious beliefs.
Worked in this fish and chip shop once when I was younger, my boss who was pretty dodgy imported fish from China and put them in our display case and labelled them as Australian and jacked the prices up lol.
The WA ambulance service uses **extremely** under qualified patient transport officers to pick up the slack for the understaffed metro ambulance service.
Quite often, especially at night time, if you call an ambulance, you may end up getting a transport team come to your house instead of paramedics.
Most transport officers don’t have a single clue about what to do in an acute health care situation, but the company deems them as suitably qualified after running through their in-house training program.
They even were sneaky enough to continue fooling the public by changing the rank on the back of the uniform from “transport officer” to “ambulance transport”.
Transport are literally glorified taxi drivers.
Worked at a national retail office supplies chain a while back.
One manager was dealing drugs out of the printing section, when the regional manager was informed she just moved him to a different store.
The manager was also shagging a staff manager on shift in the office, it was audible.
A store manager bullied a staff member into operating a forklift with him standing on the tines and going up 3 levels.
The staff member protested and didn't want to be responsible for a serious incident, they were threatened with sacking if they didn't do it.
Footage was captured of this and the store manager then threatened sacking if it was released (it was anyway).
The same regional manager then threatened the whole store if anyone went to WorkSafe about it.
The same store manager was taking money out of petty cash and betting it on the horses over the weekend, then putting the original amount back in on the Monday.
I don't think he had any need of using that particular money, he just didn't want to use an ATM and really liked taking from the business.
Could go on with many stories but basically that particular chain was full of incompetent management who harassed staff and covered for each other as their fulltime job.
The upper management had no clue about how to do their own job, let alone what was going on at store level and it was more an accident that the business was ever profitable.
So basically like every corporate in Aus.
Mining companies are way worse for the environment then most people realise, the shit that happens on a daily basis and is reworded or reclassified to avoid reporting is amazing.
Most people that deliver junk mail will ignore the “No junk mail” signs on letter boxes, the best way to stop junk mail is shoving a rag inside the newspaper hole, it’s too much effort to fit anything into the letter slot.
I was always told when I did catalog delivery that the local paper and the real estate/community banner were *not* considered junk mail and had to go in every letter box bar the ones that were actually blocked off. Everything like catalogs, flyers were junk mail and not to put them in “no junk mail” boxes.
Some people really didn’t like that. Only got threatened once. I was 16. Fuck that job was not worth it.
Woolies workers never actually check whether an item is in stock out the back when you ask them to, they mainly just go back there to shoot the shit for a minute or two.
TW:
Hazing, bullying, se*ual assault, r*pe and s*icides are a very serious and very prevalent issues in the ADF. But it’s all swept under the rug. Most of the time the victim is blamed and the higher rank gets away with it. All propaganda the ADF releases about “reform” is just smoke and mirrors.
Premium dog food at the pet store has a very low markup (sometimes less than 20%) so the price you pay is actually pretty reasonable. When it goes on sale this is usually always brand funded, with rebates provided to the retailer. food is to get you in the door, treats and toys is where the profit is. Just because it’s sold at a pet store doesn’t mean it is safe, ethical or good for your dog.
Australia really needs a proper regulatory body for animal food.
Agreed - there’s so much just blatant lying that goes on in the advertising, along with the extremely low standards we set for a “complete diet”. People are purchasing a product being told that it is good for their pets when it’s just not the case. doesn’t help that unconscionable celebrity vets endorse these brands
Australia's biggest sandalwood grower uses Lorsban, off-label, to kill native rats (status : endangered) around Kununura, WA. Lorsban is an extremely nasty and highly toxic chemical. They then market their sandalwood as 'organic'.
Damn that's depressing. Do you know if there's any reports or something about this online, or anyone has looked into this?
There was a bit of research on effect on persistent pesticides on goanna meat, but because kununurra is such an isolated location, combined with heat and difficult terrain, its difficult to get funding. Also combined with fact that the entire town's economy depends on Sandalwood, any visiting researcher would not be Welcome. Bonus fact : Did you know the Jewish homeland was going to be in kununurra before they chose Israel?
Also. There were many sites globally that were surveyed for tbis purpose including more than one site in Australia. Edit: just realised my comment was so vague. I was referring to the sites for the jewish homeland
Interesting
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I heard about a guy who was a friend of mine's supervisor, who left his wife to marry one of his PhD students, had a kid with her, then left *her* to marry another one of his PhD students. Brilliant scientist, outstanding in his field, brings in all sorts of grant money and fame to the institution, many a blind eye is turned.
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I was an academic for years and you are absolutely right - terrible job, with appalling management at all levels. The people who persist doing good work - and they do exist - are truly dedicated and amazing, given the toxic conditions
Sleeping with the students is a tale as old as time unfortunately. When my mother went to University she had a housemate that would bang the professors for grades.
Nice. If he is too ethical, then he wont know how to be a good judge of when people are unethical.
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Thinking more of a takes one to know one situation haha.
