[SpeedFighter]

Cell phone surcharges -

It cost cell phone companies $50 million 2-3 years ago to set up their networks and systems to allow customers to keep their current cell phone numbers when they switched carriers. Currently, they bring in $10M - $25M monthly in surcharges.

There are many taxes and surcharges on your bill each month. Yes, most are due to government mandates (i.e. port in-out, 911 service etc.), but they have been paid for many times over, but you continue to get charged.

Since, it's government mandating these services and upgrades it is agreed that the carriers do not have to advertise these costs. You sign up for an advertised $39.99 plan you know it will be $47/month with taxes and surcharges.

Companies don't pay. It's of course passed onto the consumer. That's every business though.

[ZGSON]

I don't install carpet, but I have friends that do. Just know that if you have your carpet installed, if you ever pull it up and looked at or under the padding, you will likely find several loogies and cock n balls tape designs.

[ShoelessRye]

I don't know if this is A]a secret or B]True but somebody who would know this stuff once tried to explain to me that if you've ever worked for a big company they very likely took out a life insurance policy on you and still have it to this day and will cash in when you die even if you only worked for them for long enough to get the paper work written up. Supposed to be quite the money maker.

[SchoolyardChoke]

Originally Posted by chokingvictim

I'm not sure that's really a secret though.

Yeah, it's pretty obvious. I guess I was just stating generalities.

Originally Posted by chokingvictim

Also, what do you mean "your money as a retail customer doesn't matter"?

I'll use the company I currently work for as an example. The company creates, manages, and sells mutual funds to shareholders (retail and institutional). The majority of assets under management for each of the funds we manage is mostly comprised of shares owned by institutional investors. The typical ratio of assets under management for any given product is usually 75-80% Institutional to 20-25% retail. My company manages well over 150 different mutual fund products and all pretty much follow this pattern.

What I meant by "your money doesn't matter" is that even if you have as much as 3-5 million dollars invested (or even more), it's only a drop in the bucket compared to some of our more important relationships. Sure, we're gonna try to keep you happy...but it's not the end of the world if you terminate the relationship.

I've literally seen sales guys let $50 Million prospects walk because they didn't want to deal with the potential investor's guidelines for reoccuring client service.

[Fedor#1]

Originally Posted by Mossberg

I remembered another one.

Most private pilots opperate under what they call "the big sky theory" which is that that the sky is so big that it is unlikely that you will hit another plane. It does happen though.

It almost happened here a few times in nyc recently

[icepick]

Originally Posted by MiamiRenzo

5- in the real world 99.999 % of all retail stores are full of shit charging way over 150% mark up on items

Not necessarily. It depends on the product. For example, in the technology sector, things like cables and printer ink yield 85% and 50% profit respectably. On the flip side, retail stores make only about 5% profit on purchases like laptops, printers, etc.

[AaronT]

Now for my jobs. When I use to work at wal-mart (markham markville to be percise)

- Milk sometimes sat in the back unrefridgerated after a delivery for several hours due to short handed staff to get the job done. The freezers in the back are not big enough to pull the whole skid of milk in so it took 2 employees 1 hour of heavy lifting to get all the milk in there. And like i said, sometimes the job did not get started tell several hours after delivery. And from friends who still work there, it STILL happens today. Do not buy milk from wal-mart.

- Often the frozen foods freezer (the on floor one) used to break down. Once time I helped in the clean up and basically we had to take all the food, file it, and throw it in bins to be disposed of. I threw EVERYTHING I got a hold of out, but there were like 10 of us working on it and the 3 managers kept lots of stuff (like yogurt and maple leaf meat packages which had clearly gone bad because of the broken cooling.) Anything to keep the store budget up of course, cause thats there sole job as managers.

- Employees are told when re-stocking shelves to bring older expiry dates (not expired yet tho) to the front of the shelf and place the new products behind. This makes sense, but it was often hard work to do that and no1 really did, thus the new stuff was usualy at the front. But just incase you shop on a day when an employee is doing their job properly, check behind your products before you buy, you can possibly snag ones at the back which have an expiry date futher away (new stock).

- Mostly all returns listed as defective (despite still working condition) are trashed. I always loved throwing out the defective returns cause it was easy to pocket any items I wanted. Free stuff I got over the years were A PSP, various video games, art supplies, a digital tire gauge and more. I always told the managers that it was wrong to throw out so many returns and that we should be donating them to a charity (Mostly everything was in good working order. Like if a pack of 105 pencil crayons was missing 1 pencil, it would get tossed, rather then being donated). They said they could not donate anything because they needed to trash it so the companies would refund them the money once they write it off (hence why the return policy is so lax)

-All Bicycles that come into wal-mart come in a box. The store hires a guy to build the bikes. The guy has x ammount of bikes to build and hes done his job. Thus he rushes through the building as fast as humanly possible and often builds infiror quality bikes with missing parts, backwards pedals, upside-down training wheels, etc etc. To make matters worse, he builds them all in the back room. Thus its the employees who need to bring them out onto the floor. And all of use use to ride them out to the floor. No big deal on the bigger bikes, but we used to ride the kiddy bikes out too, often crushing them. So yeah, expect infiror quality bikes when buying one from wal-mart.

- 10% off day is EVERYDAY at wal-mart. Tear up the box (not the product) of something your about to buy and ask the manager for a discount. They will always offer you 10% off (employee discount). Never more, never less. So if you want to buy a barbecue lets say, just cut the box open at the top and make a few tears at the side. Instant 10%. On big box items like barbaques, just an open box will suffice for 10% off. So just open it, then tell the employee that one and to ask a manager for a discount cause its been opened.

- End of summer patio sets always have missing/ left over parts. Ask the employee whos working there what sets are sold out but have parts remaining. I once had a guy who picked up 10 chairs from one set cause that all that was left, a table from another set cause thats all that was left, and an umbrella from another set cause thats all that was left. He got the whole thing for like $100 and the stuff was worth at least $800 (was the high end set) So yeah, the 10% deal is only broken on buying parts from incomplete patio furniture sets.

- Dont be rude to the employees. They have a really ****** job and if your rude, they will make you wait hours to get your stuff or help you with a carry out. If your nice, they will go out of their way to help you first. Also, When getting a carry out, we also helpped those who were more likely to tip before others. So make sure you TIP the guy for helping you (regardless if hes lifting a tv into your car, or weeling a second shopping cart for you to the car. $5 a person is a fair rate. $10 if your generous and $1-2 if your cheap but still want to show appriciation. $10+ and you will ALWAYS be remembered by the employee, as it rearly happens. So yeah if 2 employees help you, give one of them $10, they will split it up. Whats another $10 on that $1000+ tv you just bought right?

[Fedor#1]

wow good thing there is no walmarts where i live

[niven]

nice indepth walmart review

scary stuff

[theargosy]

I think there's more dirt on Wal-Mart, like spying on employees and shit...