I wonder if they really have views storing every single franchise transaction right now. Call me crazy but I have my doubts about corporate Denny’s data architecture.
Depends on the company structure really. Frankly, because it's a franchise, Denny's is notably less likely to have something like that. Each franchisee likely has their own records, but there's a good chance corporate only gets the totals.
Oh yeah. You think anyone is looking into that stuff atm?
If you're being investigated currently it's because someone has motivation against you. They do happen, but to remove competition.
I know what subreddit we are in, and this topic feels dangerously close to not belonging on here. All I can say is when mass defunding happens, it means most companies aren't going to have to worry about that stuff because there isn't enough personnel to check for anything outside direct reports.
I'm sure as an employee they receive a discount (at minimum) for one meal while working. If dude uses his discount this way and doesn't eat something himself, this really isnt big deal imo. Just figured out a way to make money on his one on shift meal lol
Every store I've ever worked at had nothing like this. The most I ever saw was at blockbuster, we'd keep an envelope of the days receipts for 30 days, then shred them.
There is almost always less guardrails than people expect.
Logging the information? Sure. Having the ability or skill to find the information from one of one thousand plus Denny's with the little information they have from a photo of half of a receipt? Doubt it.
They 100% do lol but they will have a young analyst go looking for it and who knows if they actually know how to find it…I’ve had to do something like this when we found out old employees were still using our $25 health insurance visit
Knowing that they probably don't go into a SQL database at head office and instead are all individual franchise owner stores provided with POS terminals that may be database but unsure if that polls data direct to be searched by hq
I work for a national ISP and you would think we'd have a central database/report of ALL of the products we currently collect money for (i.e., sell) regardless of how legacy, but apparently that's an impossible ask when I go to Product Management asking if this extremely rare grandfathered product is still even in the network.
Also, when a report comes in with the only identifying information being the customer's MAC address, you would think, as an ISP, we would have something to search the network for said address, especially seeing as how we're giving it a DHCP lease. Nope! We need at least one more bit of info: a market, a state, an IP address, etc. If we have one of the first two, we can manually log into headend routers and start running commands, usually having to locate sub-router equipment to login and run commands searching for the MAC. If we have an IP, we can manually traceroute it to one of the last hops and then do the same headend digging.
Again, a nationwide ISP and we don't really have a way to know WHAT we charge people for or HOW to find a specific customer connection we are actively connected to and providing service.
Just another example of how great social media is: just getting an employee with probably limited funds in trouble or fired for a "funny" tweet. I wonder if we'll ever get to an age, where we stop this self-surveillance.
Well, that's something, but I'm sure they could find out anyway if they wanted to. It's just not worth it to make somebody else's life harder for a silly joke.
My guess is that the self surveillance will only get worse. I'm a little bit older so don't necessarily feel the need to post about things, but it's become very clear to me that for younger generations, it's very much engrained that life must be on display for all too see.
If I have to choose between hiring a high end restaurant server and a goddamned Denny's server, I'm taking Denny's every time. Those guys eat shit for $5 at a time
Yeah in the scheme it's a bit dishonest. But if I was intending to pay $70 and that $14 went in a servers pocket over a giant corporation, I'd chalk it up to "well done sir" as I am not out more than I intended to pay.
Several Denny's managers and servers got caught doing this last year in my area.
Their newer system will record a system flag when an employee discount is used, especially on a cash payment.
They sync this up with their security cameras pointed at the front counter to determine if it actually was for an employee meal or was what Denny's considers "theft".
All the managers, shift leads and servers that got caught were fired. I do not know how much they took advantage. But I do know that with just what's shown of this receipt in the picture, Denny's corporate can absolutely track down the specific store, ticket and server in question.
As of this year, Denny's has been sold to Private Equity and all Denny's corporate stores are now under franchise ownership. Their IT help desk is now in India so they can absolutely task some lowly paid call center worker with investigating such abuses of employee benefits.
This is why you keep shit to yourself.
Even though the customer did not benefit from this situation, it cost them nothing to keep it to themselves. But to publicly share it will have cost the server their job.