Was this Swinburne or is it just that common?
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If you work in the medical field you might have seen a disinfectant called 'Viraclean' or 'Instramax Pink'. Please do NOT purchase Instramax Pink, it comes from the same manufacturing tank as Viraclean. It just has a different label and costs more. - definitely not a scorned, former employee
I was working an event and this ice cream place, that used nitrogen to freeze the ice cream as some marketing gimmick just sold store bought tubs of streets ice cream & sold it for a pretty penny. --- A lot of businessmen do not wash their hands.
This sounds like nitro lab
N² in Brunswick St was pretty good. Nice vibe and even if it was tub ice cream they did enough to it to disguise and improve it. I still miss it. But Messina still exists if you like lines of people. Lavezzi always slaps. Brunettis tends to have great ice cream and across the road there's plenty more good stuff.
Nice try Tracey Grimshaw
Fun, unrelated fact but in the Australian DVD release of Shark Tale Tracey Grimshaw voices the news fish. She does more journalism in a children’s movie than she does in real life
Software that runs stock exchanges is archaic dodgy shit.
Every engineer wants to replace it but nobody is certain about how it's supposed to work, the people who originally made it have long since moved on (and possibly died of old age), and if you fix the bugs then customers will complain that stuff changed.
I've seen a major system upgrade for a system handling billions be delayed for a year so that the one remaining person in the business who configured it could return from maternity leave.
Same with banks
Subway franchisees are the dodgiest people around. My boss got a “good deal” on some veggies that were literally mouldy and then got mad at me for throwing out the mouldy ones because they were “fine”. Also, everything comes frozen and the tuna is mixed with a whole bag of mayo, usually by a teenage boy with questionable hygiene.
I feel that 90% of this thread will be traumatic fast food stories.
I knew a teenage boy who worked at Subway and was appalled by the hygiene practices. It was a bit confusing for a kid in their first job to be told the rules and then be trained not to follow them.
My friend worked for a Subway and she saw the dodgiest crap there! She’s glad that’s long behind her now haha.
I mercifully had a pretty good store owner who paid well and looked after the stores (he used to own 3 or 4 in eastern Melbourne). They used to give us free soft drink so when someone left their Coke unattended, to fuck with each other, we'd pour the olive juice into it
The frozen cookie dough was 10/10 though, and they can’t stock take it (hint for young players).
I had to tell my friends a few days ago that the childcare industry I was in only required a background check. That's it. Nothing else to work around kids.
The reason Toll was hacked twice and held to ransom was because they had offshored the entire IT department to India and fucked up the process.
>fucked up the process >offshored the entire IT Same sentence mate
Never get involved in a land war in Asia, and never offshore your IT to India.
A lot of infrastructure often requires 120+ year design lives on component (think bridges etc.). Not a problem when the mentality of everyone at the company is "She'll be right, we'll all be dead by then anyway. How long do you need on the certificate?"
Same with buildings. The structural warranty that most builders offer means nothing when a building is supposed to last 50 years structurally.
I used to do paycheques for political figures and let’s just say the expense recipients are a joke. I’ve seen strippers, booze random cash amounts that are obviously drugs all claimed under the tax payers dollars. The worst part, I lost my job for questioning these amounts.
Thanks for being brave enough to speak out
Pure Peninsula Honey in Victoria uses and abuses workers on 457 visas. Their 'local' brand of honey comes from bees that are fed sugar water. I'm 30 and they paid me $17/hr, no super. They also use the old school (and illegal) jaw traps to control possums around their property. You can get this honey from Woolworths, but I would advise against it. Edit: I think the traps are no longer in use because I reported the company to DELWP.
That’s scary
>no super. I worked for the ATO for a while and employers who never paid super always had 457's. I hope you reported them for that, the tax man loves businesses who don't pay super because they get a fortune and get to rip businesses apart lol
Not exactly a secret. I used to work at KPMG and they used to run regular seminars getting people to move to the Cayman offices to expand their tax mitigation department there.
Consulting is basically googling and putting together a nice looking slide deck.
I feel like most pros at any job are good googlers
Your level of service at a hotel is directly tied to greed. Some properties see staffing as a corner than can be cut and the quality of service drops as a result. Having extra staff means having concierges available, housekeeping able to turn the property quick enough and with enough extra done to properly prepare for any last minute bookings. Front desk don’t just check people in, they are tour guides, administration, social media people, online/phone bookings, dealing with requests/complaints, and room service in some places. Shit properties cut front desk first for some reason. I watched a 5 star resort drop to a 3.5, which is a huge drop. All the property got was a slightly better profit from gutting staff. It went from the most desired property to work at in the region to being a shell after waves of resignations of the staff that made it the place to work. I saw 3 supervisors quit from the front desk, leaving it staffed with 4 staff total, all in the one weekend in protest to the GM firing a well-loved manager. The industry is rotten to the core, a place that is great to work in is a dream and I’ve had that pleasure a couple of times. But when they chase a quick buck and cut payroll staff, the whole property is worthless in a couple of years. It took the company too long to act on firing that GM. She was hauled out very quietly on a Friday night by the state manager. By then the damage was done. Being a strata property meant she was also having to work with a heap of owners that watched their investments collapse due to the poor performance of the resort. They all went private, or hired small boutique companies to manage their properties. Last I heard they had lost 60 owners in 3 years, all because she just wanted to cut some corners. No resort gives a fuck about your perfect holiday. Some places are worth staying in, but never think they are going to give two shits about their role in that. It’s the result of the fish rotting from the head, greedy cunts lining their pockets and using KPIs as a way to pretend they are doing a great job.
