When I was working minimum wage at a gas station many eons ago, we would have ‘2 for $x’ specials where x is less than 2 times the individual price of whatever item.
People would often not want to buy 2, but I would ring up 2 in the till for the special price and charge them for the single. Then when the next person did the same, I would charge them for the other single.
So over the day, I would sell 10 energy drinks at say $4, but ring them up as 5 ‘2 for $6’ specials. This would put the till up by $10, and then I would use that $10 to have a free meal.
Anyone else do anything like that?
Uhhhhh honey what you’re describing is called “theft”. Also known as “fraud” if you want a different name.
But to answer your question, I usually shit during working hours, so I get paid to shit. It’s a great feeling.
The shop is getting the correct amount of money, nobody loses, nobody cares.
I guarantee some busybody middle manager would care, especially if they wanted to fire someone and were trying to find a reason.
@PeachMan wasn’t saying this because they have some ethical problem with what OP is doing, they are saying this because this is technically what OP is doing, and could be held liable for if it was ever brought to the wrong persons attention.
Is it?? I get it might be bending the rules slightly, but I can hardly believe it counts as theft
Yeah, the $2 for X deal is a gimmic to increase sales. It’s the company saying “I am willing to sell these cheaper if it gives me an extra sale.” But by applying that sale price to customers it didn’t apply to, essentially you just stole a dollar from your employer every time you sold an energy drink.
I’m personally pretty forgiving of something this petty when done by someone making an unlivable wage, but it’s still theft.
Those deals are usually at the manufacturer-level, so the employer would likely be getting the same amount of money. The manufacturer would still be selling the same amount of the product, but would get less than if the items were rang up correctly.
So, for me at least, I give even less of a shit. Oh no, OP cost Nestle or whomever literally nothing but non-existent “opportunity cost”… how will they ever recover?
It’s a very valid reason to fire you. You’ll most likely get caught when the inventory starts to be way off.
Why would the inventory be off?
Maybe OP didn’t explain it well, but I would imagine that:
- This only happened with people who paid cash
- If we imagine that every person in line has one drink and is paying with cash, OP would be ringing up 2 drinks for every other customer.
For the purposes of inventory, 1 drink per person is the same as 2 for every other person.
It won’t be off though. Every bottle is accounted for. I sold 10 bottles for $40 but they are added to the till as 10 bottles for $30 at the special price.
It might be more obvious if you increase the volume.
Immagine that your employer has instructed you to sell 1 bottle for $3, but you can sell a whole pallet containing 500 bottles for $1000 (coming out at $2 per bottle). So you ring up the whole pallet and pay it off over the next few days by adding $2 to the cash register and keep $1 for each sale. Over those days, you have made one single sale of a pallet, while pocketing $500.
The work hours which was meant for you to generate sales of $3 bottles has been reduced to effectively selling $2 bottles, while the remaining expected value ended in your pocket.
As others have said, I don’t really care about big corporations losing out on some money, but you are 100% stealing when you reduce the expected sales value and pocket the difference during your work hours.
Per https://solink.com/resources/top-types-employee-theft/ it’s basically “Skimming”:
This popular POS employee theft scam occurs when an employee charges a customer full price but takes a little cash out of the total for themselves. This may result in telltale cash register imbalances, or, it can be more complex, like using coupon codes on a customer’s purchase while still charging them full price and then pocketing the difference.
Your implementation sounds pretty close to the coupon version.
Are your bosses ever going to notice? Unlikely. And if they did they’d probably fire you at worst, rather than press charges.
Now, that said, if your manager or employee handbook or any other source of authority at your job says it’s okay, then it is (excepting, of course, if they explicitly tell you it isn’t) - but that’s because it’s a benefit your employer has given you rather than one you’ve taken.
I own my own company, I am the sole employee. I win all the company raffles, it’s great.
My wife owns a small business and I work for her. I get all kinds of perks including being able to sleep with the boss.
Have you ever created your own job perks?
No, but I had a small company and asked the worker bees to define their own perks.
There were four employees. Three of them played paintball together and wanted paintballs. So I brought a case of their favorite balls into the office before their outings. The fourth guy wanted to have baby carrots to snack on. He ate ~3 lbs a week. Dude would code for hours as long as he was crunching carrots.
I couldn’t have guessed what any of them wanted but they were absolutely cranked by getting it. This was a huge lesson for me: ask people what they want.
That is playing with fire my dude. and i’m someone who slits the throats of businesses to make jobs tennable for myself and customers.
Uhaul for example…I dont give two fucks if you committed a heist with one of their trucks and there was blood and bullet holes upon check it. ill just mark it in the system as prior damage and uhaul sends a mechanic to fix it. done…some uhual dealers are fucking douches tho, you’ll know because of the ‘prior damage’ stickers all over. fuck those gougers. Its free money for no effort, no reason to jam the customer up or take more time out of my day ‘inspecting’. that’s the job of uhauls mechanics.
When I was the Buyer for a chain of bike shops I basically became like a co-owner. I managed to link up all of the point of sale systems merge all the preseason ordering so that it was centralized and I could negotiate better terms on inventory. I managed all data entry and got the system unified so that it was easy to search our stores and available products from distributors. I took on responsibilities and improved the place well enough that I set my own hours and could do whatever I wanted. I was the boss but without any people drama responsibilities. I could set other peoples schedules and arrange for anyone I wanted to work with, but like I never told people what to do or had any of the negatives of managing. Like, “I am just doing X, Y, and Z today and if you’d like to help, come join me, otherwise I’ll do it myself.” Working with me, my style, and taking on responsibility without being told is how people got a pay bump. No one ever talked about it, but if I asked for someone to work with me across a couple of schedules, the owner bumped their pay. I loved that I could work a few hours before the shop opened or a few after it closed and have the whole place to myself. If I wanted to do a weekday race or it was just a nice day for a ride, I just left and went riding. I picked my demo bike and custom gear to ride and constantly got new stuff given to me. It was a fun life more than a job. The pay sucked, but it was fun.
