I can safely say that if you go to a clothes shop like River Island and you can’t see anything in your size and someone asks their staff if they have it available and they say they’ll “have a look in the back”, they’re just sitting on their phone for a few minutes before breaking the news that they don’t have it in stock. I believe this also applies to most clothing stores.
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Are you rich? Did you forget to transfer some money over thus got hit with bank charges? If so, Barclays will refund these for you.
Did you have a bit of a shitty month and had to dip into your overdraft to get by? Your bank charges are non-refundable.
Also if you have a problem with them and threaten to go to the Financial Ombudsman, they’ll likely pay you off as a goodwill gesture to get you to go away, even if you’re wrong. This is because the Ombudsman case will cost them more money regardless of the outcome than it’ll cost them to shut you up.
I’m actually hoping that this is not news to anyone, but, I know it will be due to my interactions with certain customers over the years…
If you’re in the kind of furniture or home furnishings shop that is always running 50% off promotions then the 50% off is the normal price – the actual sales will be 50 + 20 or something along those lines.
I worked in a small steel works/profilers. We used to make things from low grade shit steel and photo copy test certificates from high grade steel plate to go with the jobs.
When I worked for Tunnocks, rumour was when Boyd Tunnock dies his daughter plans to sell the company to some American firm.
I also worked for a disgraced clinical waste company, I never personally saw any of the stuff they got in trouble for but a lot of their jobs were half arsed because the staff were over worked and under paid. So not surprisingly they went under.
Don’t buy a new build house.
Anyone saying they are OK…..haven’t lived in one long enough to find out why.
Don’t ever run a big tab on a bar (Weddings, corporate events etc), I’d ask for drink vouchers instead. When we had large parties with a tab, we were told by management (popular hotel chain) to add drinks on there to make up for lost stock/increase revenue. The final bill was always 25-30% if not more than what it should have been.
Rides at amusement parks owned by Merlin are literally falling apart. This is due to their age mixed with poor reliability in general.
They’re also hesitant to spend money on Thorpe Park because the last time they did, it flopped majorly (Derren Brown’s Ghost Train) and they wrote off The Swarm as a failure because it didn’t boost attendance despite it attracting large numbers. But they are planning a new coaster for 2024 so maybe they’ve softened up.
The big three (Thorpe, Chessington and Alton Towers) peaked under the Tussauds business but since Merlin took over they’re basically run as cash cows. They did invest in Chessington though because they were worried about Paulton’s Park developing further.
Also most of their money is made on Fasttrack tickets which cost more than the entry fee alone.
Don’t want to say too much here, but one big employer in the town I worked for (albeit temporary) – if you know a councillor (the local sort) and back a certain party in Blue – you’ll have a job, even if you’re incompetent at it. I knew of a worker who in any other workplace would have gone ages ago. You’d think in all of the years she’d been there, she know what she was doing. Hell no. Only there because her husband’s friend is a local councillor.
Nepotism, meeting a certain quota for a year and even bribery for another employer = promotion.
At least one online only fashion retailer will have a dedicated team monitoring social media, but you’ll find you still have to wait a long time for a reply as they are told to prioritise answering public messages because of how it looks. Unfortunately this means the private messages – the ones where you actually get your queries answered – are neglected, especially as they spend most of their time answering public messages asking why they aren’t answering the private messages.
I have spent about the last 25 years working in IT. Travelled most of the world for it and worked for several big name organisations. I am now working on some serious cutting edge stuff.
In all that time I have not seen anything that makes me think computers do not hate people. They hate humanity and take every opportunity to make our lives a nightmare. And on the occasions when they don’t, they are lulling you into a false sense of security, which only makes the takedown so much sweeter.
Especially printers. Those fuckers would convince you that you were god before saying “PC LOAD LETTER” right when you try and print off your new commandments.
There are very rarely any problems with ‘the network’.
It’s either you, or your PC, and I can’t be bothered dealing with either today. If switching it off at 5pm and on again at 9am tomorrow doesn’t fix it, I might talk to you again then.
