50 People Who Work In Luxury Industries Spill The Biggest Rip-Offs They Sell Their Rich Clients

If you make your product rare. we are very small olive oil producers, we have all the machines to completely produce the oils ourselves. we work very clean and organic in a way that goes beyond any certificates, so we won't fool anyone on this side. BUT there is certain special oils, ie. the very early harvest, or oil from wild olive trees. we have some wealthy customers, if we tell them we only have 10L of wild olive oil left, they want to buy it all... only to know that they have it and noone else. so we found ourselves lying sometimes about the amount of oil left, it makes certain rich people buy everything available just to have it 🤷🏻‍♂️.

I once DJ'd in a casino in Macau. The VIP tables would competitively send bottles of champagne to each other's tables just to signal their wealth. It would be announced over the PA system, but nobody would get the champagne. The bottles never actually existed! It would be like
"Table 10 sends 5 bottles of champagne to Table 4"
"Table 4 is sending 15 bottles of champagne to Table 10"
"Table 10 is sending 30 bottles of champagne to Table 4"
Etc
Etc
This kept on going until they were up to like 200 bottles of champagne. They weren't friends or anything - they were just showing their wealth off to this other table.
They got a few symbolic bottles with indoor fireworks taken to the table by girls, but that's it.
I asked the owner what it was about and he said they can pick them up on another day if they want, but nobody ever does - it's purely for show. Insane.

Medical woo. They will pay $200 to put their feet in a little tub of ionized water for 30 minutes while the metals in the water oxidize and turn it a color - THEN they find out which toxins they released based on the color (spoiler alert - it’s always brown/copper).

It’s complete and total nonsense and that’s the *cheapest* one I can think of. They’ll drop thousands on stuff like this without a second thought.

Dignity, as a valet at a billionaire hangout we had all sorts of regulars that would pay (to us) ridiculous amounts in an attempt to embarrass us. A notable one is the fellow who came in with a $100 bill about once a week and asked me to tie his shoes. He'd step out of his Rolls Royce Cullinan with one shoe untied and money in hand.

As best we could tell, it was to demean us into servants' tasks or whatever, but really it's a pittance to him but equal to 8 hours labor for me. So we always did it.

I do high end cocktail bartending. One of the rules I live by is that the difference in a $11 and a $30 drink is purely presentation. The glass needs to be immaculately polished, the ice needs to be in good condition, and the garnish needs to be skillfully prepared. Additionally, you need the right space to sell $30 drinks, you need clean surfaces and enough hands to ensure a consistently pre-bussed bar-top.

All of that has zilch to do with how good the drink actually tastes. It’s the real problem with most bartenders, I find. Making delicious drinks is important, but presentability is what sets the price tag and perceived value.

Gold flakes on things. My ex worked in the hotel industry. The rich would buy anything that sounded or presented itself as expensive.
Gold flakes are really cheap, they put that on/in anything and they can up the price 3x or more.

One of the more interesting ones is having expensive replicas made of priceless jewelry in case of theft. My surrogate dad in Nassau county, Long Island knows of people who spent thousands and thousands of dollars on "costume" dupes of their best jewelry so they can wear that out and leave the real stuff at home under lock and key.

Imagine a set of costume jewelry worth more than your vehicle. That sort of thing.

The “VIP Lounge access” in night clubs , it’s basically milking a person with low self esteem.

I’m a high end AV Engineer, think 150k+ speakers and home theaters/smart house stuff. People will pay THOUSANDS of dollars for speaker wire that is twisted a certain number of times in a certain configuration that’s supposed to prevent EMI and improve sound quality. It’s all BS to a degree, the human ear can’t hear the differences.

Honestly the markup on wine at fine dining restaurants is insane. i worked as a hostess and watched people drop $300 on bottles we got wholesale for like $40 without even blinking.

My brother works fine dining as a manager. Someone once wanted a sparkler on top of a dessert and the restaurant didn't want to do it. My brother said "sure we can do that. For $500." And the person did it. Now they have a box of sparklers available in the kitchen for requests and the restaurant gets $500 a pop. And once one dessert gets the showy sparkler walked through the dining room, past all the other couples celebrating or bachelorette parties or people who won big (it's at a casino), then EVERYONE wants to get a sparkler. Blows my mind.

I work for a high-end plumbing company. We do some truly enormous new residential builds. 

The difference between regular and high end plumbing is purely aesthetic. All our pipes are meticulously organized and ran with non-flexible materials. We essentially do satisfying cable management but for pipes. It looks nice and wealthy customers like nice looking things. .

My billionaire real estate client was having me go back and forth with the selling realtor on a property over a $10k difference in what he wanted to pay on a multi million dollar vacant lot. He made a point of telling me he and his wife were sipping a $10k bottle of port while having me work around over 10k on the property. Also the most unhappy client Ive ever had. Rich and unhappy ain’t no way to live.

