Punter A has a meal for £100, according to the bill, and pays by credit card. The crooked waiter puts through a transaction for £105 and hopes the customer doesn't notice (having had several glasses of wine by that point).

Punter B has a meal for £100, according to the bill, and pays by cash.

The restaurant's total takings for that night, on paper, are £200, but the restaurant has actually taken £205. The extra £5 gets taken out of the cash paid by punter B, and goes into the crooked waiters' pockets. The restaurant is left with £200, of which £105 is on plastic and £95 is in cash.

If anyone scrutinised the bills and payments the discrepancy would come to light pretty sharpish but, if the total takings (card and cash) match the bill totals, who's going to look too closely at individual transactions?
( flake has nothing against your right leg, Tue 12 Jul 2011, 0:00, 3 replies)

But still management must have at least been aware
if not it would only take a couple of really disgruntled customers to complain before someone actually looked at the books & the whole thing crashed.
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Tue 12 Jul 2011, 0:26, closed)

Either aware (and complicit) or incompetent.
It does sound somewhat implausible. As you say, it wouldn't take much to expose it.
( flake has nothing against your right leg, Tue 12 Jul 2011, 1:51, closed)

Yeah, but...
So long as the restaurant is small enough that the receipts are done by hand (i.e. there aren't preset names and amounts for each item in the till), and given that the vast majority of restaurants avoid you having the menu and the bill at the same time, you'd have to be very alert to notice that all of your dishes cost 50p more than they should have.
( RadioElectric, Wed 13 Jul 2011, 4:09, closed)

This makes perfect sense.
Thank you.
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Tue 12 Jul 2011, 10:54, closed)

Flake has got it
I have a restaurant so know most of the wrinkles, this is one of them but VERY easy to be caught as the customer only has to check his bill closely.

What does happen a fair bit will be an extra drink or two added to the check of a pissed up customer (or group on one check) that then get's voided off or put on the comp check at the end of the night after said customer has already paid.

That said, the Manager would have to be in on it also as bartenders/servers should never be allowed to do comps or voids.

So moral of the story, no matter how lashed you are getting, check your check.
( Snollock Biffer I don't really sniff Bollocks, Wed 13 Jul 2011, 19:46, closed)