Honeymoon couples get the room next to the lift. We assume you won’t complain about the noise stopping you sleeping.
You used to be able to alter the reduced ‘whoops’ barcodes in Asda if you typed the number into self serves instead of scanning the item. The three or four numbers at the end corresponded to the price you’d pay in pennies. Could change it to anything, they only ever came up as ‘reduced item’, no info on what it actually was. Dunno if this is still possible. Doesn’t work in Tesco.
I worked at Tesco in the late 70s on the deli counter and am amazed our customers survived:
* All out of date packet bacon was removed and sold on the counter – we had to “freshen” it by unstick each rasher and then re-stack them. Ditto ham, corned-beef, coleslaw etc.
* Out of date packet cheese was trimmed to remove mold and then sold on the counter.
* Round joints of Boil-in-the-bag “gammon” was unpacked and sliced and then sold on the counter as “gammon steaks”.
I searched this whole thread just for that one comment from a GP receptionist.
I’m now gutted.
A roast dinner you pay £20 for in a pub was cooked at breakfast time and has been sat keeping warm under heat lamps all day.
The reason the veg sometimes comes in a separate dish for the whole table to share is so unused veg can be sent back out to another table.
It’s not even reheated when sent out, just put on a warm plate and covered in hot gravy.
Based on the pubs I’ve worked in anyway.
I did have a fab experience in Seasalt the other week – I was pulling faces at the jackets and the sales assistant asked what I wanted. I shrugged and told her, saying it was hopeless, and she said – “wait, I think we have something in the back!” and went off and brought out three jackets of totally different styles for me to try. I bought one. This has never happened before to me…
I worked in a call center for a high street bank in the early 2000s. Customers would call up to change a direct debit or something and were then passed to my team for an “account review”. This is where we would try and wear them down and give them the hard sell so they would end up taking out credit cards or loans which they didn’t really need. We were put under such huge pressure to sell as many of these as possible a lot of really dodgy stuff went on. Credit card apps would go through without the customer knowing, same with loans. The worst was when a loan application would decline on account of the customer not being able to afford the repayments. In this case we were told to put the customer on hold and not tell them the outcome, give the app to a supervisor who would falsify the customers income and expenditure until the loan got approved. Basically giving people loans with financially crippling repayments for shit like hot tubs or holidays. I soon left because I couldn’t face doing that. A few years later the credit crunch happened and that bank ended up getting a government bail out.
When McPlants are cooked at McDonald’s there is so much crap coming away from them that the purple cooking trays are barely distinguishable from the black breakfast bacon ones now.
I used to work for a pharmaceutical testing company, firstly kids toys that are of a certain nature like bubble liquid or slime have to be tested. Secondly things like the bubble mixture are allowed to have things like listeria in them (although I can’t remember if they we’re for resale in the uk), because you’re not supposed to ingest them. And generally anything like a slime/putty or sticky based toy will remain clean for about the first play session with it out of the packet after that it’s a bacterial nightmare waiting to happen and a great transfer method for infections. So save yourself the trouble and just don’t buy them for your kids.
A certain big name cheap card retailer won’t recycle any of there old cards, everything has to ripped in half put in a bin bag and have boiling water poured in the bag. Thousands of cards everyday. Such a waste when they could be recycled
I used to do that when someone asked for items when I worked in the Co-op, but I wouldn’t check I would just say no sold out so I didn’t have to move
The markup on Converse is insane.
Airlines oversell their flights.
I worked for a clothes shop (it’s a chain, still exists, and is popular – ladies fashion) and we all had ear piece head sets. We used to talk about the fit customers who came in with their girls/wives and would have competitions to guess certain things about them, like whether they waxed their chest or liked certain positions.
Working in a shop in my 20s surrounded by other girls of a similar age kinda made it all very….hormonal.