Hotels

The difference between a $75 room and $150-200 room is usually massive

The difference between a $200 room and a $800+ room is a lot of small things that most people like, but wouldn’t spent $600+ on.

Former luxury hotel room service coordinator (answered phones, did office work) here.

All the food, but particularly booze. The markup is INSANE. Pro baseball players like (lots and lots of) cheap beer and will pay 3x for it after we basically grab it from the grocery store down the block to emergency restock after they drink it all.

Don’t even get me started on the liquor - absolutely eye watering price-per-shot even for the crappy stuff (and we could tell who knew what they were doing vs. who was ordering what they thought was fancy, but they all overpaid).

But the worst is honestly what people *didn’t* pay for. There’s something so odious about giving super rich people free stuff. I’m sitting there barely able to afford to eat, working 40+ hours per week, comping drinks and sending out elaborate free amenities to people who are spending more for their stay than I make in month.

I worked in luxury fashion . Not sure if this is relevant but I’ve seen hundreds of thousands in actual cash spent on purses.

I worked at Celine and was even offered a job in France at one point.

We had an alligator purse that at the time was priced at 35k $ . Had two in stock. Sold one to a Saudi Royal family member . They came in and shut the store down. We were all called to the floor . The Saudi family had a black truck deliver two gym bags full of American cash . Hundreds of thousands.

My store manager and her assistant were busy running bills through the counter . Family left spending nearly a quarter million on purses and jackets from Celine.

Cook here! I've worked fine dining exclusively, for over a decade. Mostly country clubs, currently at a high end hotel chain with locations in multiple countries.

Everything on the menu. It's everything. We mark up everything to such an insane degree that the kitchen staff alone account for half the luxury vehicles in the front lot. You paid 176 (ish) USD over wholesale for that caviar, so the dishwasher can drive a G Wagon.

We can charge 6 dollars for a fried egg because we say so. You could buy a dozen eggs for the price of one fried egg at a luxury hotel. Its not a special egg. It's the same brand as the diner down the street. I've been there. I've seen the eggs they use. You could probably get 3 eggs there, for the same price as the one egg I will make you. I will make you a 47 dollar burger that uses the same beef and the same buns as a sit down burger place. Our food is not priced to be reasonable. It's priced the way it is, *exclusively because we can*. Some of the people I serve are so wealthy that they don't even ask for a bill. They just charge it to their room, with no concern for how much they've spent. We had a lady a couple days ago, who ordered a gorgeous tomahawk ribeye for her dogs to share. They didn't like it. She threw it away, and just shook her head at her dogs. I know because I asked like I cared about her dogs preference.

We have a once a year regular. Pretty sure homie is one of those people who is so wealthy that he doesn't exist in our mortal realm, like his world is his own, and his alone. He comes in like he is a regular dude with disposable income. Wears New Balance sneakers, Kirkland khakis, and a polo. Single suitcase, no fanfare. He orders all of his food basically free style. Nothing is ever *off* the menu to him. 4 egg whites (6 dollars each), fine herbs (I think we charge like 5 bucks), brie (depends on what we have on hand, but let's say 10 bucks a serving), braised beef cheek (a dinner item we always have. He pays full price of 62.99), and a side of fruit (10 bucks). This is what he eats both mornings he is here, every single summer, like clockwork. He drinks two double Kettle One Caesars, sometimes a Latte, and leaves a generous tip. Usually his breakfast comes out to a couple hundred dollars, more if he has company. Its all really worth maybe 50 bucks. At absolute best. Our food is very good, but we are catering to people who don't just have disposable income, they have incomparable amounts of income, and we take full advantage of that. We feel no guilt for this, because they never ever ever complain.

I used to book hotel rooms for Disney. The El Capitan Suite at the Grand Californian Hotel runs about $10,000 a night.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s an extremely beautiful suite with top-tier everything, but it will never be anything but crazy and wasteful to spend $10,000 for the privilege of sleeping in a room.

Caskets and urns, I work in a fancier funeral home as support staff (not a director). We literally sell $80 urns imported from India for $600+. A $2000 casket goes for $8000.

Remember that you are allowed under federal law to bring your own urn or casket. Sometimes I feel like there is more financial flexing at funerals than at weddings.

Less common but the most vile scam I've seen.

I worked for a restaurant that wanted to be on a higher income shelf, in the middle of a white men in finance and gilets district. Very popular business breakfast spot.

They had a huge oven near the expo and you could see freshly baking sourdough bread. The oven was not actually "baking", it was set on something like 40 C so the bread was kept nicely warm but definitely not freshly baked. We didn't even bake it on site, it was delivered in the morning and put in the oven, as a display.

If someone ordered "bread and olives" or "charcuterie board" from the menu we would make a whole event of getting that bread out, slicing, arranging and serving. You would then expect any other order that had bread in there to get THIS bread.

Yeah, no. Any order, like things containing toast, full English, avo toasts etc had generic Warburtons used. FOH staff had to deal with complaints about it left right and centre.

I lasted 3 weeks, the restaurant about a year more after I left.