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20 people share their employers’ secrets and loopholes that everyone can exploit.

A lot of big brands have secret discount codes and loopholes that the general public may not know about, but if you&#39;ve worked at a department store for any extended amount of time then you likely know some of the workarounds.Ideally, the public would know all of the deals and offers at their disposal, but a lot of companies like to keep their return policies and special deals somewhat concealed (unless it&#39;s a big one-off sale), so that people don&#39;t abuse them (aka get their money&#39;s worth).Luckily, the internet is a treasure trove of resource sharing, and people on a popular Reddit thread shared their employers secret deals, loopholes, and unseemly secrets.1. From OP: The following will get you significant discounts at LensCrafters: AAA (30% even on non-prescription sunglasses), AARP, Eyemed, Aetna, United Healthcare, Horizon BCBS of NJ, Empire BCBS, Health Net Well Rewards, Cigna Healthy Rewards. They tend to keep some of them quiet.  If you&#39;ve bought photochromatic (lenses that get dark in the sun, like Transitions) lenses from LensCrafters and they appear to be peeling, bubbling, or otherwise looking weird, you&#39;re entitled to a free replacement because the lenses are delaminating, which is a known defect.  If you&#39;ve purchased a frame from LensCrafters with rhinestones and one or more has fallen out, there is a policy which entitles you to a new frame within one year. They&#39;re not always so generous with this one, so be prepared to argue a bit. Ask for the manager, and if that fails, calling or emailing corporate gets you almost anything. As a barista in the Coffee Beanery, I was routinely told to use regular caffeinated coffee instead of decaffeinated by management. 2. From drbr0wn: I&#39;m speaking as a person who has been in the hotel business for most of his life. When you drive into a hotel parking lot and you see that it&#39;s not full, that means the hotel&#39;s probably not full - unless there&#39;s a bus or something. There is no such things as a fixed hotel price. You&#39;re given automatic discounts for AAA, AARP, senior citizens, membership clubs, etc., but you can easily get 20% off the rate the person at the front desk quotes you by hustling and haggling. It&#39;s better to sell a room for 80% of the asking price than not sell it at all, right? 3. From velcroshoes: If you have Comcast as your cable provider and live with another person, you can continuously get their 6-month promo deals, by doing a &quot;service take-over&quot; after your promo is up. Just pretend you&#39;re moving out, and the other person is moving in. They will give the new person another 6-month promo, and won&#39;t have to do another install, it just changes who&#39;s info is on the account. Almost nobody uses service take-overs and therefore don&#39;t really keep track of you doing it. 4. From timwillingham: I&#39;ve never worked here (Cash America Pawn), but this is one of the best, will save you hundreds. Some of you may know this, but at Cash America Pawn shops, on every price tag on a product they are selling is a collection of letters from the word &quot;MARY LOUISE&quot;. The letters are a code for how much the pawn shop paid out for the item, how much they&#39;ve invested.  The code is that &#39;M&#39;=1 &#39;A&#39;=2 &#39;R&#39;=3 and so on. The &#39;E&#39; = 0. Say that the price for an item is 400 bucks. You look at the price tag, find the code, and it has the letters AAEEE. This means that Cash America paid out $220.00.  Once you find what you want, make sure you&#39;re talking to a manager or assistant manager, they are the only ones who can go really low. For the example used above I would offer $250, then $275 then we would probably settle for $300. I love buying sh*t from pawn shops and this code can give you the upper hand. 5. From mauxly: I used to work at Apollo, the parent company for The University of Phoenix. We wouldn&rsquo;t hire UoP graduates because we knew our degree programs were sh*t. 6. From wasntme11: ATMs in the US that charge $1 (or $1.25, $1.5, whatever it&#39;s up to now) for non-bank cards will sometimes not charge that if you ask for a different language (Spanish, French, Chinese, etc). I assume they don&#39;t always bother translating the &quot;I&#39;m going to charge you now&quot; page to airtight legal lingo in every language and just skip it. Some will present a translated version of it, but it&#39;s worth a shot when stuck needing to use one. They also often don&#39;t charge for non-US cards so if you have another account out of the country they&#39;re free in many more cases. 