I was told to lie to a client once…Once. I guess I’ve had it pretty good.
Ninja.
There was this one guy who wanted his employees to drive around digging up any flowers they saw on what looked like unattended land, which he would then turn around and sell…
The store had contract agreements with food and alcohol vendors which included merchandising, displays, and expensive equipment like coolers. The owner made the agreements, got them to install the equipment, and then just made bare minimum orders from them, if that, while buying sodas, chips, and beer in bulk and breaking up the retail packages to sell individually. The vendors would show up at the store and he would chase them away before they could come into the store and check their products. I really don’t think he understood or even read his vendor contracts.
He though he was saving money, but as I attempted to explain to him on several occasions, it was penny-wise, dollar foolish, but it went right over his head. Like I said, the man had no idea what he was doing.
If I had had the money, I’d have bought the place from him and made a killing, or at least turned a profit, but I was only working there because I was broke and couldn’t find any other job.
During the summer while I was in college, I worked for a business that imported live animals. One day, they sent me to get a shipment at the airport, but the container had been left out on the runway in July. Many of the animals in the container were dead or in danger of dying by the time I picked them up.
I counted up the dead animals and brought the whole shipment back to the warehouse. My boss started finding dead animals in the warehouse cages and adding them to the dead from the shipment in order to boost his insurance claim.
I worked for a tourist spot in Chicago on the lakefront selling souveniers from a stand. The owner had an agreement with a grubby looking guy that he would come in and take some of our crap like glowsticks and other things that lit up, and he would go out into the park and sell them to kids and parents and people on dates etc. At the end of the night he would pay me for the stuff he took and cash out and keep the rest.
This grubby guy was not liscensed as a park vendor, was not a real employee, and I was told to say that he did not work for us if I was ever asked. This lead to a confrontation with the Police where I tried to say he didn’t work for us but they knew exactly what was going on and I had to say I knew who he was and he worked for us so that he wouldn’t go to jail. I almost never came back to work.
Also tourist trap or no, we charged 17.99 for disposeable cameras that cost less than half that at any drug store, I thought it was so scumbaggy to gauge people to take some pictures of what might be a memorable vacation, or keep them from doing so out of sheer greed. I hated even telling people who asked me how much the cameras cost.
Lol, I used to work for a certain well known childrens book publisher/distributor, what we sold a book for was about 8-10 times as much as we paid for the book.
I win/lose.
I work for the State Government Of Tennessee.
I was working at a chain grocery store when I was 17. You got quite a bonus working late saturdays and sundays, around 40% of the whole monthly salary with the right shifts, IF you had more than a certain amount of hours per month. Every now and then my employer fudged with the time stamps(we had to write in a code every start and end of a shift) for my shifts, so that the total amout of hours amounted to less than the required limit per month. As the cynical teenager I was, I recorded every minute of my shifts in physical format with witnesses to back it up, and told him to give me my money or face the reprecussions. He always tried with the “Oh, something must have gone wrong with the machine…” routine, but eventually backed off and gave me the money.
We also did not get paid lunch hours, but was still required to stay at the work place, wich is illegal in Norway.
Nearly every restaurant I’ve worked at, from a country club to a dive Mexican place has cut corners but the most egregious was Pepino’s in Walled Lake, Michigan. Everyone raved about the bean salad every table got for free in its own cute little bean pot from which it was dipped by the customer. And when the little pot was cleared from the table we were to dump any remainder back in the jumbo container awaiting the next table. Same w/ the bread baskets - that turned out to be nearly universal in the places I’ve worked, even a very hoity-toity French-influenced wild game restaurant in Northville, MI.
I was reminded of that in a Bar Rescue episode where the un-savvy owner exhorted his bar staff to save the foam from poured beers and pitchers to be used in a later beer. Saving pennies.
I really prefer going through life not knowing how restaurants do things.
I worked in-house for a number of temp agencies and I found them all the be lacking in ethics but the worst was an agency in the Wall St. area which coded the applications for age and race, listened in on calls without telling people, had hidden cameras even in the bathrooms, used discriminatory practices when making placements, claimed they fully tested and reference checked applicants when they didn’t, and much more. So, it was no surprise that the owner was convicted of making false claims in order to get 9/11 funds. Both her office and home were in two separate buildings two short blocks from the WTC and she claimed that her home had been damaged and she had been traumatized when, in fact, she was out in the Hamptons and her NYC home was completely gutted for renovations. And, furthermore, when she returned to NYC it had always been her intention to stay at a hotel and was on the record as having a long-term reservation there because her home was to be under construction. So she got some big bucks from one fund or another. When she was caught she tried to blame it all on her accountant but ended up having to go to jail every weekend for a year.
Oh, and she made her employees go back to work months before she returned to her apartment.