I used to work in a poultry factory when I was a teenager into my early 20’s. I can, with confidence say do not buy a whole chicken from M&S. You are paying through the nose for a ‘quality’ grade A chicken. When your actually getting the same quality that you’d get from buying from the co op for a fiver. Sometimes your even getting worse quality. I’ve literally pulled birds out of the reject bin ( that we weren’t meant to use because they aren’t up to standard) and labelled it for M&S. Covered bruises with strategically placed stickers, to make it look A grade. I, and many people I worked with have packed some proper shite birds for you guys to eat. I can’t imagine it’s improved over the years since I left 😂
If you buy something from ASOS and the courier is Hermes, just say it didn’t arrive.
We were told to just refund/replace the item immediately if a customer said Hermes never delivered their package.
This goes for a lot of things but;
Almost all products (chemicals, drugs etc) have to list there active ingredients and as long as your expensive one has the same ingredients as the cheaper one, always get the cheaper one.
Note – This doesn’t work on all drugs, and some chemicals like air fresheners have non active chemicals but help assist make the chemical work more effectively (i.e Oust and cancer drugs)
I used to work for a worldwide highly renowned hotel chain as a chambermaid and, to save on extra laundry for the company, I was trained to ‘wash’ the lasts guests’ cups and saucers, from the room’s tea caddy, in the room’s bathroom sink with just hot water and scrub them with their used towels, and then to use one of their other used towels to dry the cups and saucers. Then back on the tea caddy they went for the next guest! There were many times I would have to pick pubes off the ‘clean’ cups…
To this day, I never use the mugs in any hotel room I stay in.
Buy white goods on a Friday evening. There is a price push last thing on Friday before they clock off for the weekend. Each company leaves it as late as possible so other companies can’t just match their prices, but this also means they really do have to go as low as they can, it’s a balance between profit and being competitive, but you can’t react as quick at the weekend.
If they mess it up there will be an emergency price push first thing Saturday, to correct it by the person assigned the job for the weekend, who will be fuming.
Or at least this was the case when I worked for a major white goods supplier some years ago.
Worked for Lidl during part of 2019 and 2020. Some of the behind-the-scenes stuff is pretty shocking. Their store systems still run on Windows XP despite it no longer being supported by MS, which as far as I’m aware makes it a security risk.
Also, the stores are filthy. Shelves normally have a layer of dust sitting on them, sometimes stains or discolouration where they haven’t been cleaned in ages, plus there’s normally loads of dirt and detritus around the self-checkout area. This is all because the staff are expected to clean and simply don’t have the time along with every other job they have to do. Some stores have a single cleaner, but their hours are normally restricted, so they’re not able to get much done.
Final thing I can think of, the company has an unwritten policy of not offering customer assistants full-time contracts. For example, they might offer you a 20 hour per week contract, and then if you want more hours they’ll add more on in the form of overtime. All holiday is paid based on your contracted hours, so if you book a week off you’ll be paid 20 hours for that week off. This means the company can really save money on holiday hours and discourages staff from using their full holiday entitlement.
They might be a good supermarket to shop at but they’re a pretty shitty one to work for.
Re the clothes thing: I used to work in George (Asda clothing) and since it wasn’t unheard of for there to be backstock not on the shopfloor I would actually check. We weren’t allowed phones anyway. The exception was shoes – they were stored in unsorted totes, of which we had dozens, so there was no way I was going to check them all. One day the store manager says that a customer is asking for a size 8 in whatever shoe and so I pretend to look in the warehouse except the manager follows me so I feel compelled to actually look. Spent 2 minutes looking through half a dozen totes and the manager just says ‘let’s give up, this is pointless’. So glad she said that lol.
LIDL (from 8 years ago):
We were timed on the tills to scan 30 items per minute! If we went too far below the manager would lay into us after we closed.
All the ‘fresh’ bakery is actually just cooked from frozen
If you’re watching sports or any live TV on Sky Glass, you will be at least 1 minute behind the satellite feed. This is because it is technically an OTT streaming service like NOW rather than an IP multicast service like BT TV.
