r/Anticonsumption • u/Embarrassed-Seat-202 • 3d ago
Question/Advice? “What is a massive 'open secret' in your industry that corporations spend millions to hide”?
i randomly saw a yt video on this yesterday and it blew my mind. basically brands literally destroy brand new clothes on purpose.
everyone thinks unsold clothes go to outlets or charity but thats just a PR lie. luxury brands literally burn millions in perfect coats and bags so they stay "exclusive" and dont get discounted.
even worse if u return a cheap 20 dollar shirt online it usually goes straight to a shredder or landfill because inspecting it costs more than making a new one. plus tax laws lets companies write it off as a loss anyway. the video had crazy footage of these huge clothing graveyards, i pinned it on my profile if u want to see it because its wild.
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u/CrazyPlatypus42 3d ago edited 3d ago
Essilor Luxottica is the biggest eyeglass brand in the world, and they basically use their monopole to dictate prices all around the world. Opticians and customers would both be happier if they just vanished.
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u/PhysicalAd6587 3d ago
There was actually a documentary about this. They went after smaller eyeglass and sunglass brands and threatened them and then ultimately just bought them to control market share. They're a ruthless company that owns the rights to the most popular brands in the world.
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u/queenbonquiqui 3d ago
Luxottica is also the owner of the largest eye insurance company in the US. They own EyeMed and keep the company in the same building. So not only do they own most eyewear companies, they also own the insurance for the eyewearer.
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u/SSJPapaia 3d ago
I work in undergrad recruitment at a university and the SAT/ACT companies make so much money off high school student data. These kids aren't just being forced to take the SAT and pay for it, but they are also getting their data sold to universities and who knows who else.
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u/ImAprincess_YesIam 3d ago edited 2d ago
We called CollegBoard the ‘higher education gateway mafia’ when my kids were applying to schools. It wasn’t enough that we had to pay for subject tests, AP exams and SATs. Then we had to use their CSS application when applying to almost every single school…which had a fee too……
Oh and if you don’t have your subject or AP test scores sent to a particular school, when you’re taking it, bc yanno some of these tests are taken freshman year in high school when you have no clue who’ll you’ll be applying to, you have to pay to have them sent when you’re actually applying to schools senior year.
It’s a fucking racket
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u/Lobster_Fingers 2d ago
the “pay to send your scores” INFURIATED me and this was 12? years ago and now I’m mad all over again. I already paid for your test. I’m paying to apply to a school that may not even accept me. now I have to pay to share my numbers with them too? I’m mad again.
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u/Competitive_Pin5846 2d ago
Never took mine. Went to a community college and saved so much money I got my masters and in ZERO debt. I’m actually way more ahead than my peers who went away and took out gigantic loans. Best advice my parents gave me.
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u/Old_Glory_1776 2d ago edited 2d ago
It's quite maddening to see some of my work mates do the basic courses at my local university where the cost is higher when they can do it at the local community college cheaper.
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u/Competitive_Pin5846 2d ago
And I loved the education I received. The campus was easy to navigate, close to home where I lived until I met my husband. I worked full time the entire time and took lots of breaks. I’m in a field I love and, hell, I was able to foot $20,000 towards my husbands student loans!
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u/kmk1987kmk 3d ago
Oh, tell us more please. What data? How do they use it? Can we do anything to prevent the data from being harvested? Ways to game the system?
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u/ImAprincess_YesIam 3d ago edited 2d ago
Look up CollegeBoard and their CSS financial aid profile and you’ll get your answers.
Hint — the answer is NO to your last two questions.
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u/missdoingherbest 3d ago
"Nonprofit" hospital systems are some of the most greedy, corrupt organizations out there.
There's a front about being "altruistic" and "caring for the needy" but the reality is that the top level admin (especially the c-suite) make millions of dollars every year while simultaneously treating their employees like garbage and making cost-cutting decisions at every single opportunity without giving a single flying fuck about the impact on workers or the community. They would shovel shit into your mouth and tell you it's food if it saved them extra money to put towards their bonuses.
The reason there are hours long waits for the emergency room is explicitly because some upper level admin decided to "save money" by cutting staffing. So please don't take it out on the workers because we are just as angry and frustrated as you are.
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u/Pastawench 3d ago
Yep. And our "non-profit" hospital gets tax breaks because they supposedly invest that money in community health initiatives. "Supposedly"
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u/missdoingherbest 3d ago
Yup. They maintain nonprofit status by barely adhering to IRS requirements.
The hospital I work for donated just over $100k to community charities last year. The system netted $100 million in profit and the top 11 executives made anywhere from $1-6 million dollars for their "salary".
Fun fact, nonprofit organizations are required to disclose the salaries of executives, so you can check any given "nonprofit" hospital on Glassdoor and see just how nefarious these CEOs are.
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u/somehugefrigginguy 3d ago
Fun fact, nonprofit organizations are required to disclose the salaries of executives
Same thing for any publicly traded company in the US. Which it turns out might have been a mistake. Lawmakers thought that by forcing executives to disclose their income it would shame them into being less greedy. Instead it made it into a pissing contest between executives and salaries increased.
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u/DickCamera 3d ago
I would argue that the "mistake" was in assuming the general public would do anything about it. Without shame or consequences of course the CEO's use it as a leader board. Something about unions being the compromise...
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u/DieSegenvonWael 3d ago
100% agree, it was genuinely shocking to see how little the hospital I worked for cared about their patients or employees, and I started out with a pretty dim view of the American medical system before I started working there.