7. From KatAttack: 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&#39;s employees for leftover chocolate strawberries). 8. From thaitea: Never worked for the hotel industry but this is a secret I used a few times to cancel my hotel reservations at no cost. If you book a hotel online, most places don&#39;t let you cancel if you do it last minute. All you have to do is reschedule for another date then call in the day after and cancel that reservation :] 9. From jordanlund: Not really a secret...but the general public doesn&#39;t know my company exists. Let&#39;s say you have a small business and you need 100,000 envelopes with matching letterhead. You go down to your local Kinkos or whatever and order it up. They&#39;re glad to take your order. Then they go in their back room and cry because they can&#39;t do 100,000 envelopes with matching letterhead.  Then they call us, we take a giant 4 foot in diameter spool of paper, throw it on a cutting machine, make the envelopes from scratch then slap them on an industrial printing press that spits out 100,000 in a couple of hours. At our peak, before the economy tanked, we were making 70,000,000 envelopes a month. 24 hours a day, 6 days a week. Before I started working here I just naturally assumed all envelopes were made in bulk in China. Not so.  EDIT: Wow - that&#39;s a lot of upvotes. Here are some pics for your kindness: 12 foot tall stack of paper: http://imgur.com/LZVLu.jpg All lined up to be cut into envelope blanks:  http://imgur.com/Da0Bq.jpg The cutter and a stack of envelope blanks before folding: http://imgur.com/GYJIK.jpg Going through the folder/gluer: http://imgur.com/xFyz7.jpg EDIT EDIT: Now with video! This isn&#39;t my plant, but &quot;How Things Are Made&quot; shows mostly the same gear... In slow motion! I&#39;ve never actually been able to see what was going on until now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DkVTMBZRv8&amp;feature=youtube_gdata_player 10. From chrisldenton: I currently work for a regional ISP in Southern California. We keep no records of IP addresses whatsoever, and I know for a fact that most other small and medium ISPs keep no records either. Moral of the story: don&#39;t use AT&amp;T, Verizon, Time Warner, Cox, or Comcast for your internet. There are always other providers, you just have to look harder to find them. AT&amp;T &amp; Verizon are required by law to let other ISPs lease copper for DSL service, and usually the small providers give better service and don&#39;t keep track of your activities.... 11. From pwbdecker: 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 &#39;WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING!?!?&#39; and she says &#39;Oh, they told me to break this stuff because they can&#39;t sell it.&#39; I marched into my manager&#39;s office and asked what the hell they were thinking, and they replied &#39;Well that stuff has sat in the clearance bin for months, we can&#39;t afford to keep it on the floor, so it has to be destroyed.&#39; &#39;Well why can&#39;t you donate it to like, a SCHOOL or something?&#39; &#39;Well if we donate it, we have to write it off as a loss and it makes our profits look lower, this way it&#39;s written off as damaged property, and it improves our books.&#39;  They did the same with blank CDs, there were stacks of hundreds of them and I was like &#39;I can use them&#39; 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. From HolyLiaison: I work at a Dairy Queen Grill and Chill with Orange Julius in Minnesota. Here are some tips/secrets for those of you who enjoy awesome ice cream/food.  Blizzards: We can make any type of Blizzard you could ever think of, even stuff we&#39;ve never officially carried at the stores as long as you bring in the candy. My store does this for a few people that bring in Nerds/Skittles/Starbursts.  Misc: We can also mix and match any topping/candy/cone dip in the store for any product we carry, so if you think of your own concoction for a Blizzard/Sundae/Smoothie you can just list off the toppings you want. I highly suggest you try a Blizzard with Cocoa Fudge, Oreo, and Malt Powder! It&#39;s my own special break time creation!  Hot Food: If your DQ store has Iron Grill Sandwiches I suggest these specialties I&#39;ve made for breaks before: Grill Cheese Sandwich add 3 strips of Bacon, I usually get two because they&#39;re kinda small. You can also add stuff like Tomato&#39;s and Onions if that pleases you more. Some stores might even have cheddar cheese on hand, if so then get it made with cheddar. Oh and Chicken Strips with melted American cheese on them, they&#39;re primo!  