In South Africa, monkeys have a nasty habit of stealing fruit from the orchards or, if they’re especially brash and adept, sneaking into houses to steal fruit from the dining room table. In order to catch the thieves, locals use old medicine flagons and glass long neck bottles with nuts on the inside; when the monkeys grab the nuts, they close their fists and try to pull out their hand, but they can’t fit their fists and their bounty out through the skinny neck. They can’t carry the bottle with them because it is too heavy, and therefore get caught. The owner of the bottle then gets rid of the monkey, keeps the bottle. Even when he knows that the owner is coming, the monkey cannot and will not release the nut, purely because of greed.
Unfortunately, theft is not limited to monkeys with sticky fingers, and you’re likely to encounter it in your business at some point. This might be directly – stealing from the till or taking product – or indirectly – gaming discounts that you have running for customers, etc. If you are to catch somebody in your restaurant or in your bar who you know is thieving, the best way is to catch them red handed. To do that, you need to leave things out in plain sight with a watchful eye. They might think that they are not being paid enough or that they are being mistreated. There is a multitude of reasons as to why they believe that they are justified in stealing from your restaurant, but at the end of the day, they are stealing directly from you and that is punishable.
To catch a thief is to do it in plain sight. Know that you are leaving something out for them to take, and make sure that they are seen to be taking it. That can be a timely process and it could be, if left unattended, a very, very costly exercise so it needs to be pounced on and done very, very quickly. There are several strategies that you can use, but each situation will be unique.
In one situation, I found out that a bartender was stealing cash. I started to mark the notes in his till with a felt pen. I noticed he liked to take $20 notes, so I marked them and put a few of these notes into circulation within the restaurant, within his till and about halfway through the night, I said that I needed some change for two $100 notes. He proceeded to open up his bank (his wallet) and give me the change that he had so I that I had two hundred dollars, he had a $120 dollars in notes and three of those notes were marked with black felted pen, I had caught him red handed. I asked him to come down to the office and started the proceedings, fired him on the spot and took a statement from him, let him go, report him to the police and the police then took the matter further. He was barred from my bar, he was barred from my restaurant and he was never to work in the restaurant company again.
It’s an unfortunate circumstance, but these things happen and they must be addressed because if you allow a culture of thievery within your restaurant, then the only person accountable is you. I have tools to manage stock disappearance. Both the food and the beverage stocktakes allow you to have a very tight control over the inventory in the business, whether for the bar or the kitchen. If you feel the stock is going missing, you could do stocktakes every day. And by utilizing the staff and the input of the stock every day, you are able to determine what is going missing and then you can identify which shift is being stolen from and you can do inventory at the end of every shift. In order to catch the person doing it, you need to be able to be on top of it and by utilizing some of the tools available here, you will be successful in identifying and addressing the problem.
Story
Minnie was a long-time employee at a family dining restaurant. She was trusted, did her job well and her customers loved her. But analyzing the P&L, her GM, Eric, noticed that Minnie had a disproportionate amount of discounts applied to her tables’ checks compared to other servers. All promotions that the restaurant ran – birthday meals, holiday discounts, etc. Additionally, he noticed that many of these were on cash transactions. One afternoon, Minnie asked Eric to apply a birthday meal discount to one of her checks. Previously he would have done so without hesitation, but because of his suspicions, he said he’d be happy to, but first we wanted to go out to the table to wish the customer a happy birthday.
Minnie stopped him and confessed. She lied about the discount being valid and knew that if he went to the table with birthday wishes, she would be caught anyway. She had realized that if a table paid in cash, she could give them their correct change, but without them even knowing, before she closed out the check she could ask for a discount to be applied. She already had the cash, so the total amount of the discount went straight to her pocket.
Eric was shocked that such a loyal and long term employee would scam the business, but he had no choice but to fire her. He identified the problem by staying close to his numbers, and caught her by confronting it head on.
