A question for JT...

...or indeed anyone else with retail management experience.

I've just been to the One-Stop at the end of the road and met two of the regular staff, both in their uniforms. One was serving, and the other joined the queue behind me - ignoring the unstaffed till!

This puzzled me and so I asked, "Why wait? Why not just serve yourself on that till?" But apparently, as both of them explained to me, he'd be likely to get fired on the spot for it.

WTF? If I was the store manager, why would I want to fire a member of my own staff for buying something from my own shop?

But they both told me that this is standard practice for shop workers.

Is this common? Does this happen in every shop, or just One-Stop?

Is it a legal thing? Does someone other than the buyer have to be involved for the sale to be legally valid?

Is it that he's not allowed to "work" outside his contracted hours?

Surely there must be a good reason for this.

I see this happen a lot at Aldi, maybe because I tend to go in quiet hours just before they close at 10. Guess it must be some kind of anti-fraud separation of duties type thing

What foolscap said. I also go in just before they close and see this virtually every time.

Makes perfect sense, stops shit like JT had to go through from happening.

I think that was a slightly different situation!

It's to stop the employee either pretending to pay (many shops' CCTV isn't very good, making it impossible to see if money was placed into the till or if an employee simply pretended to), paying with a fiver and taking change from a twenty or merely helping him/herself to a handful of notes. Most shops are very strict on demanding employees don't have any money on them while working so they can't do anything like this during their shift; some search staff at the beginning and end of any time spent working the till.

(Incidentally, while working as a manager I always told staff that I was going to trust them unless they gave me reason not to do so and wouldn't search them unless money went missing. No money ever went missing, other than the the incident mentioned above, when all the evidence that came out in court pointed strongly to my boss rather than to an assistant.)

I did think briefly about staff trying to scam the till, but I dismissed it out of hand because I thought the till records would make it easy to prove who was responsible.

Now I've thought harder, you're right, of course. They can't afford to count the cash at each shift change. If the cash is counted and a discrepancy shows up, they can look at the records and narrow it down to one of the staff who used that till since the previous count, but there's no way to prove which exact staff member was responsible, and so it's not feasible to prosecute the crime. Thanks!

What would be the penalty for being caught in possession of a crappy photocopy of a £20 note that's been coloured in with purple crayon? Being fired on the spot and reported to the cops for potential prosecution under the Fraud Act?

Is there a penalty for talking to punters while outside the view of the CCTV?

Many shops do in fact count up at the end of each shift and are rigorous in making sure staff sign out of the till when leaving it, even if only for a few seconds, so that if any money does go missing they know exactly who was most likely to have taken it.

The most common till scam, at least in shops without CCTV, is the unrecorded transaction - if a customer pays with the exact price, doesn't require change and leaves without a receipt, the employee could pocket it (or, more likely, hide it inside a tie or a rolled-up sleeve, which people who do this sort of thing think nobody else has ever thought of before). If s/he then voids the transaction, it's recorded, but if they wait for the next customer and voids the previous customer's item it's not usually considered suspicious because customers change their minds at the till so often that employees legitimately void an item or two several times a day. This is why so many things cost £19.80 or whatever: if you've searched your staff for change in their pockets prior to a shift, they can't make an unrecorded transaction because they need to open the till to give the change. The missing stock will eventually be detected during a stock take, but that could be anything up to a year away and by then it's probably too late to do anything about it.