We are all dying to know the juicy secrets behind something as controversial as a non-disclosure agreement. An entire world of information that we don't know--and, as humans are extremely curious creatures, we are simply absolutely on board with learning all of the juicy secrets behind an NDA.
The trouble is, NDAs are used on a lot of things. Sometimes they're just to prevent corporate espionage. Sometimes it's because you've booked a job onboard a major film/tv-series and the creators want to keep it under wraps.
Sometimes it is juicy though, and those times...well. Those are the ones we tell everybody.
"People no longer bound by their NDA, what can you now disclose?"
Here were some of the juiciest answers.
The Cola Wars
coca cola GIFGiphy"Not my own but from a family friend. Coca Cola and Pepsi regularily settle disputes behind closed doors on things like employees trying to quit and join the competitor."
"Their employment contracts have entire clauses stating you cannot be employed by the competing companies even after you quit so to protect company intel and confidentiality."
"For example, a Coca Cola employee feels like he is being mistreated by the company so he quits and tries to work for Pepsi."
"So Pepsi's legal team will inform Coca Cola as soon as they find out and Coca Cola will sue the guy for breach of contract and in return Pepsi will pay them."
"This is done so Pepsi and Coca Cola don't sue each others into bankruptcy for breach of laws regarding industrial competition and market regulations. Basically a peace treaty of sorts."-JazzPhobic
Behind The Mask, Who Are They?
"I was part of the beta testing for DC universe online. I remember a few missions that were voiced probably just by developers, before they hired the voice actors to do it."
"I wish I had saved footage of it but there was one where Supergirl was clearly voiced by a man doing a high-pitched falsetto voice. One of the funniest things I've ever seen."-DrumBxyThing
Hollywood For An Evening
"Not sure if I'm no longer bound or not or how common knowledge it is, but living in NYC I was paid to be a fan at a major red carpet movie premiere for a popular film franchise."
"100% of the people there were paid to act excited as famous actors and a VERY famous director walked out and said hello and did interviews. We were under strict instructions not to let anyone know we were hired."-LearnedToUnicycle
See? We told you--sometimes, it's just corporate America. But sometimes it's test runs of (now well-known or defunct) products:
A Good Idea In Theory
"Cheetos Clean Paws. I worked in market research and Frito-Lay tested these back in 2007, I think. The concept was Cheetos that didn't leave orange dust on your fingers."
"What that translates to is Cheetos with an edible lacquer sprayed on them. But they tested very poorly because they tasted like they had edible lacquer sprayed on them."
"My coworkers and I referred to them as semi-gloss Cheetos."-darkisright
No More Drama
"I signed an NDA for a predominant American show where they take a certain type of business on the brink of failure and 'transform it' to save the business."
"When the producers of the show found out my wife and I both worked there, they tried to fish through our relationship for tv drama."
"When they found out we have a solid relationship, they tried to convince us to fake our drama with scripted conflict. Long story short, we got fed up and quit during shooting. We were cut from the show. Oh well."-unholyXwater
Hollywood Conspiracy Come To Life
"I used to work for a company that tracked ticket sales for theaters across the US. By contractual agreement with Hollywood studios, we collected information for approximately 80% of theaters, but we were not allowed to collect that last 20%. Why?"
"You may have heard of Hollywood accounting. Hollywood studios work very, very hard to ensure their accounting is as beneficial to the studios as possible. No surprise; all businesses do this."
"But Hollywood has unusually high amounts of money in very narrow products, creating a distorted market. And the industry is rife with films grossing obscene amounts of money but not reporting a profit."
"Because our company couldn't collect that last 20% of theater data, it wasn't possible to absolutely say that a movie made X number of dollars."
"So, I can't prove it, but ...On Friday, June 21st, 2002, the movies "Minority Report" and "Lilo and Stitch" were both released to great fanfare."
"Minority Report's opening weekend was reported at $35,677,125 (27.0% of total gross)."
"Lilo and Stitch's opening weekend was reported as $35,260,212 (24.2% of total gross)."
"This is a lie. Lilo and Stitch earned more money than Minority Report its opening weekend. 20th Century Fox couldn't have a Tom Cruise feature film being beaten by a f**king cartoon."
"So someone at 20th Century Fox called Disney and offered a deal. Since the full amount of money earned couldn't be proven, Fox would announce that Minority Report was the top earner for the weekend. In exchange ..."
"We never knew what the exchange was. We simply knew that Minority Report was reported as the top earner and Disney received some benefit for not saying anything."-OvidPerl
Teachers Describe The One Student That They'll Never Forget | George Takei’s Oh Myyy
And They Say American Industry's Dead
"Used to work in a warehouse where we made feminine hygiene products. The pads came out of one machine into several different branded boxes. Both the nickel gas station pads and the 10 dollar a box pads."
