Businesses have been known to cut corners and abuse their employees to make a buck. It's a trick as old as the institution of employment itself.
But it does come back to bite them... eventually. Every once in a while a business owner feels the effect of the pain they have caused on other people.
Either way, we now talk to each other about these exploitive and abusive practices.
Redditor PMForDickGraysonPics asked:
What are some of the worst business practices you've seen?
Here were some of those answers.
Not The Animals
A veterinarian I once worked for tried to make me reuse bloody IV tubing between patients, "just rinse it out" he told me. He charged the same amount for a pain injection for a 5 lb pet and a 150lb pet, he over-worked and underpaid his employees, he was rude to his clients, and tried to make staff carry out tasks they were not qualified/educated to do. He would cut corners in any possible way.
Several of us reported him to the board.
Yeah Just Do It Fam
Hostility towards raises. Rewarding your existing employees is almost always cheaper than hiring new. Ive had a manager that scoffed at a single 3% raise for someone who had no raise for 5 years. Good luck hiring a new person with that experience and for less money. There's a reason why job hopping gets you more money, and it's not because hiring new is cheaper.
This Is Called Entrapment
Any company/service that allows you to sign up using the internet with minimal verification but requires you to either produce ID, bills, proof of address, or show up in person to cancel that service.
if i can set it up via the internet i should be able to cancel using the internet too.
Buzz Buzz Buzz
I used to serve at a restaurant where we wore pagers that buzzed us when a table's food was ready. Good idea right? Well the owners had the policy that you had to immediately go pick up the food no matter what, and that included if you were in the middle of taking another table's order. They said that people "understand" and are cool with it. Of course they weren't though. Every time I stopped taking a table's order and went and got the food, they were totally pissed off. I could not believe the owners did not understand why literally no other restaurant on the planet does it that way.
Stealing!
I use the term "business" loosely, but I once did graduate research with a professor who was in the process of trying to get a major auto manufacturer to invest in our lab. They liked us, but wanted an example of some of our work. So rather than directing them to some publications of ours, my professor gave them a zip file containing all of our recent unpublished research, including the basis for a patent application.
My professor was shocked when they just kept it.
She Done Closed
I worked at a restaurant that wouldn't let people get a refund on their food even though there was a cockroach in it. Instead they offered a 10% discount on the food as per their "policy". Needless to say this restaurant no longer exists.
Forcing You To Quit
Trying to get employees to quit. My managers at fast food didn't want to keep long term employees due to having to pay them more and firing them means unemployment costs. Us quitting means no unemployment and not having to give raises.
Fraud....
So this store put a massive discount on weighted blankets. They were originally selling for $150, but were now being offered for $39.99.
The catch? You'd need to sign up for free as a VIP member online. Urm ok no harm done.
So i signed up and bought the blanket. And so did thousands of other people.
The store cancelled our orders and refunded our money, claiming that they weren't able to fulfil our orders. And now they had a couple thousand more new names on their mailing list.
And sure enough marketing emails came pouring through. I unsubscribed once but still had emails coming in.
THE POOR DOGGOS
I heard this one from a friend: She worked at a dog kennelling business that would tour prospective clients through the front of the building and show off how each dog would get its own indoor/outdoor run area and specialized attention, etc. Then when Thanksgiving and Christmas came and they got more bookings then they could accommodate, they set up cages and stacked kennels in a back room and people were paying big dollars thinking that their dogs were in a nice roomy pen while the business crammed as many dogs as they could into these basic cages. It was shameful.
A Rock And A Hard Place
I worked for a big car rental company in the returns department. They would push us to find and charge customers for any new damage on their cars by awarding bonuses on top of our monthly salary.
We were given mirrors to look for scratches under the cars where costumers would normally not have checked before they rented the car, often leading to heated arguments over if it really was their fault or not. The company did not care either way and made us charge their insurance deposit if they refused to pay. The daily verbal abuse and stress from being sandwiched between my managers and angry customers has definitely left a mark on my mental health and I will probably never work in the traveling industry again.
While many of the things described aren't illegal, they're definitely unethical.
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