Updates Posted at 12:10AM Below  Cakes: Much like everything else in the store we can make them however you want them as long as you order in advance (at least 3-4 days, longer for more complex cakes) of the date the cake is needed. Within the last year or so we started testing out candy cakes with Oreo, Strawberry, and some others types of goodies in it. We can do this with every candy/topping we have in the store. So if you have a special occasion and need a Cookie Dough cake? We can do it. Cake with Blackberry center layer? We can do that too. Anything you can think of can be done, and we&#39;ll work with you to get it done right! Just make sure to spell your name right if you want it written on a cake. Oh, and the cake decorator at my store (Apple Valley) is the best in the nation. She won the Iron Tip Challenge a couple years ago which designated her the best decorator in the whole DQ system. She&#39;s also the nicest person you&#39;ll ever meet!  Tips/Warnings: Dairy Queens are privately owned so experiences will vary A LOT. I&#39;ve been to some really, really horrible Dairy Queens around Minnesota. When I compare them to the store I work at (in Apple Valley) it&#39;s like night and day. And honestly, I&#39;m not favoring my store one bit when I say that. Some of the other DQ&#39;s are in horrible states, and really need to get their acts together. That&#39;s all I can think of at the moment. I&#39;ll probably come back and add some more. 13. From cheezerman: I work at a big winery in California, but pretty much every winery does this.  During harvest, grapes come in by the truckload. They are picked by machines with little human intervention.  Every load has thousands, probably more, of bugs. Spiders, earwigs, everything. Also, there are usually other animals. I&#39;ve personally seen snakes, mice, rats, bats, birds, etc go through the crusher/destemmer. THIS ALL GOES DIRECTLY IN TO THE WINE. Fear not, though, the stuff you drink is perfectly safe. Not vegan, though. 14. From WorkHarder: I used to travel a lot as a consultant. We got &quot;corporate rates&quot; at almost all of the hotels we stayed at...for example the Pepsi rate, the Coke rate, the Delloite 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 &quot;negotiated&quot; rate. Good way to save a few bones on a hotel room. 15. From LuckyDragonNo5: I work for an airline. Your cell phone is not going to make me fly in the wrong direction. 16. From filmstudiogrunt: I work at a major film studio in Texas. On big film sets everything is so chaotic that pretty much anyone can walk on if they pretend like they know what they are doing. Anyone aside from the top-ranked people won&#39;t hassle you because they don&#39;t want to piss someone off that could get them fired. I&#39;m fairly confident that anyone could meet their favorite celebrity simply by buying some food from the store, saying you&#39;re a p.a. or crafty, and walking up. Also, security is a complete illusion. Just don&#39;t look nervous! 17. From tatatalala: I work at UPS. Probably pretty basic, but if you need to ship &#39;sensitive&#39; things, a fail safe method is to either double or triple vacuum seal it and put it in a lock box. Mail the key separately. Also, for general shipping, use more than enough packing peanuts, or just crumpled up paper!! Don&#39;t skimp on tape and use a rigid box!! 18. From _illumination_: American Mint, LLC sells &quot;collectables&quot; such as &quot;the world&#39;s smallest gold coins&quot; and the &quot;wild west bowie knives&quot;. Everything is garbage, the $49.99 knife they sell you was acquired by them for $1 or less, all made in China. Any gold or silver in their coins is from the Republic of Liberia, so they probably don&#39;t pay much for it. The .750 ounce small gold coins that are .999 fine sell for over $89.99 which is more than double their value.  They make their money by screwing people into subscriptions, then when you return the item, they say they never got it or they take 3-4 months to credit the return.  I remember when an elderly woman called in to customer service to complain that she couldn&#39;t get her Thanksgiving dinner ingredients because the American Mint had billed her debit card without her authorization and threw her account into the negative. We heard these stories all the time from the CS reps. In the warehouse, returns used to come in by the mail cart. They would send out about 2000 items a day, and receive about 1250 returns a day. Everything there is junk and a terrible &quot;investment&quot; yet they&#39;d like you to believe otherwise.  