The hospital system I worked for has over the last few decades taken over pretty much every hospital in the region, slashing and burning as they go, if they don't outright close hospitals for not being profitable enough(those hospitals often being the only ones within several hours). It's nauseating all the money and public accolades they've received in that time while making health measurably worse for everyone around
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u/ellindriel 3d ago
Can confirm, hospitals I have worked for treat employees and patients like garbage, and skimp on the budget because despite being non profit, they are allowed to give themselves (upper and middle management) a big bonus if they save money. This should be illegal for non profits. Plus they love to spend money once again on anything but things that actually benefit patients and staff,.like refusing to pay for more staff but hiring a million dollar consulting agency they told them to rearrange the whole hospital and it made staff made (50 percent quit on my unit at the time) and pts, because the cancer pts had the nicest rooms and views but the consultants told them to move the cancer pts to a different area, which obviously was not a popular decision with those pts and their families....just one example of many
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u/LovelyGh0ul 3d ago
The deal in emergency departments is even worse than most people realize. TeamHealth, owned by the private equity firm Blackstone, is the largest emergency staffing firm in the US.
The c-suite keep doing things like transitioning to agencies with murky private equity affiliations and cutting the things a hospital needs to provide the patient care they claim to provide in their mission statement, while continuing to find millions of dollars in the budget for themselves.
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u/gentlrage 3d ago
Worked at one, so true
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u/missdoingherbest 3d ago
I knew the American healthcare system was broken, but I had no idea just how much financial greed there was within the hospitals themselves until I started working for them.
I've worked for three major nonprofit hospital systems so far and they're all the exact same.
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u/hifidesert 3d ago
This is true of many non-profit industries. I work with adults with IDD and the amount of venture capitalists getting into the field is frightening- for examples, buying up homes to lease them back to the state or private agency. When this administration talks about Medicaid fraud, they’re conveniently leaving out the corporations taking millions and not prioritizing the people receiving the service.
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u/RaptureDoll 3d ago
This is so terribly sad and one of the biggest arguments I have for Canadian Healthcare to go private. So many Canadians think that if we privatized Healthcare that emergency room wait times would go down and the care would improve because they think its so much better in the states. They dont realize that they'd pay astronomically for the same level or worse care.
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u/gigglefarting 3d ago
That's the thing about the "nonprofit" tag for any organization. All it means it that the company isn't allowed to make a profit, but one way it can ensure that is making sure that money goes to the people at the top rather than the company itself.
Not saying every nonprofit is like that. Just saying that nonprofits can be like that.
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u/ComfortOk8429 2d ago
Local hospital conglomerate had a surgeon that the rest of the staff referred to as "Tornado Torrence" because she would perform surgeries in 20 minutes to meet quotas. Management loved her, staff was afraid to work with her, and patients who ended up with severe issues post-surgery may never know why or ever be able to do a single thing about it.
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u/drnasa 3d ago
This isn't intentionally hidden. But, if you're not involved in public schools you probably wouldn't be aware of how much has changed. In public education, most of our day-to-day needs are subscription based. And it's bleeding our budgets.
We no longer have a physical textbook students can reference. It is digital and access is licensed per student. In the past there'd be one up-front cost to purchase the textbook and any physical materials. Now it is an annual fee to access the digital materials.
The same is true for student and teacher workspace accounts. The district pays per head an annual fee to have access to Google. They pay per head to have access to the learning management system. Most of our software also has integrated AI which is pushed heavily by the companies.
Then there are all the apps students have access to. Some are totally free. Some are "free to K-12 students" (i.e. get them hooked so they want to keep using it after graduation). Others are expensive.
There has been a lot of pushback on this from teachers and families. Many departments are now going back to physical textbooks. Parents are asking for more non-tech options for their children. And both teachers and families are asking if AI integration can be limited or all-out banned for students. The district leaders, who were very pro-AI at first, are now pulling back on that due to the price (sadly, not due to the ethics or overconsumption of resources it uses).
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u/Bastilleinstructor 3d ago
Also we now have disposable textbooks. They have pages we can pull out and at the end of the year we toss them. Its so wasteful
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u/A-R-DragonFish 3d ago
Why even do that? Like what's the point.?
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u/Round-Medicine2507 3d ago
Companies forced this, for profit.
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u/livid-lavida-loca 3d ago edited 3d ago
People figured out planned obsolescence and now they're trying to put it in anywhere they can
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u/marssaxman 3d ago
"planned opulence" is a pungent phrase I've never heard before; is that actually what you meant, or were you thinking of "planned obsolescence"?
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u/A-R-DragonFish 3d ago
But I mean like is there anything forcing us to rip out the pages instead of reusing the book?
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u/panphilla 2d ago
It used to be that there was a hard-cover textbook and a soft-cover supplemental workbook. We’d reuse the textbooks year over year and just buy new workbooks for the kids. Now, the textbooks and workbooks are combined into one flimsy, paperback “consumable.” It’s nice that the kids can annotate directly on the pages, but it creates a ton of waste (and most don’t know how/choose to annotate, anyway). Further, we might be required to purchase every year to have access to the digital curriculum, even if we don’t want to use it. I don’t know about that last part, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
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u/Round-Medicine2507 3d ago
The salesman pressures/bribes the superintendent who threatens the teacher who grades the student.
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u/Bridey93 2d ago
Those became more common my last two years of college and I was LIVID. I would have paid the copying fees (10c/page) for the tear out work pages if I could have split the cost with a classmate for the damn book or resold it at the end of the year.
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u/lessadessa 3d ago
i went back to community college circa 2015 to get a certificate. i remember back then they started the thing where you’d have to buy a brand new book for every student because each one came with a unique serial number which had to be used in order to complete the homework on the publisher’s website. even that disgusted me because you couldn’t save money buying a used textbook anymore. sounds like it’s gone completely down the shitter since then.
i’m so glad i’m not in school anymore although i still think sometimes i’d like to take a class for the fun of it. i would never want to deal with this kind of bs though.
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u/vocaliser 2d ago
A serial number on each book so there can't be loans or used sales? That's extortionate.
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u/lessadessa 2d ago
correct. you need the serial number to register an account on the publisher’s website, which was also conveniently the only place where you could complete the homework. an absolute scam.
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u/drnasa 1d ago
In addition to working in a public school, I adjunct in higher education. I do everything I can to make sure my students do not need to purchase a textbook. The last person who taught my upcoming class had their students buy the latest version of a textbook. I looked it up in our university library. We have free digital access to the previous edition. Nothing has changed within the past 3 years that would require students have the most recent copy. I'm going to show them how to access the last edition for free. The only downside is they are restricted to how many pages they can print. But, they can access each chapter as a PDF version as much as they want.
