15 ex-employees reveal 'dark secrets' about their jobs that companies don't want you to know

All toxic workplaces have dark secrets that they don't want the world to see, ranging from sketchy business practices and exploitation to discount hacks and marketing scams. While companies don't want to reveal these secrets, employees almost always know what's going on, considering they work there and probably are being asked to do it as well. Employees are always willing to dish on their employers after they've left the job. One Reddit user asked, "What were you told to keep secret about a company you worked for, but you don't work there anymore," and the replies were eye-opening. There's a good chance not all of them are true, so we'd do well to take them with a pinch of salt. 

Here are the top comments we came across:

1. 

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. u/Reddit

2.

I worked in a coffee shop where they would buy individually packaged muffins in bulk, like the kind you see in convenience stores. They would then have us remove them from their packaging and wrap them in saran wrap, and sell them as homemade for over twice the price as what they sold literally next door at the gas station. I always enjoyed the compliments I got for my baking skills. u/Mlefurr

3.

Uber had a project where they hired a bunch of us (from a temp agency) to just take free rides over the city all day in order to essentially spy on the competition. They asked us to take pics of drivers' Lyft-enabled phones turned on during rides. I heard the info was later used to f*ck with Lyft and create fake activity zones or something, so that it would create less business for them. Pretty messed up, really. u/Nonhiphipster

4.

I worked for a chicken restaurant. At one point we were so infested with cockroaches it was normal to see about 20 a day. We (The management and supervisor staff) begged the manager to shut down the store to clean. Instead we never ever stopped and were required to come in on the weekends to clean around everything. We also were required to call cockroaches "friends" so we wouldn't let the customer know that we were infested. On more than one occasion we would feel them crawling on us and we were told we weren't allowed to react or we would be written up. Thankfully we got shut down by the health department and corporate took over the store and turned it around. u/waywardMSL

5.

I started working as a casual in a seafood department of a supermarket franchise a while ago. After 2 months they moved me to full time, 4 after that I was Employee of the month and assistant manager. The company asked if I could relocate to another store to run their shop as Manager. I was stoked, manager at 18? Felt good man. I was getting paid $450 a week. I thought something was wrong. The union came in one day and I asked him about my paygrade and what I was earning, and his jaw literally dropped. He pulled out his folder and showed me what I was supposed to be earning which was over double. He backed me up when I approached head office about it and despite them trying to pull over everything in the book to avoid back paying me, I ended up walking out of that meeting with something like seven grand plus a penalty. The company went from 15 major stores to 2 in the space of 3 years. u/JollyOldBogan

6.

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. Reddit

7.

It's a pretty open secret, but Wal-Mart constantly works part-timers 40 hours a week so that they don't have to give them the benefits of full-time employees. I still work here, but still, f*ck Wal-mart. u/Yamiookami

8.

Soy sauce. the secret ingredient in Jimmy John's tuna salad is soy sauce. u/Horsepowerranger

9.

I still have copies of emails from our Gamestop district manager directing us to sell through all our pre-orders of GTA4 instead of holding them for the customers that reserved them because he got a commission on total numbers sold. u/wcrispy
 

10.

When I worked at a gas station while I was in high school, whenever the owner would call us to raise the price, we'd fill up our cars first. u/Yuri53122
 

11.

I used to work at Tim Hortons. This isn't exactly a trade secret... but get a blueberry tea bag and steep it in white hot chocolate. I never tried it myself, but it's apparently delicious. u/Twentyfootangels
 

12.

At a movie theater where I used to work, at the end of the night, we would collect all the unsold popcorn and stuff it into these enormous yellow trash bags. The next morning, yesterday's popcorn was the first to go in the warmer. My boss said that popcorn was fine to reheat and serve for up to a week. We never dated the bags, though (bags that we were not allowed to throw away. We reused them all the time) so there was literally no way to know how old the popcorn was. Not as horrifying as some stuff here, but I thought it was kinda gross. Reddit

13.

I worked at this awful f*cking pet store that sold dogs. We all knew the prices of all the dogs by heart but if someone asked we had to pretend not to know, bring the dog out to them to play with(even if they specifically asked you not to) so they get attached. Then when they're all nice and bonded with the dog, I'd have to come out to tell them that instead of the $300ish they were expecting, it would be more like $2,500. Queue tears. Lots of f*cking tears. There was all this complete b*llshit we had to tell them to justify the price including that the dogs were registered. Well, I had a customer come back absolutely furious that the dog wasn't actually registered. Turns out what management meant (but didn't EVER say to us) was that the dogs were register-able. That's just one example of a whole lot of sh*t I put up with there. I'm a pretty honest person as guilt really gets to me more than normal I think and all that intense lying through my teeth to good people made me extremely depressed and I quit after only 3 months. u/2muchpain

14.

This is way more lighthearted than most, but here it goes. I used to work at a fast-casual burger place with a secret recipe BBQ sauce. The secret ingredient was Root Beer syrup. Reddit

15.

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 whoever reveal any of this EVEN TO FELLOW EMPLOYEES! u/Reddit