Sky Glass has had so many technical issues since launch it’s unreal. They’re also still missing a large number of channels that are on Sky Q whilst charging the same price. Most of Sky’s tech is outsourced.
Also, NOW is forked from the same tech as Sky Go and has the same issues, just that it’s been duct taped to its own subscriber management system. Peacock was also forked from NOW and apparently everybody hates it. It uses the same weird system where you select what you want in a web browser only to open an app on the PC to show it.
Also the amount of compression Sky use on audio and video is astounding. Video is often blocky and washed out whilst audio is often flat and lifeless.
I could really tell some stories about Sky and technology. I would be here a while.
I used to work at a secondary school as an IT Technician.
– Staff do spend a lot of time bitching and taking the piss out of students in the staff room and sometimes the classroom.
– Teachers like to party. A fair bit of the devils dandruff was passed around the Christmas do, even at school discos…
– In the IT dept, we love blocking websites and watching how the students get around the blocks
– There’s lots questionable stuff that goes on during an ofsted inspection (rewards for kids who say good things in the interviews)
– Probably not a surprise but some teachers are bullies and are there to purely be in control of kids and enjoy humiliating.
Don’t drink tea or coffee or anything else requiring hot water/the coffee machine on an airplane.
I used to clean them when the planes came in for their plane MOT (C-check). It was at the least a year between deep cleanings. The layers of dirt and dust that sit on those bad boys is intensely disgusting.
Sealed packets only. Ideally wine!
Probably not really much of a surprise, but your “expert” tour guide probably has a basic script that they barely deviate from, and know next to nothing about the subject outside of it. There’s a good reason they very rarely ask if anyone has any questions- it’s charisma and blagging, not expertise.
Working in candles/diffusers/essential oils.
Almost all small business and even some larger scale retailers that claim “100% natural” are completely lying.
Most use compounds with synthetic material mixed into natural, synthetic fragrances and wicks or partially synthetic wax.
The entire industry is so adulterated and many people think they use natural but in reality it’s not.
We have a lab and about 75% of the natural oils we test from the market have some synthetic ingredients. It’s all lies.
If any of your relatives paid lloyds bank to store and/or execute a Will, they have probably lost it. They had a huge drama recently which culminated in them hiring offices full of data entry clerks to open boxes, open secure document storage envelopes, search them for wills, and enter any identifying information from each Will, to construct some kind of catalogue of whos Wills they have. Lots of Wills were definitely missed; these offices were unprofessional poorly run places, some of the envelopes or even full boxes of envelopes were water or rodent damaged and could not be processed, and i dont even think all of the to do boxes were done before the project ended. They had warehouses full of uncatalogued secure document storage envelopes that had been taken from individual banks (without whatever catalogues they had there) and dumped in massive centralised warehouses.
This is probably well known across retail, but I used to work for a major high street name, I Won’t say wHo, but they often artificially raiSed the prices of items for a month or so before reducing it down to normal again and calling it a “half price sale”
10/06 – Stapler £3.99
11/06 – Stapler £7.99
11/07 – Stapler £3.99 wow half price what a deal.
They called it “price establishment” I’d love to know if anyone else in retail did the same thing.
If you phone your GP a few minutes before 8 and it’s closed
Trying pressing #2, if you hear “enter custom service menu” try entering random single digit numbers until you get through
…
-#2 1 (listen to message to see if it plays the open message)
Then
-#2 2 (listen to message to see if it plays the open message)
Then
-#2 3 (listen to message to see if it plays the open message)
Etc
I used to work for.the biggest supplier of GP telephone systems and they mostly use Panasonic NS700s. That #2 code is like a bypass code when listening to recorded messages such as “we are closed”
Every message on the system has a CS number and if you can find the CS number that relates to the open message, you can technically call in just before they open and get in the queue a few mins before 8 so you are first and get the first choice appointment
Don’t abuse this by calling in at 7am because they can track you down and listen to your call, including all your bypass hackery