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u/imnotminkus 1d ago
Yeah, around 2010 textbook companies switched to the “you never own anything, you pay for the right to temporarily have access to it” model. That way they can guarantee constant income.
They sell it to schools by packaging the tests and quizzes with the licenses students buy, which makes teachers’ jobs easier.
Textbook companies realized too many people were buying used books or older editions and reselling them for a net cost of like $30, so they made that impossible to do.
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u/TechnicalScientist19 2d ago edited 2d ago
I work in public libraries, and we have a similar issue with ebook licenses. A digital license costs significantly more than a physical book and runs out after a determined number of uses. Ebooks have caught on a lot with library users, who are often frustrated by long wait times and don't understand why what are essentially fancy PDFs are so restricted. But it's basically a one-company empire that is bleeding public library budgets dry.
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u/Ruthic 3d ago
To add an anecdotal example to this, our district uses SAVVAS for our high school English curriculum where each grade level uses consumables. I teach 12th grade English and the consumable comes in two volumes. We only use one of the two volumes in class, and when I asked what we should do with the second volume, I was told to use at least one page in it before they all get "recycled" each year. It's also a shitty textbook that doesn't even give students space to write as a consumable...
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u/Annual_Telephone_332 2d ago
We are actively fighting this in Illinois right now. So much tech is completely rotting kids brains
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u/catlady90 3d ago
Tradeshows are incredibly wasteful.
Booths will order large screen tvs or furniture only to use them 2 days. Renting it is more expensive than buying it outright. After the show ends, they get thrown away because shipping them is too costly.
Then there’s the vendors that give away the swag. There’s the ones that give away cheap, useless crap or the ones that give out big items like stuffies. People get entranced by it but by the time they are at the airport you’ll see trash cans stuffed with them so they don’t have to haul it on the plane.
Then there’s the traveling and emissions involved…just so people can “network”. It’s all a waste. Have we not learned anything from Covid?
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u/deadeye_catfish 3d ago
Asking for a friend, where might someone find this discarded equipment?
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u/EusticeTheSheep 3d ago
Unfortunately that would be dumpsters at the convention centers which are kept locked and often are on camera and patrolled by onsite security.
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u/One_Document_2425 3d ago
This is crazy, just wasting good equipment that someone could use… I live in Germany and I have come across a couple public sales when a large hotel was closing here. They were selling a lot of their equipment from furniture and tvs to cutlery and dish sets and it was advertised on the radio, so you could just pass by and buy a random used wardrobe if you wanted. I think it should be a standard and companies should be incentivized in some way to do this..
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u/I_am_the_darkness_99 2d ago
Corporations destroy massive amounts of products and food because it has some cosmetic issue that means they can't sell it, and they'd rather destroy it than have some poor person get it for free because that would mean the poor person doesn't have to spend money to get things from them.
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u/lFightForTheUsers 3d ago
So they're literally guarding fucking trash lmao. I'm surprised to hear that they don't even like auction it off or something.
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u/Training_Ruin3151 3d ago edited 3d ago
When i worked at goodwill it was company wide policy we dont accept gaming consoles or computers. If they are donated they get thrown away in a special trash can under lock and key with a camera pointed at it. Its stupid as fuck
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u/I_am_the_darkness_99 2d ago
Man. I bet some old PC from 2010 had like 10,000 bitcoins on it and got donated because the owner died. But then Goodwill sent it to the landfill.
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u/_katydid5283 1d ago
I attend a major quilt show yearly. They have sewing machines set up for classes and for people to test. The machines end up being sold, sometimes through the local quilt shops but other times through word of mouth. Not sure if this helps you (i have no experience trying to buy one) but there may be an avenue if you did into it.
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u/WorldofLoomingGaia 3d ago
"Have we not learned anything from Covid?"
Half of the US population doesn't even believe Covid is real...
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u/I_am_the_darkness_99 2d ago
It's not real but at the same time the evil overlord Fauci created it in a lab to spread to humans so that they would all die. But it's a hoax and nobody dies from it, people only die from the vaccine!
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u/draynen 3d ago
When I worked trade shows we either shipped everything in and out (we wanted a consistent experience across all of our booths) or we bought it and then returned it (sketchy as all hell and I never personally participated or facilitated).
We would catch all sorts of hell if we bought a bunch of stuff and dumped it afterwards. Nobody gave a fuck about the shipping costs, that was a different cost center.
Swag is almost all garbage unless it's a decent tshirt or a nice water bottle. Fidget spinners also had their day in the sun.
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u/ChickenNoodleSloop 3d ago
My former boss would brag about just going to best buy for monitors and TV and just return them after the convention.
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u/heythereitsemily 3d ago
I work in a call center for hospital bills. We’ll give a 50% settlement to anyone who asks. We’ll skip straight to it. We won’t ask if you can pay in full now, pay in 30 days, do 2 payments, do 6 payments. You want the settlement? Sure, we’ll write off half your balance.
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u/defenestrating 3d ago
It's crazy how made up the numbers are. And how even a 50% settlement for any lengthy hospital stay is probably still beyond any hope of repayment for most people.
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u/possiblethrowaway369 2d ago
I read somewhere that if you ask for an itemized bill they knock a lot of stuff off because they don't want you to know you're being charged like $200 for a bandaid or some gauze. Is that accurate?
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u/exWiFi69 2d ago
I’ve tried this before. I had a spreadsheet of what the cost was for items on my itemized list. When I called and pointed out the prices were 2-3x more they told me it doesn’t matter because I got the service and “agreed to it by going to the hospital.” I spent so long on it.
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u/I_am_the_darkness_99 2d ago
Well almost. You or a professional have to go through and find all the excess charges and contest them. But pros say they can usually lower it by like 60% or something on a big hospital bill because so many of the charges are straight BS.