I worked for a vet that was negligent to the point I ended up being called to testify against him. There were too many incidents to number but generally, he would do surgery without a mask and I saw him once blot an incision with a surgery towel he picked up off the floor. He botched one dog’s growth removal so bad that she had to be hospitalized for a month. He knew he botched it and pretty much treated the dog for free (the owners none the wiser for it). That wasn’t the worst of it though. The case I had to testify in - the dog came in for having diarrhea. The tech took an x-ray and I heard him tell the doctor the dog (who was being difficult) “passed out”. The doctor never once looked at the dog after the tech told him this, just directed them to give it subq fluids and an injection. When the owner came in to pick up her dog, it collapsed in the room and was exhibiting agnonal breathing. The first time the doctor saw this dog in the the critical condition it was in was when the kennel girl summoned him into the room. The door was open so I got to witness the entire conversation where the terrified owner was begging him to to tell him what was wrong with her dog - the dog that walked in normally when she dropped it off and was now dying in front of her - and he started yelling at her that the dog was in bad shape and she needed to take it to the ER clinic (which wasn’t even open yet). Understandably, the lady was in shock and called her husband to meet her at the clinic, which delayed treating the dog even more, and it eventually died. No one knows why the dog crashed in the first place but he made no move at all to stabilize an obviously crashing patient that was IN HIS HOSPITAL. He got a severe disciplinary action over that one but didn’t lose his license until (well after I left) his A/C went out on his kennel and he lied about two dogs that died because of it.
Those are the major things- there were also the minor issues like letting an unlicensed assistant stitch up dogs, or calling us at 8 in the morning and saying he wouldn’t be until 10 - emergencies be damned.
It was 1970 when I first got into the city, fresh out of college and it being a recession, the best I could do was go to a private employment agency, who charged me $150 to find me a job as a security guard for a real estate financial firm. They took $50 in cash and the remainder from my first check. I was told that this firm was “A real mover” and that “The sky’s the limit” if I wanted a future in real estate. Anyway, the financial company was really dodgy. They had no security guard license and in the first week, I was nearly arrested by the local police, while on patrol of the firm’s real estate assets. The police saw my car and badge and since there was no record of the firm, thought I was trying to impersonate a peace officer. That was barely cleared up when I walked into the office late one night and found one of the firm’s managers having sex with a secretary in an office corridor. In the next couple of weeks, the firm came under investigation by the local Grand Jury and it turned out it was selling real estate without having title to the land. The firm was shut down. I was let go and there was going to be no more paychecks, us hourly types were just going to be left in the lurch, including my supervisor. He said the he// with it and told me to take a couple of IBM selectric typewriters (then worth about a month’s pay) as compensation for the paychecks I’d never be getting…and watched as he backed up his car and took several for himself.
About half the management of that firm ended up going to state prison for fraud.
In some states (like New York) it’s illegal for one retail outlet to buy alcoholic beverages from another. Anly place that sells alcohol to the public can only buy if from licenced wholesalers.
Hm, I worked in a boiler room setting appointments for time shares in Northern Virginia. I actually sort of liked the job, the people I worked with were nice, and honestly, all I did was ask the people if they were employed, and set an appointment for them to go stay overnight and sit through a presentation. I actually went on an appointment with someone that filled in one of the ‘You can win a vacation’ cards for the same company a couple months after I left the job. [I got a job with better hours.]
I worked for a truck rental place in Va Beach with 3 branches. One of the pieces of paperwork I filled out when I took the job was stating that if I didn’t give 2 weeks notice, they would keep the first paycheck. They held the first paycheck until you were fired or quit. It is illegal to hold a paycheck like that, and really illegal to hold it if you don’t give 2 weeks notice. I quit because they wanted me to stay in the office, keeping it open when Hurricane Charlie was getting ready to hit. The man I was living with was out in the parking lot in a car with our luggage. We had no trucks to rent, they were all out, the lot was totally empty. I calmly locked the money and keys in the office safe, called the owners, and told them that I quit, the resignation letter was in the safe and I was locking up and leaving for Dillwyn now. In retaliation, they kept my first paycheck, my last paycheck, and were trying to claim that I also owed them another couple hundred dollars for ‘errors made while I was training’. Heh. I had a friend still working in the main office, so she copied the relevant contracts from the files, copied my whole employment file, and went with me to the Labor Board. I still had copies of the employment handbook, all the paperwork she copied and the labor board investigated. They came up with all sorts of irregularities - enough so the owners of the company had to track down all the employees for the past years and pay all sorts of money to us for all the ways they screwed us out of money in hours, overtime, withholdings and the lot - including several hundred thousand dollars in penalties 
I worked selling advertising sort of camoflaged as little articles about the businesses. The company had lots of boilerplate about all sorts of different types of businesses. We would go through a phone book for an area like Hartford CT, and call every little business on our page. For example, a gift shop - we would call and find out the name of the owner, what type of stuff they sell [like Lladro figurines] and sort of fill in the blanks in the boiler plate and put the resulting little ‘articles’ into a newspaper insert full of other little articles about local businesses. People would more or less be conned into thinking that this was for a legit business section in the newspaper.
I worked for a payday loan company. :o
THe Boston public transit authority (MBTA). Part time winter job (shoveling snow). The boss would buy snow shovels from a local hardware (full price). They would all get “lost”, and he wold buy another bunch.
He had a nice relationship with the guy who owned the hardware store.
You are so fucking tiresome, man.
Joe
I worked for a telemarketing company once. LOL What do I win?
I was in college at the time and didn’t know any better. They had us cold calling people around town selling tickets for an event that the local “Police Association” was putting on. It turns out that this “Police Association” was a fictional group that the company would make up.
They had us calling people in Holland, MI for a supposed event being put on by the “Grand Rapids Fire Fighters Association”. No wonder we weren’t getting any phone sales. They also had lists of numbers we were told to call that were “unlisted”… a big time no no.
I quit after 4 months. They went out of business a few months after that.