Went to a favourite place recently, boy what a shocker and a let down after having great previous visits. Spiders and ants in our room when we checked in, a micro shit in the toilet..... woulda been worse if it was on the floor or the bed, I spose.
Yeah, hotels are going downhill. There’s one in Melbourne with a tiny high end restaurant and wine cellar that you’d think would hire experienced staff and pay them well, but it’s far from reality. They barely pay just above minimum wage (level 3?) for floor staff and hire staff with barely any experience and if staff have previous experience they’re pushed to utilise all their skills for the same pay. GM are penny pinchers and charge staff $2 for coffees, even $1 for chocolate powder if you bring your own milk(!!). They only have a double shot portafilter so whenever a single coffee is made 1 shot is wasted. Asked if the shot could be given to the intern working for free. Manager said no.
I worked night audit at a place that had negotiated that the night team are allowed to have food and all the coffee they wanted. It was ordered by the exec chef and f&b managers because we did a lot of their late-night service and opened it all up for them in the morning so it was a fair trade. GM caught wind of this and decided the 2-3 coffees we had with the bowl of chips we’d sometimes make was too much. It took 3 managers to step in for us and tell her that it won’t be happening. A month later all three of us quit when she tried to make a 3 man team downsize to one against all protests that the job was impossible for one person.
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People who claim to be good economic mangers get their cards declined surprisingly often at resteraunts
Are you...talking about members of the LNP?
While the TV current affairs cameras were out the front with some PR hack telling them that the organisation doesn't use dangerous chemicals, the aforementioned chemicals were being loaded onto a ute out the back for "disposal". Still, it was strictly true - the chemicals hadn't been used anymore for almost 24 hours.
Ah, the subtle different between "doesn't" and "hasn't". Ask the right questions, people.
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You would have gotten snow chains with your car rental regardless of whether or not you paid for them (this was in NZ). It's too much admin to haul them in and out of cars based on who paid or not; they just stayed in the cars.
Ha, we went through this hiring a car in Germany. Snow tyres were an optional extra but they're are a requirement of German road laws. Took out chances without option and still got the car with snow tyres.
After The Good Guys were bought by JB HI-FI, JB's business strategy was to intentionally Pitt the stores against each other. If customers didn't like the service at JB they would often take their business to TGG instead not knowing they were taking their money to the same company.
The number of times when I worked at BWS that people got cranky at the prices and were like "I'm going to Dan Murphy's instead!" in an indignant way was baffling.
Ngl BWS and Dan’s is pretty fucking obvious. I didn’t realise JB bought good guys until someone at Harvey’s told me lmao
Your $50 steak (sides and sauce are extra) was grilled by a person in a chef’s uniform with no formal training and who, just a few months ago, was working as a dishwasher. Editing to add: the amount of food and plastic waste that goes on in restaurants is absolutely mind-blowing. Kilos and kilos of chips, rice and bread are thrown away at the end of the night. Hundreds of pretty much untouched plates of food end up in the bin. Single use plastic is so common, I’ve seen back of house staff grab a plastic container, fill it with water, drink the water and chuck the container. Food is pre-made and portioned into containers that are thrown in the bin, literally hundreds per day.
Hardly a secret when it's so rare (pun intended) to get a properly cooked medium-rare steak.
The crazy thing is that people come back again and again. I’m convinced that there’s some psychological phenomenon where people who have paid a hefty fee for a meal convince themselves it was worth it, even when it wasn’t. There are some people who are fussy because they’re paying so much but I feel that the majority of people want to believe they’ve had a great meal, even if it was average at best. Oh and I also think another reason people enjoy the steak is that it’s heavily seasoned. Another not so juicy secret is that most of the seafood is frozen (even if advertised otherwise) and the lobsters live in filthy, stinky tanks and often die in there and get eaten by other lobsters. Yum.
That grilled snapper I sold you? It was basa Battered flathead? Yeah try basa
All your basa are belong to us.
You have no chance to survive make your time
My bro is a marine scientist and lost his shit at a restaurant that tried to pull the old switcheroo of an expensive fish for a cheaper fish. He knew straight away when it was served.
Passing off basa as snapper is a hard sell.
Wait, is it all Basa?
🌎👩🚀👩🚀
Fish are often mislabelled to a certain extent, either it’s something obscure called by a more commonly known name (not that bad or predatory imo, people just want to buy something they’ve heard of), or it’s outright cheap fish sold as something more expensive (quite predatory)
Basa is massively farmed making it super cheap
That's the neat thing, it's all basa.