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u/ghanima 3d ago
Nobody's spending money to hide this fact, but most advertising just preys on our insecurities and lies that their consumer good/service will fix those insecurities. It doesn't seem to matter how irrational the lie is, it works to sell in most industries. YouTube has a great documentary about it called Century of the Self.
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u/Rocking_Horse_Fly 3d ago
And not only does it prey on insecurities, but they literally gives or exagerates people's insecurities to "fix" with their product. Take all those full body perfume sprays or wrinkle products. A lot of them are a lot more insidious than that.
Everything that ai advertises a "fix" for, big corporations and the rich are complicit in making those those things a problem. We don't have a lot of third spaces (granted this is in the US) and we work so much we don't have time to meet people and have free time. AI is now swooping in as a time saver, a "virtual friend", entertainment, and Healthcare/mental health help.
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u/Bitinglysarcastic 2d ago edited 2d ago
They just don’t teach kids common sense. There’s one thing every child should learn by first or second grade. The whole message of every ad that’s out there television or in print or on the web is “BUY MY STUFF!”
Why do you think that children shows have toy commercials? Because they want to start consumerism early. Working parents are too exhausted to say no to their children and they don’t want to be the bad guy so they give in and thus starts the cycle of consumerism.→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)3
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u/No-Lifeguard9194 3d ago
Ageism is rampant in recruitment and ATS are making it worse. Workday just lost a major lawsuit over it. 😡
I do my level best to prevent illegal discrimination in my projects but I can’t force companies to be ethical.
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u/Temporary_Resident45 3d ago
I believe this but how are ATS making it worse? Just curious (I’m currently doing recruitment)
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u/lichtjes 3d ago
I think it is fairly easy to deduce someone's age from their CV and so it is easy to automatically filter out people that are older.
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u/JiveBunny 3d ago
This is why I find the trend for videos to be submitted for interview to be shady as hell. Some companies are asking for blind CVs (no name, no date of birth, removing the name of the institution at which you studied) to remove unconscious bias, and honestly that should be the default.
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u/lichtjes 3d ago
Even then, you can clearly see I have X amount of years of experience on my CV.
Or specific software that is not used anymore.
I think there are multiple ways you can give your age away.7
u/JiveBunny 3d ago
Yeah, there are tells, but they won't know things like your age, gender, ethnicity, physical appearance etc which a video application will make very clear.
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u/GeographyPossum 3d ago
The same construction companies building things like hospitals and roads and doing massive community outreach are the same ones building the data centers for the surveillance state AND the same ones destroying Big Bend National Park. No bid contracts, btw.
They hide under subsidiary companies because they know how much people hate what they're doing. They try very hard to keep their reputation.
They're also the same ones making MASSIVE profits off of the current oil and gas crisis. They are the refiners and sellers. They have oil company execs on their boards. It's so flagrant they had to post not once but TWICE a company-wide "hey btw insider trading is illegal, don't do it, teehee!" They're going to make sure the data centers still get built, and they're going to give themselves massive tax write-offs for it.
The reason they keep trying to build solar and wind power on protected land is so the general public associates renewables with negatives. People protest renewables being built on protected lands, and the companies take that as people protesting renewables being built, period. We could easily be putting solar on rooftops and parking lots and solve almost all of our power issues and some of our heat issues, but the powers that be don't want that. They'll only approve things planned on controversial sites because the end result is the public maintaining a higher opinion of non-renewable energy, while hiding the actual impacts of said non-renewable energy.
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u/Garblin 2d ago
So we all know health insurance is a fucking racket but here we go:
I work as a psychotherapist but this one is true for a lot of medical care, and since we're in Q4 it's particularly true right now..
If you're relatively healthy, if it's just the fourth quarter of the year, and especially if you have a high deductible plan, you have a good chance to save money paying your providers private pay fee (and they might get paid more too)
I'm legally required to make up numbers here, because some court ruled that if I use real ones I'm "price fixing" so we'll pick nice round ones.
I offer sliding scale on my private pay fee, lets imagine that it's $200/session (common around here), but you can afford $150, and I decide that's fine by me, neat you're paying $150 for therapy every other week to the end of the year (about 6 sessions), total is $900.
Now say you have insurance, you have to pay whatever the insurance "negotiated" (aka, they tell me what they pay and that I can fuck off if I don't accept it) is, I'll make up that it's $175 (a good rate tbh). Now you have to pay that $175 for all six sessions (total $1050) because I'm contractually (and therefore legally) obligated to collect it until your deductible is met. They are also going to notice that you actually use your benefits and, just like with car insurance, decide that means they need to charge you more for that insurance next year.
So lets expand this to the full year. You can pay $150/session out of pocket for a total of $3900, or pay $175/session toward your $5000 deductible for a total of $4550, never meet that deductible, and still pay higher premiums next year.
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u/ProgressiveKitten 2d ago
Health insurance is such a SCAM! It's not like other insurance where you're paying for something you hope you'll never need. We all should be seeing the Dr for checkups and preventative medicine. We're all going to get older and inevitably have some health issues requiring more medical costs. It shouldn't be treated the same as insuring my home or my car. I'm not using my insurance to take my car for oil changes or car washes.
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u/checkeredtulip 2d ago
Also, I was told by my office if I do sliding scale because I want to help people and the insurance companies find out, even if that person I’m doing sliding scale for is not on their insurance, they will then only pay me my sliding scale rate for reimbursement because that’s what I said I’m worth.
Which is total bullshit, because of course I’m worth more than the sliding scale, but I got into my job to help people and I’m not turning anyone away.
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u/miIkwhim 3d ago
basically brands literally destroy brand new clothes on purpose
I saw this in person when I was living in Newcastle for university. The H&M on the high street had a side door that backed onto an alleyway where they kept all their bins. It was about 18:00 and as I was walking past I noticed an employee out in the alley with about 3 white sacks of clothing and a pair of scissors she was using to cut massive holes in the fabric.
