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| Scene of the crime.. the white tent on the right is where we were working |
But while not so directly tied into the series, here's a doozy from this Friday night that has to be included. You'll understand why by the time I close things out. Be patient grasshopper.
So... I now work part-time at The Arena, right? Concerts, sporting events, and the like. All told, there's about 15 bar stations and 50 or more bartenders clocked in and running registers during "max capacity" events, of which we've had three this week. You're imagining that we're making money hand-over-fist, right?
Well, we should be .... but sometimes things don't quite work out like that in our business.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, the possibility for theft remains an ongoing temptation for all bartenders. It's just too darn easy to pretend you're ringing in a drink when you're not, and allowing a cash-paying customer to leave his money there and then to put it in your pocket. That's just one of many "f'rinstances" by the way.
My point is that there are many ways to steal when you're behind a bar, and as Mom and Pop restaurants grow into chains, then eventually large, greedy corporations, eventually they see them all. Some servers and bartenders of course grow with the company, being promoted to management or corporate executive positions over time. Then it becomes part of their new job to prevent their "rank and file" employees from stealing, via the exact same tricks they once used, when they held the previous positions.
And so maybe they "fess up" and share with their bosses the more obvious means by which they cheated the system - or at least they share these "easy cheats" by claiming that they "... knew someone who did..." while they had the lower job title.
So newer policies and even brighter shades of red tape get introduced to those of us in the work force, as new and usually more time-consuming procedures of doing things get added to our work routines, many of them centered around the concept of reducing or preventing theft.
Really, I can't blame the companies for doing so. I know I would if I owned a huge corporation.
Now when you work at a typical restaurant, there's possibly only one bar in the building and sometimes only one bartender working per shift. It's relatively easy for management to watch them, and keep tabs on most of what they're doing - especially when you add cameras to the equation that managers, owners and corporate officers can view live from the comfort of their own homes.
(Yes I'm serious - at my last full-time bar job (Cattle Baron) there were three cameras trained on me behind the bar.)
But when you have FIFTY BARTENDERS working at the same time in a large Arena setting ... watching them all and protecting your assets becomes a challenge, understandably. Certain control factors just have to be in place, to keep the joint from being robbed blind.
The corporation that my Arena employs to handle their alcohol sales actually started out as - and now specializes in - "Concessions" and so the control factors built into our system are quite like those you might relate to how things are run at a movie theater. Like how you can't just ask someone for a large cup for water, because they'll tell you "the cups are counted, and I'd have to charge you $5 for just the cup."
The upshot here means that opposed to holding employees accountable for how much popcorn, soda, or draft beer or alcohol is actually gone from your work-station when you leave, The Arena just counts cups. We count cups at the beginning of the shift, and at the end. Nine different cups for bar stations btw. We have Single shot cups, Double shot cups, Patron tequilla cups, canned beer cups, bottled beer cups, and various draft beer cups, plus the souvenir cup.
Getting to the point finally (!) the difference between the number of cups you start with minus the number you end with gets painstakingly calculated on a ledger, and multiplied out by the nine different costs to figure out how much money SHOULD be in your cash drawer at the end of the night.
It's my second night and I'm paired with Barb who's been there all season. The outside cash bar, she says, is one of the premium best money-making places to be assigned, and so I'm glad to have drawn it. Tonight's a special event "block party" for the home team with 2 blocks of downtown Broadway traffic closed off, 2 large Jumbotron screens broadcasting the game live, and a couple thousand people who couldn't afford or didn't get tickets to the sold-out playoff game milling around outside The Arena to cheer them on.
And they're enjoying some alcoholic beverages as they do so, natch, and tipping well.
Barb and I are humming along getting to know each other and just watching that pile of $1 bills grow and grow as the night progresses. The event winds down (sorry for the loss, home-team), we clean up and she gets to counting the drawer.
Uh-oh.. Barb finally says slowly that she has a bad feeling. We re-do the math together, re-count every cup again, and turns out there's about a $200 discrepancy between what should be in the drawer, according to the cup counts, and what there actually is.
We're both pretty sure of ourselves and the other's abilities to not blame it on a money-counting error on either of our part. We recollect together every little detail of the evening, and she says at one point she caught someone reaching to grab a cup (for whatever reason, like to spit tobacco in, or to split a drink with someone perhaps) and she told them No. But it was busy, throngs of people were pressed up against the make-shift bar, and for all we know that wasn't the only time someone nabbed one, it was just the only time we caught them.
Now I know that "by law" an employer cannot make you pay that money. Generally speaking what they can do is to write you up for improper cash-handling or failure to follow procedure, and then maybe fire you if it happens again. That's the normal way I'm used to anyways - the legal way. Turns out The Arena has a different plan, that gets around such laws. Barb tells me that we both signed a waiver...
We both know good and well that the only options that exist are to pay the money, or turn the drawer in $200 short and be out of a job. At least we did break $200 in tips together this night, so we cough it up, pay the shortage, and walk with $34 left over between us. If we hadn't earned that much, the balance would either have come out of our own pockets, or out of our paychecks at the end of the week with our bosses having documentation of the error, which would of course likely affect our schedules and long-term employment status.
If all of that sounds a little messed up to you, well it is.
If you have any other ideas how a large arena could protect themselves from 50 bartenders being $200 short ($10,000) every night of the week, at this point I'm all ears.
There's just a certain "air" people like me can sort of pick up on when we're working with a professional, even from just one shift. Barb's good at this job, a wee bit older than I am I think, and there's nothing about working with her that makes me think she's scamming me somehow. Fortunately, she's not all up in arms about how "the new guy" messed up her cash drawer and cost her money. She's as non-plussed about this as I was when the Brazillians stiffed me on their $600 tab, and says to me "Well, now you already know the down-side of working here."
And now so do you.
"HOW is possible that we could both remain so calm when losing over $100 each on a single shift?" you might wonder...
The answer to this and more, as my series on "the autograt" concludes. Be sure you're subscribed!
Darn, on a future re-write I need to add a Forest Gump shrimp list quote to this!
ReplyDelete"We have Single shot cups, Double shot cups, Patron tequilla cups, canned beer cups, bottled beer cups, and various draft beer cups, plus the souvenir cup..."