Get robbed, get fired

[wmenorr67]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/22/pregnant-popeys-manager-fired-after-robbery_n_7120690.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592

Damn and I like Popeyes.  Looks like the manager was placed in a no win situation.

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

HuffPo leaves out the most important part of the story.  The manager wasn't fired for being robbed.  She was fired because she failed to secure the restaurant's cash properly.  

Standard practice in retail businesses like this is to move excess cash from the register into the store safe, to keep the registers light and reduce the risk of theft.  That was part of her job and she didn't do it that day.  She let all of the day's cash build in the register, and as a result the store got taken for a lot more than it should have.

She made an expensive mistake.  They fired her for it.  That's life.

[AmbulanceDriver]

HuffPo leaves out the most important part of the story.  The manager wasn't fired for being robbed.  She was fired because she failed to secure the restaurant's cash properly. 

Standard practice in retail businesses like this is to move excess cash from the register into the store safe, to keep the registers light and reduce the risk of theft.  She didn't do that, she let all of the day's cash build in the register, and as a result the store got taken for a lot more than it should have.

She made an expensive mistake, and they fired her for it. 

This - when I managed a gas station, our register was programmed to instruct us to drop cash to the safe if the drawer got above a certain amount (can't remember off the top of my head what it was now)...   And I suspect if someone wasn't following the procedure and got hit for more than a couple hundred bucks, he might have fired them.

[Blakenzy]

Well, she could sue the company for not providing a safe work environment 

[RevDisk]

I've heard of 7-11 and the like having it be policy that if the store is robbed, the employee has to pay for it out of pocket. Is it more or less what HTG and AD said, if it's above the amount set by company policy, you owe or get fired?

[vaskidmark]

I've heard of 7-11 and the like having it be policy that if the store is robbed, the employee has to pay for it out of pocket. Is it more or less what HTG and AD said, if it's above the amount set by company policy, you owe or get fired?

7-11 used to have prominent signs announcing they had less than $40 in cash in the store.  Registers automatically instructed cashiers to drop excess cash in the safe behind the counter (used plastic tubes).  Safe was on a timelock.  If you were third in line paying with a $20 you had to wait 5 minutes for the safe to drop more money so the cashier could make change.

stay safe.

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

I wouldn't doubt a policy that says any robbery in excess of the register limit comes out of the employees paycheck. Sounds like an effective incentive to follow the register limit policy.

And now it appears Popeye's corporate office is coming down on the local franchise owner to give the woman her job back.  Sounds like a tough situation all around.  

[RocketMan]

HuffPo leaves out the most important part of the story.  The manager wasn't fired for being robbed.  She was fired because she failed to secure the restaurant's cash properly. 

Standard practice in retail businesses like this is to move excess cash from the register into the store safe, to keep the registers light and reduce the risk of theft.  That was part of her job and she didn't do it that day.  She let all of the day's cash build in the register, and as a result the store got taken for a lot more than it should have.

She made an expensive mistake.  They fired her for it.  That's life.

According to one story I read about this incident, this wasn't the first time she had ignored the cash deposit policy.

[Firethorn]

I wouldn't doubt a policy that says any robbery in excess of the register limit comes out of the employees paycheck. Sounds like an effective incentive to follow the register limit policy.

And now it appears Popeye's corporate office is coming down on the local franchise owner to give the woman her job back.  Sounds like a tough situation all around.  

I've worked fast food a bit - $400 over 4 registers just after a busy period isn't actually all that much, and corporate policy about constantly moving money to the safe is often a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' policy in that you'll get written up for being too slow if you follow the deposit rules during busy periods.

[BryanP]

I've worked fast food a bit - $400 over 4 registers just after a busy period isn't actually all that much, and corporate policy about constantly moving money to the safe is often a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' policy in that you'll get written up for being too slow if you follow the deposit rules during busy periods.

This follows at least one account of this story I've read.  She said the excess was because they had just finished a particularly busy hour and she hadn't had time to move the cash yet.  If she's telling the truth it's just bad timing.