"Also we had one product of pads where we imported them from china, then repackaged them into our own boxes. I didn't have a problem with that. The problem I had was the box had an emblem saying 'made in America.'"
"Would've been ok if it said assembled in America. But no."-GGATHELMIL
Studio deals, scripted drama, and failed products? What else can fall under an NDA? Let's find out:
Duck Soup
"Used to work for Disney. They only used Disney employees for the test screenings of Marvel movies so I got to see Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (already great) and an early version of Doctor Strange that needed A LOT of work."
"When we were giving feedback to the moderator the writers were sitting in the back with their heads in their hands looking very defeated."
"It was a confusing mess but they fleshed out the characters more so it was better by the time it was released. Oh also they used to kill a lot of ducks with pyro at Disney World when they did the IllumiNations show at Epcot. Shhhhh."-meany_beany
Doggos Deserving Better
"Adogo is a doggy daycare in Minnesota that made me sign an NDA for two years saying I was not allowed to talk about the company mainly, sadly, because they treat the workers and dogs like sh*t."
"No care for how many dogs were packed into a room, which is both unsafe for the dogs and the dog attendant. Often I'd be alone in a small room with up to 25+ dogs, most who only had the most minor of behavioral tests done to see if they would play well in daycare."
"Owner also tried to get around not paying my worker's comp when I did get injured on the job, and whenever anybody put in their two weeks after realizing what a toxic work environment it was (which was often) he would punish them with scheduling them all week or make them open to close 12 hours for all their shifts."
"If you're in Minnesota and looking for a reputable dog daycare: STAY AWAY FROM ADOGO. If in the Twin Cities I would recommend Dog Days, not perfect, but they actually seem to care."-Gday613
The Bee Problem
"I used to work in a call center that had Bayer Advanced (yes, THAT Bayer) as a client. Bayer knew/knows full well that their neonicotinoid based pesticide/gardening products killed bees and were responsible for colony collapse."
"We were instructed to bold face deny and/or lie to the customer or caller if we were ever asked about it. We were also instructed to lie about the spray nozzles on the bottles."
"Bayer knew they sucked and were almost always completely DOA defective, but they refused to admit it and decided it was cheaper to just keep mailing replacement nozzles."-wizardswrath00
Everything from a doggy day-care to an evil corporate overlord who knew full well their product was harming the earth can be covered under an NDA. The lack of specificity of what an NDA can be used for, in part, is responsible for this; the other part is the human beings can really be a little scummy.
In the instances where the NDA protects the integrity of a working project, we see the (likely) original intended use. Are you under any NDAs right now? And when they're up, will you go on and spill all those secrets?
Companies are typically in business for profit, and very few have the goal of keeping the customer's interests in mind.
But some corporations go even further to get more out of their customer in exchange for their "quality services" and as a result, the line between general business and scam becomes blurred.
Redditor jwwin asked:
"What is a predatory business that shouldn't be legal, but is?"
Students paying an exorbitant amount in tuition in order to seek higher learning should be warned there are additional expenses to cover for.
A Textbook Example
"College textbooks, they will release an 'updated' edition every semester but the information doesn't change. And then after you spent a fortune on the books the places that buy textbooks will give you like 5% of what you paid for the book."
– teethalarm
A "Double Whammy"
"Former Prof here. I talked with a book rep about this once and learned a lot. It is a bit complicated but worth understanding. Book publishers rely on large quantity sales to make any money on a book because the cost of production is so high up front (author, editors, printing, etc.). So, for a book to be profitable, it has to sell a lot of copies to spread the cost of production across all the books. A paperback in the fiction section might sell 100,000 or more. A textbook might sell as few as 1,000. So, the publisher needs everyone to buy the book to break even."
"Now add colleges into the mix. Somewhere in the 1980s (give or take), colleges saw publishers selling books and making larger profits on them than the college bookstore was making per book. So they got the bright idea to start buying used texts and reselling them. Before that, a text would come out and 97% (making the number up but it was close to that) of the students would buy the book in year one, 85% in year two, 75% in year three, 60% in year four and 50% in year five. A $50 dollar book would cost $25 to make (again, making the numbers up), sell to the bookstore for $40 ($15 publisher profit), and be sold to the student for $50 ($10 bookstore profit). Across the five years, the producer would make a profit."
"Then, college bookstores began offering students $25 for a used book and selling it for $40 ($15 profit - $5 higher than that of a new book). Students would then prefer the $40 used book over the $50 new book. But that cut the publisher's sales from 97% to 50% in the first year. Because they could not sell as many books they had to do two things: (1) raise the initial price of the text to cover the production cost in 1-2 years rather than 4-5 years, and (2) cut the cycle down from 4-5 years to 1-2 years to ensure that they got sales of the book. That is a double whammy. Texts that used to cost $50 now cost $300 or more. And they have a new version out every 18 months or so. Students refuse to pay that price and that cuts the sales numbers even further forcing the price up again. And, with new editions out so frequently, it is harder to sell them back to the bookstore."
