The first thing you do every day at PetSmart is dump the dead reptiles into the trash. We treated them as well as we could once they were in the store -- given our fairly minimal resources -- but they're mistreated in transit and often die within a day of arriving at the store. We once reordered a chameleon three times because they kept dying. Everyone knew they were too delicate to transport, but the head office wanted a chameleon in the store. Most employees aren't aware of this, since management tries to sweep it under the rug, but I was the morning custodian.

The birds are also neurotic as hell due to sheer mind-numbing boredom, and the rodents bite because they're unsocialized. Elderly hamsters get put in the back room, where they'll never be purchased because they make customers sad. At least in my experience, the employees genuinely try to take care of the animals, but it's just not a good environment for them.

The cats are okay, though, since they're not actually sold by PetSmart. The company just rents out display space to rescue groups and shelters. They're mostly pretty happy and well cared for.

When diesel fuel gets spilled in working water front they just spread dish soap. This sinks the fuel to the bottom, where it can't be cleaned up, avoiding the rainbow slick, 10k fine, and a real clean up.

Ruby Falls is fake. Their waterfall is pumped in. It's artificial. The formations are paint and plastic and Styrofoam or occasionally purchased from other caves halfway across the country. They lie about the height of the falls. Like not a little exaggeration, they claim it's almost twice as high as it is. Most of the stories your tour guides tell you are made up. Unless they have gray hair their funny quips about past tours are mostly bs.

The employees are not told any of this and have to piece it together on their own. A lot of management legitimately doesn't know. The tour guides know and don't care, the ones that do care quit. They threaten to sue employees who ever reveal any of this EVEN TO FELLOW EMPLOYEES!

Walmart distribution center had a week long orientation. For about 2 days of that orientation they gave us reasons why unions are bad and have no place in the company .

They told us we would be terminated if we tried to unionize. They pretty much fed us propaganda materials and treated us like kids. They made us repeat that we understood the situation and the consequences of attempted unionization.

Comcast spams their own employees asking them to donate money to their PAC to fight Net Neutrality. Fuck Comcast, I'm glad I was fired.

Worked at Domino's in college. Our franchisee made it a fireable offense to call in sick. If you missed a scheduled shift, it would be considered quitting, and you wouldn't get put on the schedule ever again.

As a result, workers would come in to work INCREDIBLY ill and still make your food. I once witnessed a coworker begin to make a pizza, stop to go puke in the bathroom, than continue making the pizza.

DuPont killed off an endangered species in an area they wanted to expand. Then they laid off some folks who knew they were endangered, and magically the EPA inspector didn't find anything, because they had buried up the pits and holes where the frogs had died

This is my best story, I was 18 and a pushover at the time, wasn't going to argue since I just started working there:

At Staples (in Canada), we ran out of pencil crayons during back-to-school season, which was not good for business; parents want to do one-stop shopping for school. So one of the managers took me to the Wal-Mart at the other end of the shopping center, and we loaded up 2 carts with ALL of their pencil crayons.

It gets worse. To eliminate any suspicion and prevent the Wal-Mart managers from stopping us, we told the cashiers we were on a mission trip to Africa and that these were supplies for poor schools over there. They believed it, we took them all, stocked the shelves at Staples, and resold them.

Looking back, damn that was some shady shit.

Arby's is vile. They will sell you sandwiches that are literally roast beef shavings and burnt scraps because they want to save money by not wasting even inedible bits of beef. I was told, when I worked there, to not waste any meat, even if it meant rolling a pile of burnt skin, rubbery scraps, and miscellaneous shavings into a ball and plopping it on a bun.

I quit after a week.

Edit: so, worth clarifying--yes, there are well-run Arby's. Mine was a training store owned by a very large franchisee, and they are the embodiment of penny-pinching miserliness. Their preferred method of rotating stock (cheeses, veggies) is to switch the labels when the hold date is exceeded, rather than actually discarding the expired products.

I used to work at a well-known chain restaurant (not Applebee's) when I was young.

People would ask all the time if something was microwaved, due to their food varying in temperature, their plate being hot, the taste of their food, or whatever. Y

es, the food is microwaved. No, we will not actually tell you that. From what I could tell, your main course was made to order. So if you ordered the chicken, they would actually cook the chicken on the stove right after you ordered it. Everything else, like your sides, was shoved in plastic bags and "cooked" in the microwave. Like your potatoes, veggies, rice, soup, whatever. I think fries were actually made to order as well since they were meant to be crispy.

