Two Domino’s Employees Accused in Pizza Discount Scam
05/21/2007
PENSACOLA â€â€Ã¢â‚¬Å“Two Domino’s Pizza employees are being accused of stealing a chunk of dough, and not the pizza kind.â€
They discounted that many orders by an average of $14 and no one noticed anything for a year?
Yup, if that was a corporate store I’m sure the manager and area supervisor are eager to find jobs now, since they no longer have one with Domino’s.
-J_r0kk
Any good suggestions as to how to avoid this type of employee theft?
I always have the coupons attached to the daily cash-out sheet. The thing that worries me is the possiblity of staff getting their hands on a bunch of coupons and “redeming” them.
#1 Don’t have discount coupons. No coupons to abuse, then it is more difficult to abuse them. (My personal way of dealing with it right now is not selling any pizzas till next Thursday 
. . . . then we will go back to no ‘discount’ coupons except rare occasions).
#2 Count your coupons on hand at every shift and match to the number of discounts on the system.
I suspect that someone somewhere was not doing a through audit along the line. SOMEONE was the weak link that let this happen. Or several someones.
This is sillier than the problem you guys are discussing - in that the customer was charged full price.
My people almost always quote the customer the price over the phone - and then would have a heck of a hard time either
a) raising the price at the counter or the door when delivering
or
b) adding a coupon to a closed order.
The only way to do this a lot (as in this case) would be to quote the customer full price, then add the coupon to the order before “completing” it. You’d still have receipts with coupons on them but need to collect full price from the customer. Something that would need a TEAM of the telephone person and the counter person or driver. And a plan to not give the customer a receipt.
Some preventative measures, OTHER than tracking and requiring every paper coupon (I hate requiring a customer to hand the the clipped coupon - I am happy they’re buying from me, and happy to give them the same price as the person that ordered just before them…):
a) My POS automatically red-flags any order to which a coupon is added after the initial order is closed
b) Every place you can take an order is video-monitered.
c) You can look for unusually high coupon activity - especially if it can be linked to a particular pair of phone/driver or phone/cashier teams.
I can’t believe they got away with this on that level. I’ve seen it before, but never for that long and for so much $.
MM-There are far more ways to do this than you mention. If you don’t believe me, can I come work for you?
25% of you staff are going to blatantly steal from you, nad you aren’t going to catch all of it.
50% are going to steal if they have the opportunity and it ‘isn’t anything big’. This includes taking cups, screens, cokes, pens, paper, uniforms (how many of your own uniforms do you yourself have?). Basically anything that you would think, “there are enough of these…”.
Only 25% of your staff isn’t going to steal anything.
Now on these boards, I bet if we took a straw pole and asked everyone how many employees they have who steal, 80% would say none. It is just like doctors.
If you are speaking to a group of doctors and tell them that exactly 50% of MDs graduated in the bottom half of their class in medical school, I assure you most of them will disagree with you, but facts are facts.
back in the mid 90s . the Papas I worked for in Ohio. Had something similiar happen.
The closing driver and the shift runner would take orders and not put them in the computer at all. They would write the order down on paper so they remembered the order and that is how they got caught. They left a piece of paper with about 6 orders on it one night in the office. Those orders werent in the computer. Then the GM went back and found out when those 2 worked alone. Sales were lower and food cost was higher on those nights, consistently over the span of months. They had been doing roughly 4-10 orders a night when they worked which was 2,3 days a week.
Also had a shift runner buying lottery tickets with store money. She had gotten to the point she was stealing $40 a day from the till for it. She would throw the tickets away in the trash at work lol.
Man ppl always start getting to greedy and get caught. They start out small and realise they arent getting caught, then they slowly get bigger and bigger till caught. Always seems to happen that way.
Audit, audit, audit. You have to put a system in place to watch what your people are doing. Don’t ever trust anyone but yourself. If it goes on that long, your system doesn’t work!
[quote=“pizza master6000”]
MM-There are far more ways to do this than you mention. If you don’t believe me, can I come work for you?
quote]
I know MANY types of pilferage - but this particular story had a massive level, and specified the use of full price vs coupon price in a Dominos.
