Cash Overage – The [C-store] Employee 401k Plan

During a pre-installation session at a client’s office, his store supervisor told me about how great one of their stores was being run and how it would be a great pilot store for us to test some added features we had just introduced. I asked the store supervisor what made that store better than the others. He replied, “One cashier is the best. He never misses a day of work and he is never short of cash at the end of a shift.”

“Never?” I asked. “No he is always a dollar or two over,” he replied.

Naturally, I had to visit the store and meet this cashier extraordinaire. More importantly, I wanted to see his 401K contribution for the day. Sure enough, he was kicking it “old school” and had a scorecard on the side of the register. You know the drill. He had a nickel ($5), three dime ($10 each) and a penny ($1) next to the register drawer. So far, his self directed 401K was totaling $36 and he still had 5 hours to go on the shift! No wonder he never misses a day of work!

You see, he was counting how much money he was short ringing on the register during his shift and using a multiplier of ten so he and could pocket the money before handing over the cash drawer to the manager. Of course he would kick a $1 back into the drawer to come up “over” for his shift.

How could an employee clip you for $50 or more per shift without you knowing? Easy, if you aren’t enforcing scanning with tight inventory controls. Are you allowing cashiers to ring up sales without scanning? If you have an in-store inventory of $80,000 those “short sales” leading to “cash overages” will get lost if you are not doing a rotating item level count, checking trend analysis reports, no-sales and voids report trends, etc.

Remember: walking out of the store with cash is a lot easier than stuffing 3 cartons of cigarettes in your shorts (and it causes far less chaffing).

No employee should be “short” every day. And no employee should be “over” everyday. The ones who are consistently “over” have not short- changed a customer, they have short- changed you!

The good news is that when you fire these knuckleheads, they can go to a competitor and open a new retirement plan at their store.