Also, it really boggled my mind when people would order dessert. It's literally a frozen piece of cake, cheesecake, or whatever. None of it is fresh. And the ice cream is the cheapest vanilla bean ice cream on the market. We got ours from Aldi's by the brand "Dean's" which is well known for being a large tub at a low price.

When I worked in the mailroom for the main AT&T facility for the West Coast, the management company Global Real Estate would order Tivo's and flat screen TV's for the 350+ vacant rooms in the building at the end of every fiscal year. After they were installed, the following weekend all those TV's and Tivo's would "magically" turn up missing.

If you look up Global Real Estate, they're up to some pretty shady shit all around the world. I'm pretty sure they're run by the mob. My Italian boss once made a thinly veiled death threat to me over a steak during a Christmas party.

The best I can think of is Burger King gets a lot of it's foods from other companies while advertising that everything they make is their own branding. That and none of the stuff we fry are fresh, they're just re-dipped and re-fried over and over in used batches.

My friend from panera worked over 40 hours a week multiple weeks, and her boss would cut her hours at 40 and not even pay her a regular wage for the extra hours. She reached out to corporate about it, and they did nothing.

I have an experiment for you. Take a thin stack of regular index cards and go to your local Wal Mart. Go to the fresh chicken section. The long clear plastic strip at the front of the shelf can be lifted up out of the black shelf. Lift it up. Take your index cards and place it where the plastic was. Now run it, without lifting it up, to the end of the shelf. If half rotten chicken guts don't fall out of that shelf then you are at a cleaner Wal Mart than I've ever been in. Odds are you'll be able to see (and smell) them caked all over the bottom of the plastic thing as soon as you pull it out of the shelf. When I worked at Wal Mart I always waited until the place was practically devoid of customers before I pulled those shelves apart to clean them.

I worked for a company that is the largest producer of pharmacy software in the US. There's a bunch of beans to spill. I won't name the company directly and I will say this is all "allegedly" true because I am about to accuse the company of systemic gross criminal negligence.

Nearly 60% of all patients in the US exist in one of our systems and your information is 100% for sure compromised. Multiple security breaches occurred during my time there both internal and external. Despite this and the massive amount of HIPAA data that was stolen (think Equifax levels of information stolen BUT they also stole your credit card numbers and your patient records) the company has not changed its policies at all. They have no network security to speak of and most pharmacies that use the software are protected by a single 4-character password that is so easy to guess it frequently is cracked by accident.

The company regularly hires contractors with no background checks and no drug testing. They are immediate, on day 1, given full backend access to all pharmacy systems that use our software. In order to learn the software, they are taught to create false patient, doctor, and RX records, sometimes in live store environments without the stores' consent or knowledge. Multiple employees have been caught creating false controlled substance scripts in pharmacies in the area then picking them up after work even going so far as to create fake insurance payments so it looks like the store is getting paid. Most independently owned pharmacies make do not track actual earnings. I don't understand how they're in business.

You will get fired if you will not assist pharmacies using the system to falsify DEA reports. Pharmacies do this to hide illegal sales of controlled substances. The company is closing in on half a billion dollars of wealth. There is systemic racism, homophobia, and sexual assault occurring openly. They are about to close deals with almost all major pharmacy chains. The CEO actively participates and goes out of his way to encourage discrimination of non-Christians in the workplace. They lie to their customers constantly.

Those deals with the major chains include Wal-Mart and Walgreens. This would put the information of nearly 90% of US patients into a system that is (or was when I left) known to have active security vulnerabilities which have been exploited in multiple known hacks with no intention of correcting them. This includes your social security and/or DL#.

The entirety of the system was held by ransomware at one point. We told our customers it was a network outage at our headquarters while the CEO got together $10 million or so to get it back. This was caused by an employee torrenting porn on his workstation. The employee in question received no discipline, still works there, and golfs with the CEO once a week. The CEO has been caught multiple times in his office during work hours with multiple secretaries between his knees.

I could go on for days about this crap. If they were a consumer-facing company I'm sure things would be different but they work mostly with businesses so they get away with it.