So tell me some of the “far more ways to do this” so I maybe will learn a couple new ones to watch for!
I fully believe that the vast majority of my employees would steal if given the chance. I believe I have enough checks and balances to prevent any theft of cash outside of the allowance I provide for the cash drawer ($2 per day).
I am quite sure that my staff helps themselves to some food/drinks/supplies though. I have safeguards to minimize it, but anyone here that doesn’t think this is going on at their store is very naive.
I’ve never had a server do this. I have had to deal with drivers doing this on 3 different occasions. It happens every 3 or 4 years but it still makes me cranky!
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Your POS should cut this down, if you’re watching your reports. And won’t allow a server to a coupon after the fact. A manager will have to override it.
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If my drivers don’t hand me 90% of their coupons, I take the coupon value out of their tips. Of course you’ll run into a driver who keeps extra coupons on hand to cancel this out. But that guy probably will be the only on that runs into customers forgetting about coupons. That’s a red flag. If I still can’t catch him, I’ll start calling customers after the delivery to figure out if they really did forget about the coupon.
The first time I every dealt with this I was still in college. Heck I was only 19. Just back from my first year of college. The GM of my dad’s first store told me they had a hunch about the guy but had nothing solid. So the GM had this bad apple train me as a driver. After a couple of runs this idiot asks me if I want to know how to make awesome tips. I said you bet. He told me how he did it. It’s then I told him, we hadn’t been introduced properly. Told him I was the owner’s son and I’d really apprecate it if he gave me his wallet and keys to our delivery vehicle, because he was terminated. The look on his face was priceless…
we have sub cards where you buy ten you get a free one. We staple everything to the tickets, sub cards or coupons. When I started finding a couple that had two staple marks in them I realized someone had been getting into my filing cabinet and reusing them. Now anyone who has coupon or sub card has to write void across them I throw them all away when I do tickets. Ive caught one of my employees with his own case of guest checks. He is in prison now for armed robbery of a subway. Its amazing what some people will do to feed their habits
I live in Pensacola and was surprised that the franchisee had not caught them prior to their arrest. They worked (past tense) at a somewhat moderate sales store (by domino’s standards). I also found it surprising that customers were paying the high prices they were quoted. Domino’s typically has a high discount rate.
Obviously you cannot eliminate theft but a good manager or owner should be able to determine when something is not right.
Redemption rates for coupons are a “known”. There’s something to look into if they go from 2% to 10% suddenly. They probably do it more when less management is around on slower nights. When slower nights start showing higher redemption rates than busier nights there’s a red flag.
Certain things only seem to happen when certain people are working . . .
Most of the problems like this happen in big chains because of their inherent problems or in independents because the owners believe “most” employees are honest and don’t check unusual things out.
25% honest all the time
25% dishonest all the time
50% honest if you keep them that way
I worked at a place in high school that ran off a register. When things got busy, half the stuff wasn’t rung up. I’d come back with the money bag at the end of the night and be a good $100+ over what the til said it should be. The guy’s out of business now – wonder why :).
I also worked at an Edison Brothers-owned retailer (not pizza related at all), and their corporate policy was if you stole ANYTHING, the cops were called. I’m talking about anything at all. Not just firing, but having you arrested. With them, you either stole big or not at all. It wasn’t worth going to jail for a few bucks.
Now for a way to “audit”. Call your customers back and thank them for their order. If they used a coupon, simply mention it. “Mr. Smith, I was just calling to make sure you enjoyed your large Pepperoni pizza. I also see that you used our Large Pepperoni for $5 coupon. I wanted to be sure that your box had another coupon attached for your next order.” I can assure you that if that schlop paid $15 for the pizza, he’s going to raise a big stink right then and there.
I had a really cocky driver work for me a while ago. He got hold of a customers credit card details (when he took a phone order) and then used them on his day off to order from us!! Alarm bells rang straight away.
I ended up with the cops coming in mid shift, cuff him and drag him out of the shop (well they took him out to the back door, then I caught them and asked them to take him out through the whole shop) sent a very clear message but I always keep my eyes open (and reports read) to spot ‘things’
People will always steal from us the best way to work is to try and minimise it as much as possible.