Also, their &quot;certificates of authenticity&quot; are a joke, as they never kept track of who got what number, and when the stuff came back returned, it just goes right back on the shelf with little inspection. The Certificates of Authenticity were regularly reproduced for returns &amp; the numbers aren&#39;t always sequential so more than likely, many people have the same certificate number. I could go on for hours about this place, but I&#39;ll save it for an AMA or other outlets. I did file a rip-off report in the past and offered to testify but nobody ever needed my assistance.  I&#39;ve worked plenty of other places that did terrible things, but the American Mint was by far the most disturbing place I ever had to work unless you like throwing your morals and ethics out the door. I felt like I was working for the enemy and helping them defraud the American people and had high stress and heartburn every day for the 2 years I worked there until I quit and instantly felt better. Ever since, I&#39;ve tried to spill the beans to expose these crooks but they&#39;re still in business. I&#39;ll have to post about my Produce Department work and other jobs later on if this thread is still alive with interest. 19. From DisabilityGuy: Probably too many for this one to get noticed now, but here&#39;s mine (note: this is insurance fraud, so don&#39;t do it...): I work in disability insurance, and for common illnesses/ailments/injuries, we don&#39;t even confirm you were sick or injured with your doctor. Broke your arm and gonna be out 6 weeks? We&#39;ll take your word for it. Had your gall bladder removed and gonna be out for 2 weeks? No problem, claim approved.  So, how prevalent is this trust? Every single major disability carrier does it. Here&#39;s a quick list of ailments and their standard claim approvals (that usually won&#39;t require doctor confirmation): Fracture (of just about anything, depending on your job) - 6 weeks (note: the way this one changes are if it&#39;s a fracture of your arm and you are a desk jockey, it&#39;ll be less...if it&#39;s a fracture of your ankle and you are a garbageman, it&#39;ll be more) Gall bladder/appendix/thyroid removal - 2 weeks (if laparoscopic, if it&#39;s open, then likely 4-6 weeks) Total knee/ankle/hip replacement - 6 weeks Sprained ankle/knee/hip - 2 weeks Flu/pneumonia/sinusitis - 2 weeks Back pain - 2 weeks (careful though, this is one of the riskier ones to choose as some carriers follow up on back problems) Depression/anxiety - 4-6 weeks every time medication changes (requires a doctor to verify, but no testable proof of condition, and most doctors immediately prescribe meds if you self-report standard depression symptoms to them) Pregnancy - 6 weeks (yeah, we just trust that you really were pregnant and really delivered a kid) Total Abdominal Hysterectomy - 6 weeks  Your medical information cannot be released to your employer, so they cannot inquire as to why you weren&#39;t at work, they just take our word for it that you were disabled. Insurance companies do this because fraud is built into their pricing and they&#39;ve found it&#39;s more cost-effective to assume these people are telling the truth than to take the time to verify it.  Also, assuming you get caught, the insurer cannot report any instance of insurance fraud to your employer, and the company pursues less than 1% of the fraud it discovers (and those are only the biggest cases). Of the &lt;1% the company pursues (reports to the DA), less than 10% of those are actually investigated at all. In my office of over 100 claim analysts, only 1 has ever had a single case of fraud actually get pursued by the DA. 20. From TorrentThief: I worked in the electronics department at Walmart. You know the photo kiosks where you can create your own prints from sd cards and such? Well, on the new HP machines (which most should be by now), you can touch the bottom center (there&#39;s no button there and you may have to touch a few places, but keep trying) and you&#39;ll be presented with a login screen asking you for a security pin. It&#39;s a 4-digit number and it&#39;s almost always the store number, including leading zeroes to make it 4 digits. Check your receipt to get the store number. Once you log in, you can view other people&#39;s orders, reprint the orders, even copy their pictures onto your sd card.  Here&#39;s where it gets fun. Walmart cannot sell you prints that display any kind of pornographic images, but you can still print them. We just won&#39;t price them for you and we&#39;ll throw them away. However, when we do this, we don&#39;t delete them from the kiosks. Happy lurking. 