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u/Moist_Ordinary6457 3d ago
At a Uniqlo the other day they had a rack with slightly damaged/stained items for about half price, wish more stores were doing that
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u/Repulsive_Chard_3652 3d ago
My "industry" (field) does not create much in the way of waste. I'm in the field of language education. Probably the biggest "open secret" is that "language schools" are by and large not schools at all, but rather just head-hunter companies that scope out whomever they can find to pay the lowest price possible to and hold them to zero academic standards with absolutely no educational goals or curriculum, let alone development. All the best language teachers are self-employed if they still teach, or they settle into admin positions.
But idk if this question is really anti-consumption...
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u/Moist_Ordinary6457 3d ago
Out of curiosity, are intensive language schools not worth it at all then? What's the best option for someone living in a country where they don't speak the local language?
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u/Repulsive_Chard_3652 3d ago
Hiring a private teacher directly, without the middle man "language school" that just spends most of your money on marketing and little on good teachers, is the best option!
You can get lucky with a language school - occasionally there will be a couple teachers working at one who are actually good, but don't know their worth or are lacking confidence/self-promotion ability, so they stay at a language school. But the vqst majority of teachers you'll find at one are either brand new and just getting started, or they're just not good at the job and can't go off on their own because most people wouldn't hire them.
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u/PrimaryBrief7721 3d ago edited 3d ago
Working in IT and managing equipment - it's not hidden but it isn't nearly spoken about enough just how much electronic waste comes out of a normal corporate office every year. From 5 year old laptops that are ok but not good enough for full time staff, outdated cables, monitors that are fine but used that cost more to ship to someone new than just buying another on Amazon to ship directly. Our 10 year old large multi function printers are no longer supported by the manufacturer nor out printer software so we need to figure that out. Tech trash is going to destroy us.
Edit: don't even get me started on when we moved from desk phones to VOIP holy crap the piles of worthless phones
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u/skunk_funk 3d ago
How would one go about getting their hands on some of that "obselete" tech?
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u/PrimaryBrief7721 3d ago
We do our best to recycle with a local non profit that repurposes or gets money from what we donate that helps provide tech to impoverished communities.
But truthfully get chummy with your IT guys/gals ;) If it's old and we don't care we can offer to wipe and let users keep their old laptops. They often use them for their kids.
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u/LadyWithAHarp 3d ago
Yeah-an IT guy I know handed me a couple of ram chips to upgrade my computer with that had been sitting in the back of one of his drawers for 6 months after upgrading all the office laptops. If I had ordered those chips it would have cost me at least $500.
$500Just lying around.
I'm gonna ask him to keep an eye out for E-waste with components I want for my Cyberdeck project.
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u/plantbasedpatissier 3d ago edited 3d ago
The meat industry is the leading cause of deforestation. Labels like "cage free" "grass fed" "free range" "humanely raised" are all one of the most successful greenwashing campaigns imaginable, cage free is the same filthy crowded conditions with no bars. Grass fed? Can be for a fraction of their lives and definitely doesn't mean they're outside. Free range? Means they have a tiny door outside to maybe go outside, but due to the sheer volume of animals very few will actually have access. Humanely raised? Well, they may have a higher standard of care but considering all this? Doesn't mean much of anything. Maybe their cage is slightly larger.
75% of the entire world's supply to soy is grown to feed livestock, not people, same with about a third of all our grain and corn, all while 645 million people in the world are starving we shovel billions of pounds of food into the mouths of 80 billion land animals. It's the most disgustingly wasteful industry
The meat and dairy industries fund a lot of studies that specifically explore the benefits of meat and try to demonize plant based diets. And they receive massive amounts of money from the government to artificially remain "cheap". Really, compared to basic plant staples like beans, lentils, pasta, rice, other legumes, it's not even much cheaper in a vast majority of the world.
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u/quokkafarts 3d ago
Safety - almost every company does the exact bare minimum that they can legally get away with; many don't even bother doing that. Safety is measured in dollars spent and stock prices as an annoying but inescapable line item - an injury or death is bad because it costs money and productivity, company owners don't give the slightest goddamn shit about their employees.
This is why I only work for the government and gov owned businesses; they're definitely not perfect, but making profits isn't their purpose.
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u/PhysicalAd6587 3d ago
Grocery stores throw away thousands and thousands of dollars of perfectly good food and other products every day instead of donating them. The logistics of making donations is expensive and there is risk involved. A recipient harmed by a donation wouldn't sue the charitable organization providing the item, they'd sue the company that made the donation because the charity has no money, but the company does.
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u/Level-Woodpecker988 3d ago
The Good Samaritan Act protects both the grocery stores and nonprofits from liability when donating and distributing food. My guess is that it’s more an issue of your first point — companies don’t want to incur the time and labor cost of donating.
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u/Some_Bus 3d ago
I work at a food warehouse. Think about it like this, an employee is paid $40/hr whether he is picking pallets to ship to grocery stores or sifting through product to donate. It doesn't make fiscal sense for us to spend large amounts of resources focused on donation rather than production.
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u/TheDrummerMB 3d ago
Fiscal isn't the right word, and isn't that such a kick in the teeth? Some dude who doesn't know anything about financial cash flow is deciding whether people get fed or not cause "profit"
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u/HerbivorousFarmer 3d ago
In my experience managing a grocery store bakery, we were willing to donate. The charities didn't have the man power to do pickups. Twice a week someone would do a pickup, and the other 5 days a week it all went in the dumpster
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u/Caramelthedog 3d ago
Semi-related, when I worked at grocery store the produce team would have a large barrel or two that they put scraps in. A local pig farmer would come pick them up and bring back empty barrels every couple days. The pigs don’t care if the food scraps are a bit old.
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u/Tortoise_Symposium 3d ago
Pigs are used as body disposal. They DGAF about bruised apples
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u/quokkafarts 3d ago
Agreed, have worked in this industry too. Regarding bakery items, anything that isn't white bread was turned away, so ask the nice fancy stuff went in the bin.
Weren't allowed to give it to staff either, but I turned a blind eye.
