Restaurants and Coupon Fraud

[tylerhutchinson]

I know many people who have done this. It seems they eventually got caught and fired.

As far as getting people to take the survey, I am not sure the best approach. Honestly, if I were one of those people doing that, I would not take the survey, which would leave only honest people taking it and that will give you inaccurate numbers.

I am not sure if you have a site you can put it on currently, but I would suggest promoting it on sites with a "complete survey for a chance to win" sort of thing and offer a potential reward. Other then that I think your best bet would be to reach out to restaurants, and have them give them to their servers and then they give them back to you. Just make sure you put on them that it is confidential and the owner cannot view, or fire based on results sort of thing. I still do not know how much participation you would get.

[Harold Mansfield]

I worked in bars, clubs and restaurants for 15 years and I know exactly what you are talking about. I have probably seen every scam out there and there are a million of them. You are right, servers are sneaky.

On your original question, you can't stop servers from getting coupons on their own and applying them to cash customer checks. Especially if the coupons are readily available to the general public like in a newspaper or mailer, and the servers act as their own cashiers. There's just no way.

However, you can spot check the honesty of your staff by requiring a managers OK on all coupons before they are cashed out. Just a simple initial or stamp and asking which table it's for (and put that table number on the coupon with your initial) , should do the trick. That way the floor manager can do random "table touches" disguised as marketing polls to talk to the customer and ask where they heard about you and found your coupon. It's important that the coupons be approved before they are cashed in by the server.

This will make it much harder for servers and make the scam a bigger risk for the possibility of being caught in a random spot check.

Of course you will still have a certain amount of servers, especially when it's busy, that will try the old "it was too busy and I couldn't find you", more times than the average person. The really sneaky ones will wait until there is a crisis that takes the floor manager away from the floor, or will only do it when it's really busy thinking it's easier to hide the deception. That just makes your job easier because you know who to watch.
Since it is unlikely that a floor manager will touch every table with a coupon, and your good scammers will know exactly when to use the scam at the most opportune time when a table touch is unlikely, you can compare who gets more coupons than others, by tracking which sections or tables have a high amount of coupons and comparing that to the server that works those sections.

Be on the look out for :

Servers who always seem to get your signature as the table is leaving.
Old or outdated coupons.
Checks with staples in them, but no coupon attached. ("it must have fallen off").

You get the picture.

[Harold Mansfield]

People that say that they have never heard of servers doing things like this as a rule, may be the exception, but in my life working in hospitality, there was always someone that had a scam going. Especially in a cash business where servers act as their own cashiers.
Some restaurants have a cashier in the kitchen for the servers to cash out their checks.. that pretty much cuts the scamming out.
But I have never worked anywhere where everyone was completely honest and I'm covering corps like General Mills ( Olive Garden, Red Lobster), TGI Fridays, Bennigans, Chili's, Chi Chi's, and Macyo in Michigan, Ohio, S. Florida, and Las Vegas including major hotels, and multi million dollar night clubs.

Some scammers are light and only get you for a few dollars a night..$10 here, $20 there and some are major that can hit you for $100's to thousands a night depending on how busy the establishment.

I've caught servers running credit card scams in upscale restaurants, to bartenders padding the drawer in busy nightclubs. I knew servers that would work certain places because they were easier to scam.
Family owned and mom and pops are easy targets because they seem to trust their employees like family, where as corporations tend to cover as many bases as possible including using secret shoppers.
It definitely is a huge part of the industry, but it's very hard to get away with it for any long period of time these days.

I could talk about this for days.

[billbenson]

Kinda reminds me of my days in Sears security during college 30+ years ago eborg. Employees had discounts for them and direct family. We were forever catching employees buying things for friends. They were pretty obvious and were fired in most cases. Gotta be real easy these days with cameras. I'd be very interested to see how WalMart does it because they manage their employees by camera. In this economy, my former account manager at my bank ended up working at WalMart. She was afraid to talk to me for more than 30 seconds. The eye in the sky was watching her.

Once my boss told me I had to watch my girlfriend in jewelry. Another employee saw her steal a gold bracelet while I was there talking to her. She was using me to steal. That was an eye opener at 19 y/o.

Fortunately I'm not in brick and mortar retail. If I was, I'd use the hell out of cameras. I'd watch employees for minor ethical violations, the friends they keep, if they are looking suspicious at tiimes, credit history, police record etc. Its sort of profiling... It will give you a short list of people that you want to keep an eye on to be sure they are people you want working for you.