All the fish in the sea! Are in fact Basa…
Working for Harvey Norman is exactly as bad as you may expect it to be. Proprietors that don’t care about anything but making money, not a smidge of care for the well-being of their employees. Deliberately preying upon certain age groups by making them scared to death of the internet and selling them $750 Norton subscriptions that make around $500 profit for the business. Also Optus sales are a massive cash cow for the business. If you can, please go via Optus themselves or in some instances you’re giving Gerry up to $1000 profit instantly by signing up at a HN store.
Decided to boycott HN after GH successfully lobbied to have GST applied to internet sales. Fuck that guy, in the strongest possible terms. Also heard from people in the industry that he mistreats his horses.
This includes Domayne and Joyce Mayne as well. Weekend sales selling a popular product for under cost value, so it drains the commission made through the week, then you only have to pay your poor staff minimum wage without any of the benefits.
Fuck Gerry Harvey. I did 2 weeks work experience in Harvey Norman at age 16, and the predatory shit I saw made me realise a lot of sales jobs are fucking scummy.
The dodgy vacuum cleaner door salesman model lives on, unevolved
And Gerry Harvey chews his toenails.
I don't know why nobody's naming names, gotta keep the bastards honest. Coles regularly "strongly imply" that you'll get greater consideration for management positions by clocking off at the end of your rostered shift and continue working for free. Plenty of people seemed happy to oblige while I was there. Also they short changed me on my long service leave entitlements. Do not work for Coles if you can avoid it.
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Can confirm. When I worked for Coles, at the end of every shift it was requested/expected to work for free, post shift, for 1-2 hours, to "get the load done." If this wasn't done, the night fill team would get calls between 8am and 9am, demanding to know why performance was down. Half my team (the half who didn't work for free) were pulled into the manager's office during a mandatory unpaid Christmas party, and had our jobs threatened for our lack of commitment to the team. I also lost any extra paid work from Coles as soon as they found out I was working in bars on nights I didn't work for them. It was an absolutely fucked experience, and it seems so normalised in the industry.
Your fresh from the boat seafood is frozen. Your fish of the day is yesterday’s fish of the day and also tomorrow’s fish of the day. Your fresh local Exmouth prawns are frozen in a box and definitely not local. Your ‘house made sauce’ is manufactured by Masterfoods.
But the house put paprika in the masterfoods mayo.
Well yes of course, it's fresh off the boat not fresh out of the ocean.
Makes sense though. You go to sea for a fortnight, everting must be frozen. You can’t go out and back each day
My dad's mate was a prawn trawler captain in the 90s. The second they catch the prawns they go in the freezer and get hit with the first round of preservatives. Once they get back they get processed, hit with another round of preservatives, then get sent to the wholesaler who hits it with another round of preservatives. Dude estimated about 20 different preserving steps between catch and eat. We used to buy prawns directly from him out of the hold, and they were exceptional, far different from anything you can buy.
When companies sell stuff in factory outlets, they are sometimes inferior versions of the stuff they sell in their retail outlets. Like a shoe you might find in the retail store is made in Italy but the 'same' shoe in the outlet store is made in china.
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If it's Greencross, say no more. Money hungry fucks.
I was literally about to ask if it was Greencross.....I had a very sick cat a few years back who's kidneys were failing (we didn't know it at the time) and they snapped on the phone "we're all booked out, sorry" and when I asked about emergencies, she harshly said "I said, we are ALL booked out. Go elsewhere." So we did, and they were all booked out too but agreed it was an emergency and said "come in immediately." Greencross are NOT for the pets, they're for their pockets.
JB Hi-Fi. They teach you how to prey on senior citizens. One of the sales techniques I was told during training was to tell them that "" I use this (insert the pic/phone you wana sell) at home and it is very good". Most elderly people would fall for that.
This isnt limited to JB. This is an extremely common strategy in most sales positions. Not even close to the worst. One tactic I was taught was with Boomer couples to immasculate the man in the relationship(very subtly) by always deferring the wife for decisions. The bloke often gets a quickly bruised ego and will then make rash investment decisions like buying a house to show how in charge they are. Worst ones Ive seen are the "charity" people and gas and elec, both door to door. These businesses exist almost solely to exploit the elderly and ignorant. As a sidenote if "charity" people doorknock or approach you ask if theyre working for free. They never are.
> One tactic I was taught was with Boomer couples to immasculate the man in the relationship(very subtly) by always deferring the wife for decisions. The bloke often gets a quickly bruised ego and will then make rash investment decisions like buying a house to show how in charge they are. lmao. That's actually hilarious
Reminds me of the time I went to JB. First time the salesperson showed me a soundbar for a tv and said they use it at home and it’s very good. I came back the next week and spoke to the same person and I asked about a different one. Salesperson didn’t recognise me (I was wearing a mask) and gave me the same line from the previous week lol
I hope they’ve changed it now but Wendy’s choc dip was literally a vat of chocolate that would be reused every day, it would get topped up and cleaned but never completely changed… although this could have just been the owner of my store. She was so cheap. She doesn’t own them anymore.
had no idea wendy’s still existed. haven’t seen one since i was a kid in the suburbs
Meh that's just the choc dip equivalent of sourdough bread!
