('Stealing' in inverted commas because you can’t steal what already belongs to you)
McDonalds steals the wealth we produce in the form of profits every shift we work, so it’s totally ethical for us to try and take the profit back through whatever means we can. Unfortunately, legal systems across the world exist to preserve the capitalist system. As Noam Chomsky put it “the country was founded on the principle that the primary role of government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains”. Therefore, this article is included purely for entertainment purposes....
The most obvious way to take back what belongs to us is through taking money from the tills. McDonalds knows that most crew members despise the company and it has taken precautions to try and reduce the amount of money ‘stolen’. These include uniforms without pockets, the T-reds obsession from a couple of years back (that lasted a few weeks), cameras and fairly rigorously controlled cash handling procedures. Nevertheless, it’s fairly easy to more than double your wage.
You could try taking a stack of notes in a one off spectacular, but this is more of a parting shot than a steady income. As long as you don’t take too much, and don’t make it too obvious, then such actions tend not to result in prosecution (best to split on your break and never come back, oh and make sure that what you take is considerably more than the holiday pay you’re due or it’s pretty pointless).
You could just take a bit now and again and then play innocent when your till is down. However, if your till is down more than £20/ $30 then it should be immediately obvious to all but the stupidest managers that you (or someone else with access to your till) has been stealing. If you keep ‘losing’ smaller amounts of money then sooner or later you will wither be sacked or banished to kitchen (years ago one of our gang was banned from ever using tills when management became convinced he was stealing but couldn’t prove it).
When managers get rushed they may insist you take over someone else’s till without it being cashed up, or order you to share a till with someone else. Christmas has come early! As long as you don’t get caught on camera with a bag of loot, then they have no way of determining which of you is an honest serf and which of you is an evil criminal genius. If it’s a lot of money then they will pursue the matter further but if it’s not that much then the manager will just be left red faced in the office while you and the other crew member are splitting the money in the local boozer.
However, it is normally a much better idea to make sure that when your till is cashed up everything tallies... and you’ve got a few notes tucked in your sock. There are a number of ways this can be achieved.
The old way was to enter the order into your till, receive the money then delete most of the order before ringing it through. The difference between the correct cost of the order paid by the customer and the cost of the one item you finally entered, would then be yours to take. This is why McDonalds started going on about T-reds. T-reds appear when you delete an item without having it cleared by a manager, some till systems block this action, others show it up on your till report and this can lead to cash retraining slips. This hasn’t totally stopped this method being used- at busy times managers will hand over till keys/ swipe cards so that crew can do their own deletions, not to mention refunds... Christmas has come early! I don’t exactly understand this one never having worked at a drive thru restaurant, but we’ve heard of people working together where the person taking orders has till keys (or a swipe card, whatever). The order taker enters the correct order and collects the money, then once the person gathering the order has collected it the order taker deletes the order. Apparently, you can make £15 on one big order this way.
However, the attention paid to T-reds has led to a search for improved tactics and there are a number of possibilities. Perhaps the most reliable technique is to enter a single sandwich on the till when a customer purchases a meal. If the customer eats there fairly regularly (and is not a tourist or an OAP) then it is exceedingly unlikely they will question why you’re charging them more than appears on the till and even if they do you can just correct your ‘mistake’ (one of the delights of this scam is that it can so easily be passed off as a mistake, whoever takes an interest in what you’re doing). Most customers know off by heart how much a meal costs, as long as they’re paying the right price they don’t care what the till says. You then simply repeat this action, adding up the discrepancy between the total amount entered in the till and the total amount in the till drawer until it approximates a round number (i.e. £10 or $20, it doesn’t need to be exact), and then you take the difference. Disco.
Alternatively, if some prices where you work are exact (i.e. $5) or just off it (i.e. £2.99) then just keep a few pennies, cents, centimes (if prices are exact you don’t even need to do this) and don’t ring the orders through the till at all if someone gives you exact money. If someone gives you £3.00 for a £2.99 meal, then just give them one of the pennies you have by your till and keep the £3.00. You don’t want piles of money around your till and coins are difficult to smuggle from the scene, so take the next order properly and stick the coins in the till (again remove a note or two later on). If you do end up with coins lying about it’s worth remembering that you can fit seven pound coins in an empty creamer portion!
Once you have a positive balance in your till you enter stage two- smuggle your ill gotten gains to safety. The classic is simply to slip notes into your sock when you pause to tie your laces, but there are various alternatives. Some people devise ingenious cash stashes, for example, in the lining of your tie. Whatever you do, at the first opportunity go to the crew room and get the money into your wallet, avoid taking money with you when you get your till cashed up. The safest way to get rid of money is to get a mate to come in late on your shift and impersonate a customer. You simply overchange her/ him by however much your balance is positive.
Thus far we’ve talked only about money. This is, of course, only a fraction of the potential swag present in a McDonalds. Everything is up for grabs- happy toys, cheese, chocolate flakes, lettuce, wedges, sauce portions, cleaning substances, strip lights, sticky tape, cooking equipment, salt, pepper, sugar, pancake mix, plants, tea bags, rubbish bags, balloons, ladders, toilet roll, fire extinguishers... You need never shop again! All your worldly needs can be met by McDonalds (except alcohol and class A drugs which you can get by selling McDonalds stock), they are delighted to help.
Obviously closes, and opens to a lesser extent, are the best times to make off with larger items, but try and nick things when you might reasonably be carrying them about, so if you want to nick hash browns, don’t do it at dinner time. Normally the best way is to be totally blatant. If you say that you need to check the schedule and you just happen to be carrying a sleeve of cheese at the time then normally everyone is too busy to notice whether you come back with the cheese or whether everyone you know eats toasties that week. Bring in a spare bag and then if you arouse suspicion you can safely show your bag with nothing but personal possessions, if they look in the spare bag then just deny it’s yours, if they don’t then at the end of the day, when all’s clear, stick the spare bag in your bag and get out of Dodge.
But far and away the best way to smuggle stock out is, if you work at a drive thru store, get a mate to drive through and at the first window you quickly pass out all sorts of shit, she/ he stashes it under a blanket and drives on to collect their regular fries with half the store in the back of their car.
If this sort of stuff is happening on a grand scale (as it often is) they’ll start trying to keep stock areas locked. No problem, just throw the keys in the main bin when nobody’s looking. This will seriously fuck up the shift- soon there’s nothing to sell, they have to get hold of the manager who has got the spare keys, they get dragged out of the house, they’ll probably want new keys cut, it’s a fucking nightmare and they certainly wont lock the stock areas again in a hurry.
There is plenty that is of value- happy meal toys make nice presents for young relatives. We used to know someone who swapped hash browns for hash, you can keep friends and family supplied with tea bags, household equipment, sauces, etc. Get stuck into the black economy. McDonalds owes us, we could be robbing them blind for years and not get back half of what they’ve stolen from us.
We hope you enjoyed this humorous, just for entertainment article. Please remember that theft is a criminal offence.
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