"That's why you see so many 'course packs' now - where a professor will pick a few pages from a book to give to the students. I went from having nearly every student purchasing a text in my early career to having zero students with a text late in my career. Your professor probably dislikes the state of affairs as much as you do. I cut down what books I would select because I could not justify students paying that much for what they were getting. I would also recommend students look for older editions on Amazon and the like which got me in trouble with my administration because I was not supporting the bookstore. But, it was difficult to teach from a text that no one had or had access to. The University's desire to generate revenue from texts truly was killing the chicken because it was not producing enough eggs."
"So look for an older edition on Chegg, Amazon, or the like and match it up with what your professor is teaching from the new edition. You are right, it probably has not changed. Be careful for the problems at the end of the chapter - that is often where the changes are."
– BewnieBound
These businesses parade as services but they are notorious for taking more than what you're willing to pay for.
For A Future Owner
"Rent to Own (furniture, appliances, TVs, video game systems, etc.) The mark up on the interest over time ends up costing 4 times the purchase - or more."
– PartyAlarmed3796
"Well the trick is to not pay (seems to be what a lot of people do)."
– Expensive_Ad2695
"Which is why those places are so expensive and why they're actually kinda necessary for some people."
"They're taking a pretty big risk on people with no credit, and if a person with shi*ty credit needs a refrigerator or other necessary appliance, there's usually nobody else willing to work with them. Also, most of them report to credit agencies so you can build your credit through them."
"I'm not a fan by any means and I hate that people are buying video game systems and couches through them, but I still think they're filling a need."
– Pitiful-Pension-6535
Money Sucker
"Payday loan companies – they're like financial vampires, sucking the life out of people with high-interest rates."
– neonliolia
"And yet most of them are owned by major banks... hmmmm."
"Bank of America, Wells Fargo, US Bank, JP Morgan/Chase collectively all own the largest payday lender companies."
– Bramtyre
"In Canada, there is an effort to turn Canada Post into a kind of bank that offers basic banking services to the most vulnerable. Not sure what happened to that, but it was an alternative to check cashing and payday loan rackets."
– hobbitlover
Greedy Event Vendor
"Ticket Master."
– LTVOLT
"Agreed. We went to a preseason hockey game the other week. Tickets were $5 each but there was around $8 of Ticketmaster fees for each one and you had to use their app to get in the door because the barcodes change like every 30 seconds or something. It's ridiculous."
– darfus1895
Where can citizens turn to receive genuine care without drying up their financial resources?
Big Pharma
"Health Insurance and over priced perscription drugs."
"Wife is type 1 diabetic. Her pump is over $1000 a month WITH 50% coverage. $177 for just the sensor pack. We have the best coverage we can afford."
– Dukeboys_
"US pays the middle man for health care coverage. The middle man and the health care provider come up with "health packages" you can buy into, just in case you get sick. It's just sick how they funnel money from the middle class into this."
– dcoolidge
"Healthcare insurance industry. They can straight up reject claims you should be covered for and make you jump through near endless hoops to get them to pay for the service that is part of your plan."
– ColdHardPocketChange
All Out To Get Ya
"Homeopathic 'medicine' sellers."
"Psychics"
"Domain search engine registration scams (fake emails or physical mail that shows up saying 'your domain search registration is about to expire' and look exactly like warnings that your domain name is about to expire)"
"Fake homeowner warranty/car warranty scams loaded with so many limitations and exclusions they’ll basically never pay out."
"Multilevel marketing systems like Amway."
– 4wqrewtety
Losing Sight Of Kids' Well-Being
"From my experience working in group homes for youth are awful. The owners only want money and the more kids in care the more money."
– OddReputation3765
Going Nowhere Fast
"Car insurance."
"You get penalized for using it. Even just once in some cases."
– Effective_Sundae_839
"1000% agree. I was rear ended by a hit and run driver while i was stopped at a stop sign. Literally came to a stop for 3 seconds max and got destroyed. Car insurance wanted to give me 4k and shut me up. It’s called the nuisance fee. I eventually lawyered up and got 25k out of it. But like wtf. B*tch that’s what we PAY FOR, following renewal of my policy it increased hundreds of dollars a month and that was even after i switched to a different company. 'A claim is a claim regardless who is at fault.'”
– HitBackZach
Businesses taking advantage of their customers should be a crime, yet here we are.
What companies can you think of that legally continue to look after their own profitable interests above providing a decent service?