The chocolate ganache for icing mudcakes at Woolies lived under the bench in an uncovered giant pot. We heated it up and used it then shoved it back under the bench
The freezer industry temperature metering that goes to food standard Australia for monitoring of frozen perishables is doctored before it's handed over to save the owners a few hundred thousand every year.
Look up The Old England Food Poisoning case from 2003. They had good records that showed the fault lay further back in the food chain than the kitchen. A supplier had ordered a driver to drive around until the turkey that has been sitting on a dock for too long got down below 5c and then delivered it. The 2 worst times for food poisoning are December before Xmas and the week between Xmas and new year's.
Jesus that’s nuts and useful as I can use this info in my job
Anyone use the Redcycle plastic recycling? Surprise surprise, it often ends up in the landfill bin out the back. Usually because of broken bags or because we can spot something in there that shouldn't be (usually milk bottles).
In that War On Waste show they put a GPS tracker into a bag then dropped it off at a store. Then followed it to a regular tip where it all got chucked in landfill
Of course. It had a bloody gps tracker in it. Can't recycle that
Former Woolies worker here. If that bag didn't, end up on the last truck of the day - it was in the skip. If it ended up on the truck - it probably landed in the skip shortly after. Redcycle is just greenwashing.
Working at a servo. Manager would call other servos from other chains and ask “what’s the temperature” as code for fuel price and make sure prices all matched within a cent or two. This was back before mandatory online reporting of prices etc. The cost at the pump had no bearing on what we bought the fuel for two weeks earlier etc.
Oh yeah. I worked at a servo in the early 2000s - my store manager would drive around to check all the other servo's prices, phone them in to head office, and later in the day I'd get an automated call from pricing telling me what to change our prices to. Often we'd jump 10 or 20 cents in the middle of the day for funsies. Catch all the people out who saw the nice price on the way to the work and decided to fill up on the way home - suckers. We also once settled a lawsuit very quietly from one customer who bought a bottle of orange juice, not realizing it was very out of date, drank it, and got pretty sick. (The fights I had with my SM who kept putting all the expired food/drink I took off the shelves, back on the shelves...) (To the best of my knowledge this chain of servos does not exist in Victoria anymore)
Maccas don’t make their apple pies with choko
There’s also no pig fat in the ice cream and no dolphin in the filet.
What if I pay extra for dolphin? That's still on the secret menu, right?
I worked for a well known luxury clothing brand, I won’t say which one because I don’t want to doxx myself, but I know for a fact that they all do it anyway... Tonnes of perfectly good clothing every quarter, simply destroyed. Not recycled, not donated... incinerated. They do not want to sell at too much of a discount, to avoid ‘cheapening’ the brand. Then they also have the nerve to have labels all over their clothes about their “sustainably sourced cotton”. What a load of greenwashing shit.
Bariatric (weightloss) surgery in australia is not independently monitored. The statistics used for the yearly reports are sent in by the surgeons. I have checked the adverse reporting personally and it doesn’t add up to my on-the-ground experience. If you are considering a gastrectomy or gastric sleeve please talk to people who are at least two years post-procedure. It may still be for you, but the outcomes and complications are a lot more to deal with than you will be told.
I don’t know if they ended up doing it but a very, very big, religious aged care company I worked for was trying to get into the funeral business in order to make money off the oldies even after they were dead. Like it was literally sold to us as “increasing profits” as opposed to “this is something nice we can do for our residents and family”
A certain crumbling entertainment complex bought their Forbes 5 star hotel rating - at least in Perth.
When you call a certain second biggest Telco’s customer service and the IVR hangs up on you or it’s so complicated you give up…. That was the intentional outcome of a call diversion project. Nail in the coffin for me
They all do similar sketchy things. Unfortunately it’s really hard to put the nail in the coffin of every telco and still remain a functioning member of society.
Curious to know why you all don't name and shame these companies, particularly if you don't work there anymore? Realistically they're not gonna come and disappear you and it's basically just an anonymous gossip box without naming and shaming. Companies will continue to be cunts until they're named and shamed.
Because the details expose the person themselves usually. I doubt people are worried about the companies themselves. They just want to be anonymous in general
When I worked at Tassal I was asked to change some numbers on a scientific report because they were 'wrong'.
Fuck Tassal - A Tasmanian
Media would love this one, wouldn't be surprised if you get a message from a journo!
I worked at woolies petrol and had pricing call me to raise prices 20 cents per litre and I asked why because we hadn't even had a delivery in the last couple of days. They said they were just raising prices because they could. For no reason. Just to rip customers off.
