[SoftTalker]

Why on earth would you do this rather than expensing the missing beer and trying to figure out why it happened? I.e. who is walking out the back door with it?

[smcl]

See my other comment, there was for some reason an incentive to NOT account for this. It seems stupid now that I’m out in the real world, but when you’re making £5/hour:

- you don’t really feel empowered to challenge this sort of thing

- stock or till shortfalls of small amounts like £20 that are threatened to come out of your paycheque feel much more serious than they were, especially when you’re a student in an expensive city and that £20 feeds you for a week

- the reason it happened is often known, there’s just a reluctance to account for it correctly. We are taking about very small amounts here

[CydeWeys]

The people doing this are clearly getting one over on the owners. It's common for pub employees to swindle the owner.

[smcl]

We weren’t swindling anyone :-) The manager of the pub (or I guess the licensee?) was the one telling us to do this. And the reason they’d do this is because the pub was part of a group of pubs, and there were incentives for the managers to hit wastage targets. So if there was a shortfall in some beer (like some somehow wasn’t usable, or there was a fuckup when switching a keg that caused the first 5 pints or so to be pure foam, or on a busy night on a big round you’d incorrectly ring something up without noticing) they’d try to recover that this way.

There wasn’t much theft that I was aware of, other than one assistant manager (who was constantly accusing us of stealing) was caught red handed stealing stock, but that was whisky or rum which wasn’t part of this iirc (when entire bottle goes missing, that really sticks out - very stupid man)