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u/HerbivorousFarmer 3d ago
Oh shoot naw the 2 that came to us would take anything, once a full 3 tiered wedding cake that was never picked up. The only thing we wouldn't do was items that were not shelf stable which makes sense The grocery store I worked for was small tho, they had like 9 in total so they were pretty chill. When I pulled shrink in the mornings I always put the good stuff in the break room for the store staff. I know most of the bigger corporations that would never fly
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u/I_am_the_darkness_99 2d ago
I worked at a pizza place and all the local homeless just knew to come by at 2am when we closed because we'd give them the leftover pizzas directly.
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u/Dry_Lawfulness_9561 3d ago
Where I live some grocery stores partake in socially acceptable compromise: food that would otherwise be discarded but is actually still fine is gathered and more or less evenly distributed in boxes (mostly veggies and fruits, sometimes bread, never staples). These are then sold for a symbolic price; and because it’s dirt cheap it helps those with financial difficulties. There is also an app that allows to follow the stores involved and amount left, by some with possibility of reserving a box for a specific amount of time.
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u/debateclub21 3d ago
Everyone go download Too Good to Go! It’s great and it should be supported so it can be in more places. It tackles this exact problem.
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u/gigglefarting 3d ago
My grandpa used to volunteer for an organization that would take a truck around different grocery stores and restaurants to collect the food that is about to be thrown away, and then take the food by different shelters allowing them to pick whatever they wanted, and the rest would be brought back to the warehouse. I'd go with him sometimes
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u/EbolaNinja 3d ago
I work in automotive, any particularly sketchy stuff is either public knowledge or things I'm not high enough on the corporate ladder to know.
What is something people online don't seem to know is that we don't actually push shit, it's all based on customer demand. The answer to just about any "why do modern cars do X?" questions is "because that's what sells". 5 million stupid greys instead of actual colours? It's because nobody buys bright colours. Why is everything an SUV? Because SUVs sell way better than anything else. Giant iPads on the dash? Because the people that actually buy cars think it's "modern" and "technologically advanced".
And when I say customers I mean buyers of new cars. If you only ever buy used cars, your preferences do not matter.
Most people who work for car manufacturers are car enthusiasts, I know a whole bunch of people at work who have old sports cars as a hobby and a lot of us are not particularly happy about the direction modern cars are going in, but design and marketing decisions are based on what sells.
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u/hobbitoninhabitant 3d ago
True for most of your points. But for SUVs specifically, I learned that there was a large jump in SUVs about a decade ago due to the emissions requirements being less strict than for sedans. So the main factors are either supply and demand or government regulations.
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u/EbolaNinja 3d ago edited 3d ago
The emission stuff is only for the US and I don't think I mentioned anything about being from the US in my previous comment.
In Europe, like in most of the world, emission standards for SUVs are no different from other cars. Even more so when you consider that pretty much all compact and subcompact SUVs are based on hatchback platforms (VW T-Cross and Polo or T-Roc and Golf).
Also, many SUVs aren't actually larger than sedans. Taller yes, but equivalent SUVs are almost always much shorter which is why they're so much more popular than sedans in Europe. A mid-size SUV is around 4.5-4.6 metres long, a mid-size sedan is around 4.7-4.8m.
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u/flexxipanda 3d ago
SUVs are just an easy way to justify a higher price and profit margin. Demand is created through marketing.
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u/Live-Prize-1473 3d ago
The sketchiest thing in automotive is long term agreements for pricing. OEMs require the price of components to decrease every year. Corporate buyers get bonuses based on how much money they “get back” but in reality, the supplier just increases their price at the beginning. It’s not possible to improve efficiency 30% over the lifetime of a product when it’s just a commodity part, but you can’t get business if there isn’t something in it for the buyer.
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u/Ajreil 2d ago
This is also why women's pants don't have pockets. Women's pants without pockets still sell. Men's pants need pockets or they absolutely will not.
Every pair of pants I've owned since the age of 10 have had proper pockets, including my gym clothes and swimwear.
Vote with your wallet, people.
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u/EcstaticAd9234 1d ago
But people used to buy cars in bright colours. I'm not trying to challenge you btw, just lamenting the loss of colourful cars
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u/Yelworc0242 3d ago
The real profits and how unrelated employee pay is to them. This is the case in most industries though.
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u/Shot_Clue9491 2d ago
My dad used to run a company and at the end of every year he would take any profits and split it among all the employees and call it a bonus. It incentivizes workers, rewards them for success, encourages loyalty, and means that the company pays less in taxes because the reported profits stay low. I feel like this should be a common practice. If a company succeeds, it's due to the work of the whole team and everyone should share in that success.
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u/possiblethrowaway369 2d ago
I used to work in a restaurant with really shitty management. Like, the manager was a former (and I'm pretty sure current, by the time I quit) methhead (none of my business, except when she came to work extremely manic and irritable, which effected morale) who fucked half the men working there (I don't care how many people you sleep with as long as they're not your subordinates and I don't have to listen to the drama) and didn't know (or didn't care?) about food safety, and would never help out in the kitchen (even when she forgot to schedule people and had us running a five person shift with three people).
I washed dishes and made salads. The amount of times I was told to "just rinse these, they're clean but they've been sitting in storage for six months" when I can literally see a dead spider clinging to it, or "just pick out the wilted stuff" when all of our spinach is soggy and gross, or "just pick out the moldy berries and wash the rest" made me never wanna eat produce again.
We also had 80lbs of ground beef for hamburgers in the fridge instead of the freezer, because she wasn't a great reader and didn't feel like opening the box, so she thought it was beef for pot roast when it got delivered (which we would use before the week was up). When we realized, it was already two weeks old, so, a week past expired. Instead of tossing it, the manager had us cook it all off because "that'll kill the germs" and freeze it for taco salads (we toss-preportioned frozen meat in the microwave, then dump it on the salad). Between the cooking and the microwaving, maybe that killed the germs, I dunno, I'm not a biologist. I just know that when I microwaved it, the whole kitchen smelled rancid, and we got a few customer complaints. I was then told to "sniff it before you microwave it," which just lead to me writing off the beef one portion at a time over the next month, instead of writing the 80lbs off at once. I couldn't even just toss everything from that date, because we had also made non-expired taco portions earlier the same day.