I believe this. When fuel prices go up there is always some bullshit new report on "global uncertainty" or some other dribble but in reality it is just the companies jacking the price up. then once there is a lot of public outcry about it, they come down then up, then down etc
I used to work at a chain in Perth that would store pancake batter for WEEKS. I mean I would always taste the pancakes before serving to anyone on the day and they tasted fine, just seemed hella nasty. We'd do pancake prep for Sunday brekky...cause everyone wanted pancakes. Whenever I'd get questions or complaints that we'd be reheating pancakes right before serving, I'd always be tempted to ask them when they thought the batter was made. Then watch their faces as I would keep saying "earlier".
Work at a postal sorting company. No packages are treated with respect, even the ones labelled fragile. Often the delivery drivers can’t be bothered picking up the larger packages, so they are left in a freight cycle for periods as long as a month. Theft is also common amongst the smaller packages
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The Australian government once deported a mentally ill Australian man of Turkish heritage to Turkey. When they realised their mistake (i.e this guy had never even been to Turkey in his life and was a highly vulnerable person and had family in Australia looking for him who were very worried because of his mental illness) they contracted the company I worked for to go look for him and bring him back. Someone from my company found the poor guy in Istanbul standing in front of a toy shop looking at toys
Once? Please. Multiple times to many different people. Not all of them get on the news.
There's Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solon who got on the news, but how many more didn't get reported?
The most government departments are outsourced to cheap labour companies that grossly underpay and overwork their employees. The one I worked for people were being assaulted, stalked and harassed and the managers refused to step in. They forced a victim of DV to leave because her abuser worked there and it was easier to make the victim move along than the perpetrator. Said perpetrator now has a lifetime DVO against him.
I got porn in front of the nation Fight Club style without them knowing. I worked in animation years ago and one project was the national nine news intro. It was a shiny globe made up of orange bars spinning around. The “reflection layer” was the Paris Hilton sex tape of hard core porn. Hard to see but we know it’s there. You’re welcome.
Link please we all gotta see this
movie theatres pre-make popcorn during the week and leave it in large bags to warm up and sell on the weekend all the food courts in/around cities have a rat problem the casino pays off the press not to report suicides on premises the flame grilled burger place uses parboiled frozen meat
Suicides don’t get reported most of the time anyway
not the individual cases but the volume and nature of the suicides should definitely be investigated [this is an article from 2016 on the casino in sydney](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-01/suicide-attempts-at-casino-as-gamblers-encouraged-to-play/7895044) its almost 6 years old and is still wildly relevant today
Can say I used to work for a cinema, we make fresh popcorn every day. If we haven't sold all the popcorn by the last session, it gets thrown out.
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Had a paramedic say a similar thing, apparently they get called to a lot of people committing suicide by train by train but it doesn't get reported on because they don't want to give anyone else ideas
I used to work at maccas and even though we had separate bins for garbage and recycling it would all be compacted down together and thrown in the trash
I worked for a company that did retail management software. One of our customers was Just Jeans. At one stage we had to do a significant software change because Just Jeans has many products that they sell in several of the chains they own, i.e. Portman's, Jay Jays, etc. The products are identical and have the same stock codes, but some chains sell them for a lot more money than others.
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Had a hiring manager ask if I was planning on getting pregnant and having a family in the next two years, while searching for a job. Pretty sure that's not allowed.
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The big supermarket will close at the closing time, no sob story will change that. The store is filled with dejected and exhausted, low-paid staff who have been waiting for the exact moment the store closes. Any staff member who caves to a sob story pretty much commits social suicide. We don’t care. Come back tomorrow or go to a servo and leave us alone.
I haven’t worked at a supermarket for 10 years but I can still perfectly rattle off the “good evening customers , the time is now 9pm and this store has ceased trading for the evening. We request that you finalise your purchases and make your way through to the front of the store. On behalf of staff and management we’d like to thank you for shopping with Monopoly Supermarket”
I closed the store once and left the roller door semi open… say enough to slip a shoe box under. This was so one of my workers closing the liquor store could throw the keys back under the door for me. Little did I know a woman then crawled through this gap and proceed to shop for half an hour at her own steady pace. We only noticed her as we were about to walk out the back security door half an hour later. Couldn’t believe the disbelief in her eyes when I told her the was no way we were letting her buy anything. Promptly kicked her out. Unbelievable.
Our award winning Key Lime Pie is made from the recipe on the side of the key lime juice bottle. Literally nothing is different. Yet it's been voted our town's best dessert for 4 years.
I worked for an IT company in Perth and whenever work got slow the boss would logon remotely to client's servers and break shit, so the client would have to call about problems they were having. He would also flash the wrong firmware for a particular line of SMB routers which would cause WiFi to cease working and not be available in the web interface. Easily fixable by putting the right firmware back on but he used it to justify replacing routers every 2 years. He started a (false) rumour that an employee and a contractor were having an affair, while he was sniffing (unsuccessfully) at clients himself. I am very glad to not be working there anymore!
