11. Capitalism, ladies and gentlemen
I used to work for a major office supply chain (they own a stadium). One day I went into the back and found one of the cashiers standing over a pile of stuff, printer cartridges, calculators, etc, and stomping her little heart out and trying her best to smash all of it. I was like “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING!?!?” and she says “Oh, they told me to break this stuff because they can’t sell it.” I marched into my managers office and asked what the hell they were thinking, and they replied “Well that stuff has sat in the clearance bin for months, we can’t afford to keep it on the floor, so it has to be destroyed.” “Well why can’t you donate it to like, a SCHOOL or something?” “Well if we donate it, we have to write it off as a loss and it makes our profits look lower, this way it’s written off as damaged property, and it improves our books.”
They did the same with blank CDs, there were stacks of hundreds of them and I was like “I can use them,” so I grabbed a bunch and put them under my jacket. When I came back at the end of my shift, they had taken them back, and another cashier was taking them one by one, scratching them with her keys, and dumping them in the trash. It totally shattered my youthful optimism.
12. Save more money
I used to travel a lot as a consultant. We got “corporate rates” at almost all of the hotels we stayed at…for example the Pepsi rate, the Coke rate, the Deloitte rate, the IBM rate etc. When you want to book a hotel you can look up the businesses with offices nearby and then ask if they have a rate for XYZ company. They never asked for a corporate ID and just give you the “negotiated” rate. Good way to save a few bones on a hotel room.
13. This is HERESY
At Godiva (the fancy chocolate store) ALL chocolate dipped strawberries (which retail for around $6 a pop) left at closing are thrown away. Try to go in just before closing and be really nice to the sales associate and they might give you some.
Doing this was especially popular with other mall workers for trade (i.e. trading free cosmetic samples from Macy’s employees for leftover chocolate strawberries).