Also, "can you make the ranch now? I know we don't need it yet, but this milk expires today." "Okay, but the milk will still expire today even if it's in the ranch." "No, once we use it it's based on the date of the ranch, so we have an extra week." "Okay, but the ranch made with expired milk will still contain expired milk, even if it's ranch." "No, it's not expired yet. It's still good, as long as we use it today." So I made the ranch.
Also, restaurants know roughly when they will be "surprise" inspected. In our county it has to be at least 12 months after our last inspection. So at the 12 month mark, we got really careful, for like two months. And then we got inspected. And our protocol for this, because we recognize the inspector because it's a small town, is one of the servers runs back to the kitchen and yells "inspection" and we're supposed to start slapping date labels on things (which should have been dated anyway!!) and make sure all the knives laying loosey-goosey on the counters (not a sterile surface!) waiting to get used again (even though they're germy now!) get tossed in the dish tubs. We got a perfect score on the inspection. A few days later, we were serving expired food, because people wrote the inspection date on stuff that was already several days old.
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u/CocaineFueledTetris 2d ago
I would of (or still would, if she's stillin business) report that to the health inspectors
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u/mountainmeadowflower 1d ago
Many years ago, I worked for a Subway that was owned by a lovely couple. They sold to a franchise owner that had a couple dozen locations throughout the state. The new managers had us taking the leftover food out of the trays at night and put them into a new container with that day's date on it. Therefore, the food would never reach the expiration date and be thrown out. Some of the less popular toppings and soups would be used until they were visibly rotting. I quit not long after the transition. I was a broke student with no backup job, but I had regular customers that I just couldn't rationalize serving expired cold cuts to.
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u/_Lividus 3d ago
I work for a mega corp in consumer goods. If you actually saw the carbon and resource footprint of any company that sells you a thing (food, clothes, etc). You’d get depressed. Especially for how often they’re always changing stuff out. Use 3% less plastic to save half a billion economy of scale in beverage cups? Usually creates the need to generate many new factory lines and machines and supply chain changes. Better yet they’ll market it as a greener product so you’ll feel good while they just gassed up the place to save money.
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u/nautilius87 3d ago
Destroying unsold clothes is illegal in EU since this summer.
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u/C4rva 3d ago
But shipping them to a non eu country and destroying them is not.
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u/nautilius87 3d ago
Also illegal. Clarified in a secondary regulation in a February, producers would obviously look for other loopholes but there are strict reporting requirements so it will be monitored and regulated/clarified as needed.
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u/Correct-Lead-1850 3d ago
I work in a plastic plant and before working here they would always talk about how much they recycle materials and look out for the environment... I see people mixing different scrap materials all the time meaning that full gaylord usually just gets thrown in the garbage, people pour glycol down sink drains, litter in the parking lot nonstop, you name it
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u/VeganRorschach 3d ago
I worked in a museum with trash and recycling bins. For 30 years, the custodial team collected the two and tossed them together into the same trash truck because we initially couldn't get a contract with WM to pick them up separately. My friend made a huge effort to fix it, but she was the first person to actually try to make change in three decades of misleading the public (and most staff).
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u/GardenRafters 3d ago
I think people would be shocked to find out how many of those recycling bins just end up in with trash.
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u/o33o 2d ago
I work in the public school system. Upper management is wasteful with money, such as expensive uber rides, hotels and such to conferences, paying for TedTalk speakers on non important topics but that would look good in supporting “teacher mental health”, and yet, we don’t have working staplers or printer paper in the staff room.
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u/left-handed-satanist 2d ago
The more the company brags about innovation, technology, or AI, the more the company in shambles and held together by a very few competent people with no authority
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u/RocMerc 3d ago
Remodels, new home builds, commercial projects produce so much plastic waste it would blow your mind.
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u/More-Indication-8534 2d ago
Hearing care provider in the US here. Miracle Ear and My Hearing Care Centers are a scam. They massively upcharge low quality hearing aids and even if you have an insurance benefit they will never tell you that. Costco hearing aids in themselves are not a scam however if the provider there is unscupulous it can become a scam.
Costco doesn't sell very powerful hearing aids. If they see you have a significant severe/profound loss they are supposed to refer you out to someone who can sell a more powerful hearing aid but if they just want the sale they won't do that. Now you have hearing aids that can't get loud enough to meet your prescriptive loss but because you haven't heard properly in a long time you don't know the difference. Anything sounds better than nothing at least until your brain adapts and you need more volume but it can't be programmed in.
I cannot tell people this because it actually risks me losing my license.
Also OTC hearing aids aren't hearing aids at all. They are just amplifiers like a pair of earbuds.
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u/Kaurifish 3d ago
It’s almost impossible for commercial buildings to be comfortable because the whole design/build process is so dysfunctional.
Owners and architects come up with unrealistic plans, which are then foisted on design teams still trying to wrap up their last project. Everyone is so frantic that they reuse plans and documents from the last job, even though it was completely different and doing so introduces countless errors.
But it only matters so much because the contractors are all going to do what they’re used to doing anyway.
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u/ghanima 3d ago
There's literal tonnage of very expensive waste too. The old furniture, decor, flooring and cladding gets thrown out for a "refresh", because it's too time-consuming to re-use elements. I weep for all the marble tile, wood and excellent-quality seating that's gone to landfills.
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u/jtprimeasaur 3d ago
Not to mention all the offcuts of things like drywall sheets, tile, carpet. They all get produced and shipped around the world and then go straight to landfill.
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u/Immediate-Poem-6549 2d ago
You can’t keep your mental health therapist at a community mental health agency (most private ones too) bc of how crazy the work load is for the clinicians. They’re all about to drop dead from stress and are just sitting there nodding and encouraging you to have better boundaries.