Worked at woolworths in the bakery. We would bake things, bag them and then leave them for a day or two and whack stickers on them that said "baked today". Especially on weekends because paying the bakers to work Sundays from midnight to 7am apparently costs alot so they bake less on weekends. The biscuits were sometimes 5 days old before they hit the shelves with a baked on sticker for that day.
Google has way to much money. They took the side of a building off in Sydney just to put a monorail car inside to use as a meeting room. They bought scooters to get around INSIDE the building. But the big take away is that unless you want to dedicate your existence to your work there, it's just a job, and in my experience not even a well paying one. Still looks good on the resume though
I'm surprised it's not well paying. A coworker of mine was recruited and was making over $300k. I wouldn't have called him exceptional from a technical perspective.
Telstra does not put the customer at the centre of everything they do. Turns out that was just an empty marketing slogan.
OP was asking for secrets not well known facts
I don't think this is a secret to anyone who has ever tried to deal with telstra's customer service
Next thing I know you'll be telling me Nike's slogan doesn't give me carte blanche to act like a sociopath.
Most of the “Australian made” furniture is just upholstered here. It’s all actually made in China from rainforest timber with dodgy upholstery foam.
Having a family member working in a Covid quarantine hotel, the number of staff members caught (and quietly let go) sleeping with people in isolation at just that location was staggering. I couldn't even fathom the level of horn required
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Many companies use run to the line for the financial year . What this means is they stop paying their bills for the last six to eight weeks of the year to make their financial performance seem better. Shareholders none the wiser.
Yep and they all did the reverse in early 2020 to qualify for job keeper. Was hilarious to hear bosses saying things like "I don't care if you haven't finished yet, just send me the invoice today" towards the end of some of those reporting periods.
TV news - took the ‘work chopper’ (yep a helicopter) and came back with a story - dead teen’s body on the side of the road. Interviewed police - drug overdose. Sad thing was she was 14, it was the next day and no one reported her missing. Chief of staff came out and wanted me to turn it into the lead story cos it was a slow news Saturday. I didn’t know what he meant. So he showed me. He rewrote my script to be a suspected murder. Because the editor was ready to go, I recorded the voiceover, cut the story then packed up my desk and left without formally resigning. Until then, I thought the news was truth. Rose coloured glasses fell into the dirt, crushed.
I don't know how much of a secret they considered it to be, but we didn't have many women at the company and the company would frequently plan social events that the women deliberately weren't invited to, or in many cases, told about.
The Liberal Party??
I work in transport. I have literally seen an entire train carriage be blocked off during peak hour because a state government minister was travelling on it and wanted the carriage to themselves.
Worked for the City Council of a certain Golden Coasted city. Mayors corruption is openly known and....admired? I worked in the contact centre and my co-worker bragged about being given rides in the Mayor's Ferrari. Also, the tactics of this council are intentionally to delay and spin you around in circles, their business model is to transfer you around the contact centre until you give up, or to try and place the blame back on you. Overcharged for rates? you didn't read the bill. Public Watermain leaking in your yard? call a plumber, thats your fault. The Marketting department was easily 10x the size of other much more important departments, you could openly hear people saying things like " How do we make the Council appear to care without doing anything? " This council rakes in almost $1,000,000,000 a year and has outsourced everything. I was paid $28 per hour, with $10 per hour going straight to Hayes Recruitment.
Edit: kinda want to name and shame but I'm afraid to be doxxed and stuff so yeah, just figure the place out by yourself LOL I used to work in this well-known fish market, already quitted because of toxic working environment. For the record, maybe think twice before buying stuffs in this place especially the oysters and sea urchin products in the sushi bar. Their oysters are not fresh, they are all kept frozen inside their cool room. For the sea urchin, they are using a some kind of prepacked sea urchin imported from somewhere else and it is not fresh, it's frozen as well. If u see the sea urchin sushi/dishes got displayed with their shells on, they are using the shells only. The actual sea urchin inside the shells are not used for the dish, we are switching it with the frozen one and the actual ones are being sold separately. We sometimes use the packed sea urchin that already passed expiry date by 1 or 2 days also, this also applies to the fish roe products. So yeah if they said that all the foods are fresh, it's actually not. But if its fresh from the cool room, then yea it is.
Your furniture isn't delayed because of the pandemic. It's delayed because the company took more orders than they could fill, knowing you would probably accept the pandemic excuse.
Not sure how much of a secret it really is but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Ergon(huge Qld electricity supplier)won't disconnect your power (for failing to pay your bill) over the Christmas break).
All commercial painting companies skip a coat on everything they can
Brunetti in Myer Melbourne CBD has an extremely bad rat problem to the extent that no retail staff on the level are allowed food or snacks on that level (break room on another level is fine)
Major optical chain caps the amount of patients they’ll see with irritated eyes and foreign bodies, because you won’t buy glasses. So if you get knocked back for an appointment it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have any available, you just won’t make them money.
Lol it's like when you have an eye exam and then ask for the prescription to take with you "Why do you need it? We can store it safely here!"
