For a few years now, the monthly magazine Smart Money has been publishing a feature called "Ten Things: Ten Things Your Therapist Won't Tell You"; "Ten Things Your Caterer Won't Tell You." That kind of thing, all in the name of alerting consumers.
Now the magazine has put these revelations together on an Internet website, so readers can smack their heads in amazement at all the things they don't know! You thought your eye doctor told you everything about that laser procedure? Don't be so sure, my friend.
We riffled through Smart Money's categories and found that some of the things that tradesmen and professionals won't tell you are fascinating -- and even a little troubling.
For instance, your butcher won't tell you that an all-natural label on a piece of meat has nothing to do with what an animal eats. It could gorge on raw pesticides and still get a natural label, so long as the processor does not add anything after the animal was slaughtered. And if you think a free-range chicken spends its days frolicking in a meadow, think again. The doors to its pen must be open part of every day, but a chicken can stay in its coop its entire life and still get a free-range designation.
Your funeral director probably won't tell you that you don't have to buy a casket from him or her. By U.S. law, you can bring your own! Your plumber's not likely to tell you that clean-up is not considered part of the job -- and that plumbers can literally leave a wreck that YOU have to deal with. Most hotels and bed-and-breakfast inns won't tell you that their star ratings could be years old. A property might have once earned four stars, only to decline into a sorry dump -- and you wouldn't know it till you get there.
There are lots more things you didn't know -- or maybe didn't want to know -- about your lawyer, your yoga instructor, or your kid's camp. One Smart Money installment even pointed out there are things politicians don't tell you. Now THAT'S a surprise!