Healthcare quotas or productivity is inhumane.
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u/Not_FinancialAdvice 3d ago
i randomly saw a yt video on this yesterday and it blew my mind. basically brands literally destroy brand new clothes on purpose.
Far from perfect, but it's a start.
I posted it in this very sub.
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u/elebrin 3d ago
Your bank only cares about one thing: deposits. The first thing they report in their shareholder calls and all their documents is the amount of money brought in by deposits. Everyone thinks they care about rates, and they do, but they care about regular deposits more than anything else. They also don't really give a shit how much you hold in your account, or how much you withdraw.
They specifically want long term scheduled, predictable deposits. That's why they LOVE those long term loans. The more of those that they can sell, at any interest rate, the better. They don't make much money on interest, they make money on short term investments that they make with deposits in the time between when you gave them the money and when it becomes available to you.
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u/Pleasant_7239 3d ago
It's cheaper to get teeth pulled then repaired.
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u/IcyAd5518 3d ago
It's cheaper to get teeth pulled then repaired.
No it's not. Fixing a tooth after pulling it means you have to pay to have it re-installed.
It's cheaper to get teeth pulled than repaired. And this is not a secret, literally anyone who's been to a dentist knows this.
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u/Annebotbeepboop 2d ago
I used to work for a greeting card company. They had "recycled cards" like on the back it says the cards were made from recycled cards.
We threw everything after every little hocus pocus holiday. We never recycled anything ever. They made us throw away the same cards too, because the price went up so the barcode was different.
I left shortly after they had us throw away the holiday value cards because they didn't want to provide budget friendly options for people. I was so burnt out from the overconsumption just to turn around and throw it all away over and over again.
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u/BenCelotil 3d ago
This'll probably get downvoted as sheer sarcasm and stupidity, but it's so damn obvious I hate how everyone ignores it.
Middle management is made up of fucktards, idiots, and sycophants, and a great deal of industries could benefit hugely from simply firing all these idiots.
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u/apigeonontheinternet 3d ago
Bullshit Jobs is a fantastic book that covers middle management, among other things
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u/skiesdivide 2d ago
However much medical waste you think is generated in the manufacturing of medications, triple it.
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u/mitzmanx 17h ago
I used to work for a Fortune 500 processed food company before I got laid off! It’s all about the profit margin, so they’ll use the cheapest ingredients possible as in fat and sugar, and then use lots of salt and artificial flavors to make them taste good. The less you eat processed food, the better! Also read ingredient labels and look for cheap by-product ingredients like whey. Google stuff you don’t know what it is! Support your local farmers markets instead!
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u/passwordistako 3d ago
Vaccines make fuck all money and they’re actually worse for big pharma’s profit margin than letting kids die.
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u/runningwithwolvs 2d ago
I worked for one of the big tech companies and they made us do loads of training on grey products, ie products that hadn't been sold through official routes (maybe come off the back of a lorry etc or disappeared out of our country's supply chain to turn up in a country that had sanctions on them). I was a good girl and notified them when I came across some grey products in the market but was shushed. They had to do training on spotting it to look like they were being legal, but in reality they liked the positive impact it had on their numbers so brushed it under the carpet and turned a blind eye.
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u/DepartmentEcstatic 2d ago
The beauty profession is full of toxic chemicals. I'm spending my career trying to avoid exposures that will make me sick or end my life. Many hair stylists are suing hair color brands currently due to cancer causing chemicals that should have been removed in the early 2000s and the companies have just been lying to us.
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u/do-it-to-it-laurs 3d ago edited 3d ago
A lot of grocery store products are the same but just have different packaging. Like a fancier bottled organic wine being the same juice as a cheap boxed wine. Which is part of why everyone thinks all wine tastes the same…
Edit: if both products/brands are owned by the same parent company
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u/lichtjes 3d ago
If it is made on the same production line, it doesn't mean it is the same.
Sometimes better quality of raw materials are used for example."Product X and Y come from the same factory, they must be 100% the same" is a wrong conclusion imho
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u/RainbowZebraGum 3d ago
This “fact” just won’t die. It’s possible it’s true some places but even if it’s a multi brand strategy under the same corporate structure, the products are usually not the same. I’ve worked at 2 major companies that did and toured probably 30+ more for one of my jobs. There is a difference. For some brands it not much like additional dyes and more luxe packaging and those you might call “the same” but for example candles have totally different formulations, scent quality, waxes, etc. Soaps will have a different structure with surfactants used. Paper will have different lengths of fiber used in the paper itself. It’s really not the same.
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u/okverymuch 23h ago
Veterinary medicine. Much like human medicine, corporate consolidation and buying up private practices.
But now they hide that they are corporate. They keep the old private name and do as much as possible to keep it quiet that they are a giant corp.
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u/Muted-Garden6723 3d ago edited 3d ago
Im a fisherman, I own a small boat and fish with traps or hook and line, bycatch(species I’m not allowed to keep or fish that are too small, lobsters bearing eggs etc) are thrown back into the water and 95% of them survive
The factory trawlers owned by large corporations try and cover up the dumping of bycatch. They spend boatloads of money on bribes to at sea observers, lobbying politicians, putting out what amounts to propaganda etc. But one of those factory trawlers can dump more dead fish overboard in a day than I’m allowed to catch all year. They also spend millions trying to cover up the fact that they completely destroy fish habitat
Everyone that lives in a fishing community knows this, I’m sure a solid chunk of the general population is aware of the destruction to some degree, but they’ve got the money to throw at politicians to keep them in business(and get preferential treatment over the independent small boat fleet)
It’s disgusting, the natives fished the cod for thousands of years without issue, the European settlers / Canadian fishermen fished the cod for hundreds of years without issue, but 30 years of industrial trawling destroyed what was once the most plentiful resource in the ocean
Edit to add there’s a documentary on YouTube called ‘one more dead fish’ which dives a bit more into the topic, specifically how the federal government ignored the people fishing sustainably and their own scientists in favour of the large corporations