Optometrists are legally required to give you a copy of your script on request, is they don’t, call them out.
They do, but they sure as hell don't like it
I used to work for a company that was run by the Russian Mafia. They wanted to push premium SMS services (like the ones you used to find in the back of men's magazines) but the telcos wouldn't deal with them. So they created a mobile aggregator service that the telcos would deal with, and therefore became both the premium service, AND the service that was meant to be regulating them. Almost every weekend, while drunk, the big bosses would take a bunch of mobile numbers (literally hundreds of thousands) and just bulk upload them into their premium service. It would usually end up being 3 messages - an initiation message that looked like it came from the phone user ($3-$5) then an authorisation message (another $3-$5), and then another confirmation message that looked like it came from the user ($3-$5). So was an extra $9-$15 on a person's bill with no messages arriving on an end users phone at all. Then they got the bill. Some people would then call the call centre for a refund when they got their bill. Which we would process. But the vast majority of people just paid the bill, which meant almost every weekend, they would pocket (based on an average of 500,000 numbers that didnt claim a refund) between $4.5 million, and $7.5 million for 1 night of work. Not a bad little racket for them, but they got shut down and the owners fled back to Russia. So yeah anyone who remembers the premium SMS scams from back in the day. That was these guys.
A certain Australian casino used to 51% owned by the Catholic Church.
Many call centre staff have minimal/no life experience and yet they are hired to provide advise to customers (including financial information) and deal with customers with challenging life circumtances.... with zero training.
Fed Govt is just as full of corporate psychopaths as the private sector. From the Ministers down (RoboDebt) the senior management (GM, NM, EL2's, etc.) are predominantly psychopaths who do not give a flying fuck about the workers nor the products they create that inflict cruelty on the public.
Weetbix arent made in a sanitarium, despite what the name says
Fun fact: Sanitarium (which makes weet bix) is owned by the seventh day adventist church.
…and is allowed a tax free status. They also have a big influence with the health dept regarding nutritional guidelines and cherry pick their science to conform to their religious beliefs.
Yeah, always singing Metallica in my head when munching Weet-bix.
Sanitarium Feed me wheat Sanitarium Just give me a bowl
Worked in this fish and chip shop once when I was younger, my boss who was pretty dodgy imported fish from China and put them in our display case and labelled them as Australian and jacked the prices up lol.
The WA ambulance service uses **extremely** under qualified patient transport officers to pick up the slack for the understaffed metro ambulance service. Quite often, especially at night time, if you call an ambulance, you may end up getting a transport team come to your house instead of paramedics. Most transport officers don’t have a single clue about what to do in an acute health care situation, but the company deems them as suitably qualified after running through their in-house training program. They even were sneaky enough to continue fooling the public by changing the rank on the back of the uniform from “transport officer” to “ambulance transport”. Transport are literally glorified taxi drivers.
Worked at a national retail office supplies chain a while back. One manager was dealing drugs out of the printing section, when the regional manager was informed she just moved him to a different store. The manager was also shagging a staff manager on shift in the office, it was audible. A store manager bullied a staff member into operating a forklift with him standing on the tines and going up 3 levels. The staff member protested and didn't want to be responsible for a serious incident, they were threatened with sacking if they didn't do it. Footage was captured of this and the store manager then threatened sacking if it was released (it was anyway). The same regional manager then threatened the whole store if anyone went to WorkSafe about it. The same store manager was taking money out of petty cash and betting it on the horses over the weekend, then putting the original amount back in on the Monday. I don't think he had any need of using that particular money, he just didn't want to use an ATM and really liked taking from the business. Could go on with many stories but basically that particular chain was full of incompetent management who harassed staff and covered for each other as their fulltime job. The upper management had no clue about how to do their own job, let alone what was going on at store level and it was more an accident that the business was ever profitable. So basically like every corporate in Aus.
Mining companies are way worse for the environment then most people realise, the shit that happens on a daily basis and is reworded or reclassified to avoid reporting is amazing.
Most people that deliver junk mail will ignore the “No junk mail” signs on letter boxes, the best way to stop junk mail is shoving a rag inside the newspaper hole, it’s too much effort to fit anything into the letter slot.
I was always told when I did catalog delivery that the local paper and the real estate/community banner were *not* considered junk mail and had to go in every letter box bar the ones that were actually blocked off. Everything like catalogs, flyers were junk mail and not to put them in “no junk mail” boxes. Some people really didn’t like that. Only got threatened once. I was 16. Fuck that job was not worth it.
Woolies workers never actually check whether an item is in stock out the back when you ask them to, they mainly just go back there to shoot the shit for a minute or two.
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Jill singer vs Jeff Kennet or something more recent?
TW: Hazing, bullying, se*ual assault, r*pe and s*icides are a very serious and very prevalent issues in the ADF. But it’s all swept under the rug. Most of the time the victim is blamed and the higher rank gets away with it. All propaganda the ADF releases about “reform” is just smoke and mirrors.