21 Shady Practices Businesses Use to Save Money
Cost saving secrets the public is not aware of.
Published 1 year ago in Wtf
Businesses need to operate at the lowest cost possible to be successful and make a profit, this is a concept more people are aware of and can appreciate as a consumer, however, some businesses get greedy with it and employ some very questionable cost-saving secrets the public is not aware of.
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There are a number of things that less-than-scrupulous owners do to increase their margins. I’ve seen operators pour bulk liquor into premium bottles hoping guests won’t notice. Cocktail bars can print one brand on the menu and then pour another one because they ran out of the more expensive one. The shadiest thing that I’ve encountered though was an owner that tried to hire all of his staff as independent contractors so he wasn’t liable for paying payroll tax or required insurance. Treating the human capital poorly is the shadiest tactic an owner could do to cut costs.
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There's a weird thing they do at certain restaurants where you can order pizza by the slice. When someone orders a whole pizza, they’ll take an older pizza (with some slices sold from it) that's getting close to its hold time, fill the missing slices in from the new pizza, and serve the Frankenstein pizza to the customer. Then they have a bunch of brand new slices to sell instead of having to throw out the expired slices.
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It was back in the 1970's. I was a young cook in a restaurant in LaCrosse Wisconsin. Most restaurants would run a Friday night all you can eat special which was always fried fish, usually beer battered, Cole slaw and fries. Yep, YOU KNOW WHERE THIS IS GOING.. An extra dishwasher was scheduled that night to search the returning plates for untouched fish and fries. These would be refried and served again. The owner's explanation was that the refrying killed all “GERMS". Needless to say I rapidly found another job before someone got sick and the kitchen was blamed.
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In my teen years I worked at a Sonic Drive In. When it got slow, the manager would make us carhops dig through the trash (no gloves) and pull out unused ketchup, mustard, etc packets and put them back in the bin on the shelf. I did that once and then quit and never went back! My cousin work at the same Sonic and she said they used to make her wipe the green slime off of the hot dog wieners and then throw them on the grill. Barf!!
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Many years ago I tended bar for a guy that was the ultimate of cheap. He would go to restaurants and pick up the raw chicken they were throwing away, take it in the bar’s kitchen and bleach it in strong Clorox solution until it was Snow White, cover it in really hot sauce, salt it like crazy and cook it up for h’orderves. Everyone ate it. I don’t know how many people got sick from it but they kept coming back for more.
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This is mostly not an answer… but I’m sharing it anyway. A lifetime ago I was working in a bar, and doing stand-up comedy on the side. One line I used to use was that the owner of the bar I worked in was so cheap that each new year, as the clock struck midnight he would go round each of the whiskey bottles with a sharpie. Changing the “15 year old scotch” to “16 year old scotch” and putting the price up.
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I went with friends to a local chain Mexican restaurant in Northern Virginia for dessert. As it was close to closing time the staff were cleaning up for the night. They were emptying the bowls of tortillas and the salsa from the tables back in the packets/jars. My friends questioned the staff about the hygiene and the manager denied they were doing anything wrong. Needless to say we left and my friends have never been back
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Way back in the late 70’s my high school girlfriend worked at a movie theater in Studio City, CA. Each night at closing they would bag any leftover popcorn and put the hot dogs back into the fridge. The next day they would dump the popcorn back into the ‘Fresh Hot Popcorn!” machine and put the hot dogs back into that greasy display case. The hot dog thing was gross enough, but recycling a few cents worth of popcorn is definitely the chintziest thing I’ve seen.
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A local popular chinese restaurant advertise all you can eat sushi. People start with plates of food, eat 1/4–1/2 and then when the bill arrives they find out the restaurant is charging them for the uneaten food in an effort to minimize waste. So they quickly see their patronage decline to the point they changed the way the all-you-can-eat sushi was being given. A waiter would be assigned to a group of tables and you had to order what food you wanted, and they would get it for you, no more serve-yourself. Again, people would order food, not like it, and then waste it. So they’d get ticked-off again for being charged for the wasted food. And so their patronage dropped yet again. Finally, they stopped offering all-you-can-eat and went back to a traditional restaurant type of service, and stopped trying to charge customers for wasting food. Eventually, they finally closed their doors to business. People stopped going and had had enough. Too bad really as their bento-box ordered food was great and they also made an amazing curried pork.
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Watered down liquor. Bread or food that appeared to be salvaged from another diner or diners who didn’t eat it or touch it. I never worked in a restaurant or bar but these were observations of things someone told me sometime or that I might have read even that rather freaked me out. Not the end of the world but not appetizing. Good time enders.
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One of the biggest shadiest thing is washing meats that doesn’t smell good at all with vinegar and lemon juice and cooking it like nothing happen discussing. A lot of them use expire pasta or can product and the worse of them are the ones that use the food that the health department says is bad and hazardous Nd they even take it out of thrash and still use it. If we only knew what happens in the back of the house .
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For me, it’s some of the more rural areas of Belarus. I kid you not, in most street vendor places if you order a cup of coffee you get charged for the cup, the stir stick, the sugar (rather you asked for it or not) and the coffee. It’s quite comical really. The wife gets mad at me when I mess with the sellers and say, no I don’t need the cup thanks. The confused look on their face is priceless. Several times, to the missus embarrassment, I have actually had the waitress/waiter remove the charge for the sugar. The majority of the restaurants cut their napkins in half. The food is relatively cheap (at least for me, not as much for the locals) but the portions are small. I usually order two on some of the dishes I know won’t fill me up. I love Belarus, but man are some of the restaurants skimpy.
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When I was in high school I worked as a “busboy” in a high end restaurant. If people knew what went on in the kitchen they would have been appalled. All I can say is I’m glad the place is long gone. When diners came in, we were to take rolls from a large bin and place them in a toaster then deliver them to the table. That’s all well and good. But if any rolls came back uneaten, they were to go back in the bin. Yup. Gross, shady cost-saving tactic for you. But, the owners also had two BIG dobermans they kept in the kitchen. If we brought back any plates that had meat or bones, we were to give them to the dogs. How would you like knowing that where your food was being prepared, two dogs were running around, slobering over someone’s leftovers? Each night after we closed, the owners, a husband and wife, would sit down to a lobster or steak that had been made in that very kitchen. Apparently, they must’ve saved a lot by recycling those rolls!
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My family and I have owned a local Italian restaurant for 30 years. I’ve had employees from most of the restaurants in town over the years and I try every new restaurant. Common shady things I’ve heard/seen are using pork instead of veal at other local restaurants (when veal is on the menu as $1 more than chicken something is wrong as it’s 6x more expensive), pouring house wine as premium wine, refilling premium liquor with well (I don't have a bar/liquor, just beer and wine), the same cheaper beer on tap for multiple selections, using off brand coca-cola products as the real stuff on coke machines (you have to buy a special adapter), using cheese with modified food starch (potato) for pizza/dinners (all the pizza chains use this), using expired products, using butter blend or margarine instead of real butter which is 3x more expensive…
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There seems to be particular liquors that somewhat emulate the taste of more expensive brands that some places refill bottles with. Sauza Silver is pretty similar to Patron, Cutty Sark is pretty similar to Jameson, and over rocks it’s pretty hard to tell the difference. At least not so much that someone would start an argument with a server as it’s also kind of impossible to prove. Of course there’s a lot of this at restaurants as well especially with intentionally mislabeled fish. Also, anyone selling Kobi beef anything or Truffle anything is likely to have zero percent of those actual ingredients unless it’s served as the whole ingredient and you pay a truly significant price.
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