posted on Jan, 31 2012 @ 01:29 PM
That's right, polyester pants derivatives. Now you might be thinking, "Vagabond, I've been involved in organized crime... um i mean the credit
industry... for a very long time and I've never even heard of that." Well let me explain...
I work for a security company... actually its a janitorial service company- they just bought a security firm that just happened to snatch up a
security firm that was about to go under because of a lawsuit by mistreated employees... but I digress. The point is that the company found an
interesting way to improve profitability, which I recently learned a lot about when an associate of mine left the company.
They rent uniforms from a 3rd party provider- everywhere i ever worked you get 5, but they only give us 3, and the sizes always come out wrong. The
result is that everyone buys their own work clothes for the sake of convenience. But most of us hold 3 rented uniforms that may or may not fit us. The
company takes a 300 dollar deposit out of our first 10 checks in 30 dollar increments, and puts that money into a bank account where i can only assume
it gathers interest.
Then, they cook the books. When you order your uniforms, you sign a receipt even though you haven't gotten them. When you pick them up, you sign
another receipt. When you exchange an item that doesn't fit, you sign two new receipts. They never remove a receipt from your file, no matter what
you return to them. I've worked here a year, and I estimate that on paper they have me down for about 10 pairs of pants, 12 shirts, and a jacket (it
took a lot of exchanging, but I actually ended up with 3 issued uniforms that fit)
Now here is the brilliant part. When you leave, assuming you return your uniforms, they give you back your deposit, so you don't sue them or make any
fuss. But then, they start sending you notices that you still have uniforms and they are going to send you to collections... keep in mind this is
after they have already accepted the return of your uniforms and refunded your deposit. So you ignore it because you got your money.
But they go ahead and sell an imaginary debt to the collections agency, and your credit gets dinged.
This goes to show that we really haven't learned our lesson in this country. While I'm sure that the polyester pants desk is not going to drag our
whole economy down like a stack of bad mortgages, the fact remains that even for small regional companies it is a common business practice to simply
invent debt out of thin air and sell it for pennies on the dollar, as if discounting made up for the fact that it has no value to begin with.
And by the way taxpayers, thats getting written off as an operating expense or business loss by someone I'm sure, so in the next couple of months
when you're beating your head against the computer screen trying to figure out why there aren't more tax credits for a guy like you... well sorry,
the big dogs were hungry.