If you're a nosy person like me, you probably never turn down an opportunity to hear some quality, Grade-A tea. Whatever the drama is, I'm here for it. So, naturally, I immediately clicked on the r/AskReddit thread where redditor u/SeaDry2466 asked the brilliant question, "What does your job not allow you to tell customers?" I read through the whole thing and pulled the best, juiciest industry secrets, ranging from "Woah, I didn't know that" to "...My jaw? On the ground." Here are 19 of the most shocking ones:
1. "I'm a daycare teacher. We are highly advised against telling parents about their kids' milestones, like first steps, words, etc., at our center. We know it would likely cause the parents to feel negative emotions, and we know the child will do it again soon! It’s a very special moment, and we want the parents to experience it as authentically as possible."
2. "I work for a major US brewery, and we have one beer that we put into two separate cans. One of them is a 'premium' beverage (one of the most popular in the US, top five), and the other is an 'economy' beer. It’s the same stuff."
3. "I worked in insurance, and we're not allowed to tell you if you overpay on your insurance deductible, co-pay, or co-insurance, which is a credit on your account. If you don’t know, then you won’t ask for a refund."
4. "I worked at a fancy hotel and was out front to greet people and assist upon arrival. We weren't allowed to say, 'Welcome back!' to guests. This rule was in place to protect those who decided to bring another spouse/partner/mistress/etc. day-after-day to the hotel during their stay."
5. "Some casinos stopped paging people over the loudspeaker for this same reason. Prior, they would usually say something along the lines of, 'Ben Smith, your ride is waiting at the entrance.' Apparently, this public notification caused problems in relationships where both parties were gambling covertly without informing their partners. They'd typically both gamble in different areas, so they didn’t see each other and sometimes brought their respective romantic interests."
6. "Our product warranty is as long as it is because we know it will fail after the warranty."
7. "I worked in retail management for many years and can confirm that the average consumer has a 2nd-grade understanding of math. Black Friday sales are not really sales. If an item costs $30 normally, they will run a promotion that is '3 for $90,' and people will come in droves to buy out a product that isn't actually discounted. If a shirt is $20 and is normally 'Buy 1, Get 1 50% off' (so $60 total for four units), the Black Friday Sale will be 'Buy 3, Get 1 Free!' which is still $60 for four units. You would be genuinely surprised by how many people don't do simple math and get excited by big signs."
8. "When I was in retail maintenance, I wasn't allowed to let the managers see the bill. That was for corporate eyes only. My theory was that if they knew how much I was making to change a lightbulb, they would quit and do that instead. Or maybe they would be good employees and change the lightbulb themselves, thus increasing the company's liability."
9. "In my country, there are two main distributors of the products my employer sells: us and the other company...which buys their products from us to sell as theirs. I deliver a truck full of products every week to them, but we have to deny every connection to the other company."
10. "I work at a university, and we're heavily discouraged from telling students to drop out. We're also discouraged from telling them to change majors if it's going to make them take longer to graduate. The second one really bothers me."
11. "I used to work for an adult live-streaming site. A lot of women would complain that they weren't getting enough traffic. It's because we would curate the front page and put certain women at the top. We were told to do this for women with large social media followings or who worked for agencies that we had partnerships with. A woman could also get her stream pushed to the bottom of the list for a load of reasons too, like looks, bad camera quality, bad wifi connection, etc. Many of us also had 'burner' accounts, and the company would load up our wallets with tokens so we could tip certain women and make them think they were getting a lot of traffic/engagement."
12. "I used to work for a medtech startup, writing an algorithm to detect if someone had passed away. Since we were not allowed to proclaim someone dead, we would notify the healthcare workers that the person in question was showing 'unusual inactivity.'"
13. "I grew up working for my family's ice cream business. The restaurants that we sold bulk tubs of ice cream to thought it was homemade by us. While we did make our own ice cream, the three-gallon bulk containers were products that we purchased from another company and sold at a high markup. I was under strict orders from my father to never reveal this to the buyers. One of our customers would then sell this regular ice cream as gelato, even though it was just ice cream."
14. "I worked for a big Japanese electronics manufacturer in a call center back in the early '90s. We were not allowed to say that a line of our Sony TVs had bad tuners, even though we all knew it and sent out countless free tuners to repair shops all over the country, even for out-of-warranty products. I typed it so many times I even remember the part number — 1465371-11 — to this day."
15. "I worked at a historic penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA. At the bottom of the children's waiver, in fine print, it states that there are cell blocks that have not been abated for asbestos and that the old lead paint leaves a film of dust on everything. I got written up for pointing this out to a pregnant woman."
16. "I'm a lab technician, and we cannot tell a patient that they might be dying. It's not as evil as it seems. Many patients get the results personally through us. There is a law that dictates that lab technicians are not qualified to make a diagnosis or prognosis. Our job is to take blood, analyze it, and share the results. The doctors handle the diagnosis. Sometimes, the results are so obvious that the person is gonna go through hell, but we still have to give them a straight face and tell them that they can go see the doctor about the meaning of the results. Sometimes, I just want to hug the patients and tell them they are loved, but we can't. It eats me every day."
17. "I worked with kids, and I wasn't allowed to explicitly state whether or not a child is likely to have learning disorders that need to get checked out, even though I see them five days a week and have a wide variety of other children to compare to. It can only be hinted at to parents."
18. "I worked in customer service, and any time there was a known issue, we were not allowed to tell the customer it was a known issue. If you ever hear a customer service or tech support rep say, 'None of our other customers are experiencing this problem,' there is a good chance that it's a lie, especially if they offer up that phrase quickly. I haven't been in that game for a long time, but I did support for many customers, and they were all exactly the same."
19. And finally, "I was in charge of all the keys for a navy base, signing them out to and such. There were probably around 300 keys for the whole base...and every single one was the exact same key. When they set up the system, no one realized that when they bought the same 300 locks, it also came with the same 300 keys. So, I was basically giving out master keys to the base with no one ever knowing. I'm sure they have never replaced the locks. It passed a high-level government inspection, and those fuckin people didn't even notice all the keys were the same."
Now it's your turn! Do you have a juicy industry secret you're not allowed to tell customers like these? If so, tell us about it in the comments below or via this 100% anonymous form.
Note: Reddit comments have been edited for length and/or clarity.