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Comment by WheelsAtLarge | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting how quickly people are tempted by money. I worked for a store that decided that they needed to reduce staff so they got rid of the supervisors that supervised the cashiers when they cashed out. They figured the cashiers had been there for so many years so they were trustworthy. Almost immediately the cashiers started to cheat by skimming a bit of cash and within a few months, most of them were replaced because they had been caught cheating in some way.

The temptation is too great for many people. Checks and balances always need to be put in place no matter how trustworthy the person is.

This case is a prime example of that.

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They had trained those cashiers for years that the only reason they aren't skimming is because they are being watched.

Second that opinion, to me it sounds like they where never put in a trust situation where they'd really be in charge of a clean and honest cashout, and lashed back on the system when their "babysitters" where taken away.

It certainly doesn't help that a cashier doesn't make much in the first place.

> Almost immediately the cashiers started to cheat by skimming a bit of cash and within a few months, most of them were replaced because they had been caught cheating in some way.

Who caught them and how if they stopped counting the drawers?

A security camera on the register seems like the easiest way. If the cashier’s count doesn’t match the sum of customer transaction then watch the footage until you see them pocket the money.

Thus proving you don't need the manager oversight ?

Monitoring with cameras seems like an advance in technology that lowers the need for managers in the room. But it’s still a check as advocated earlier in the thread.

At larger companies they absolutely do this. And the digital video is stored with an overlay of what is ringing up with it's price as the cashier scans it. So it is easy to see if they are not scanning items for a partner or manually entering the wrong barcode.

It turned out that upper management, the managers above the managers that got rid of the supervisors, had gotten bad reports about what was happening in the store so they sent in a private investigator that posed as a new employee and no one was told he was an investigator. He was there a few months and caught the cashiers, and a guy selling coke. It was just a coincidence that he got the cashiers. They were aiming for the drug problem.

Just before all this was revealed I got a job at a different part of the company and was told what had happened so I never found out what ended up happening. I just know a lot of people were replaced.

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