[230RN]

I've worked fast food a bit - $400 over 4 registers just after a busy period isn't actually all that much, and corporate policy about constantly moving money to the safe is often a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' policy in that you'll get written up for being too slow if you follow the deposit rules during busy periods.

I was going to say something like that.  Skaggs Department store, Chrismas, there was sometimes two hands in the register at once making change. Got to be too full so another peon besides me, with more seniority and experience, grabbed a bunch of cash and stuck the loose bills under the counter. 

Closeout time, we were about $10 ahead.  You'd think that was a ripe opportunty for a clerk to walk off with a couple of bucks, but nobody did.

I can see a "policy" about that in the OP if you've got a cash drop right by the registers. At Skagg's the manager, in normal times, would come by periodically with a new counted-out drawer, then go back in the office to reconcile the cash in the old drawer with the register sum tape.

Didn't happen in those times when the customer to clerk ratio got too high.

When I had my own store, the safe was way the hell in the back, and I sometimes had to institute a similar measure (stuffing bills behind the counter) to keep the register down to about $50 by guesstimate.

But naturally, at 10:09 AM on one of the first Saturdays after I took over, some turkey came in and bought a 79 cent transistor and offered a $20 bill.  Terry smiled, gave him his change, and the first chance, got some more moolah from the safe.  So I kept more in the drawer on Saturdays after that.

(I used to leave the drawer open with $50 in it overnight on the theory that someone breaking in would be happy with that and not swipe the whole $2000 register to can-opener it later.)

Terry

[MechAg94]

Also depends on the store.  There are two Popeye's in my area.  One is busier I guess with a drive through and has multiple people running the drive thru and counter as well as a manager and people in the back cooking.  The other often has only three people to do about 6 jobs.  The cashier is often taking orders and filling orders.  If they are busy, it can be slow.  In the 2nd case, I can easily see not having time.  They don't keep the head count to run it as well as it could be run.

[Scout26]

Pepsico used drop boxes in the restaurants.   Nothing above a $10 bill in the drawer.  $20s and above in the drop box (which the clerk didn't have a key for).  And you better not have more the $70 in 1s, 5s and 10s.  Excess amount of any denomination goes into the drop box.

Most robberies were smash and grab types.  No crook wanted to wait around to get the drop boxes open.  Take what's in the drawer and go. 

And yes, failing to follow the above guidelines were a fireable offense, should your store get robbed.

[lupinus]

Yep. I worked at a crappy gas station in PA. We had a floor safe that was a circular safe face in the concrete floor located behind the counter and just a few steps from the register. We had a stack of plastic drop envelopes and a deposit clip board. 50's and 100's got dropped immediately, during the day there were guidelines but no specific maxes or prompts we just dropped whenever we had a hundred or so in 20's, though the guidelines tightened up at 8 when we dropped the drawer down. Forget the exact amount but it was basically just enough to make change for the rest of the (normally very slow) night. At close we counted out the drawer, prepared it with a specific amount for the next day, and dropped the rest. While most of the day had little in the way of a specific max, getting caught with a 50/100 or whatever the old manager gal found to be excessive equaled an ass chewing.

I found all of this particularly amusing. All of the rolled coins and bundles of 1's/5's/10's for topping the drawer off so we could make change? They were in the unlocked often door wide open back room stored in the bottom locking drawer of a cheap 20 year old office desk that you probably could have popped open with a butter knife.

[never_retreat]

I worked in the tool dept at a sears store when I was in hight school. We were not supposed to remove money from the drawer until after the store was closed. Well one understaffed day before christmas I literally had so much cash that I could not close the drawer. That register had no phone so I could not call for help per say. So I grabbed out a couple wads of cash stuffed them into a sack and went back to the office. Store manager tweeked, I made the security guys pull up the tape for that register to show the idiot that I indeed could not close the drawer.

[wmenorr67]

Hell any decent bar or nightclub on a Friday or Saturday night will have well over $3000 each in the till at the end of the night.  Used to be the one that got to count it all out at the end of the night and then help make the drop at the bank afterwards.