Do you have control of your store or restaurant?  By that I mean everyone who has keys to the building, and storage areas, codes to the POS system, and combinations to the safe are authorized.  And by authorized, I mean they have been properly screened, vetted, and have shown the appropriate responsibility to run your business.  And for every management change all those keys, codes and combinations have been changed.  If you haven’t, you do not have control of your store or restaurant.

Have you ever paid cash for merchandise or food and observed the cashier place the bills into the register and there was so much cash in the till that the spring loaded clip wouldn’t close?  Or the cash drawer would hardly shut?

I could never quite figure the logic of capturing cash sales at the registers and then putting the cash into the store safe that was left vulnerable to theft in so many ways.

When a $100 bill is tendered in a fast food (QSR) environment, the cashier freaks out a bit and calls the manager over to inspect it.  He or she gets a bit nervous as they go about looking it over, holding the bill up to the light, not quite sure what they are looking for.   With profit margins being so narrow in quick serve restaurants there is not a whole room for error in accepting a phony bill – particularly a $100.  If they are further along in training they may swipe the bill with one of those iodine ‘counterfeit’ pens.  There is a slight sigh and a quick nod to the cashier to accept the bill.  Other fast food establishments may refuse to accept the $100 bill as a policy, which is a whole other subject. 

An employee of a grocery store was charged with felony theft for allegedly stealing more than $6,200 from fraudulent refunds in six months. The news article states that $5900 of that amount had been stolen within the past 30 days. The employee allegedly admitted to watching supervisors log onto cash registers to authorize the transactions. She then used their operator numbers and passwords to create the fraudulent refunds.