I used to work at a chain restaurant and they 100% paid attention to this sort of thing. Once they got over $1000, cops were called in for grand larceny charges.
I worked at Outback a lifetime ago, random receipts would generate a "respond to this survey for a free bloomin onion". Management specifically said we could use it as a cash-value discount if the customer had the coupon but didn't order a bloomin onion. So here's how the play worked:
survey coupon gets generated on a printed check.
Split the check in 2 on the terminal, move everything over to "tab 2" except a $0.00 water cup. The survey stays on "tab 1" no matter what.
Give the customer the check for tab 2. This is everything they legitimately ordered, they're just not getting the survey coupon.
Pocket the coupon until you next have a cash bill, add the coupon after that guest leaves and boost your tip by $7 or however much a bloomin onion was in 2011.
Am I proud of this scam? Not particularly. But I was also 21 and dead fucking broke, and I don't regret it either. Also management knew we were pulling this shit.
At least they are getting the surveys that corporate is pushing. From management perspective they may know what's going on but not care since their survey metrics look good.
I worked at Smokey Bones in the very early 2000s. They used to send paper coupons in the mail. We would all stock up on those and use them on cash checks to accomplish the exact same thing. Sometimes we'd give them to regulars who paid with cards to be a little less conspicuous.
TGIFridays had "bounceback" coupons for 20% off your next visit. These were given directly to the servers to give to their guests at the end of their meal.
This was also during the first wave of Endless Apps, which had NO RULES. Bring in your five kids to share one order of $15 endless boneless wings? Hell yeah! Ring in multiple refills at once? Well, the guest wants it, so of course!
Tips were nonexistent.
Those coupons were exclusively used to supplement our income on every cash tab. That was a good month.
What I'll add is that they weren't just using employee discounts, they signed up for these coupon books they would send out monthly. If the guest was using cash, they would use the coupons. I suppose corporate was watching how many times different accounts were using the coupons and noticed that. These people pocketed a bunch of money, but it was considered stealing.
Fraud like that is not easy to hide and the people doing it are usually not the brightest. Usually, they will do it a few times over a few weeks or months, and when not caught, they will overdo it. The feeling of getting away with it seems to be a bit of a thrill.
Source: was tangentially involved with fraud detection at few years back.
I know for a fact Denny's and other chains do very much care about this, track it and will fire employees for theft who are caught taking advantage of their employee benefits.
As for waiting and watching the employee rack up enough damages to legally throw the book at them with criminal charges? Nah.
They will just do an audit after the first time catching the employee to see if there were other instances and unless there's significant abuses they will likely just fire them and be done.
It sounds like a mixture of how retailers deal with employee theft and the infamous stories of how Target supposedly handles repeat shoplifters.
The story being, Target has such advanced surveillance that they track every shoplifter, build a profile and ledger of damages slowly building their case. Even use a PI to identify and follow the thief but continue to allow the repeat theft until the total amount crosses the felony theft threshold for their state.
Then the hammer of retail justice comes down with an iron clad dossier on the thief or thieves if operating as part of an organized retail crime gang.
There are maybe a few public cases where loss prevention has gone to such lengths but having seen the backrooms and operations inside many Targets, I can say most stores still have shit cameras, monitoring and just a single person working LP on any given shift.
They're not intentionally letting shoplifters get away, they just got away. They may succeed in catching them next time and may be able to find additional evidence of prior theft that they can charge for but that's mostly luck, not determination.
I worked retail and a few times some dumbasses would mark down items super low then buy them using their employee discount card... Marking items down lower than the price suggested by the system is already 1 flag but using your employee card pretty much gives them the play by play lol.
Marking thinks down low alone isn't an issue on its own. I used to have to Mark down yogurts to like 10 cents because sometimes they would come in with 5 days till expiration. Things like your employee card are absolutely used to track you.
The Dennys in our city (only one) is notorious as one of the worst, dirtiest, nastiest, greasiest places to eat in town. City of almost a million people. I've never been there and I like Waffle House.
2.9 Yelp review and their "business manager" replies to every review.
My cousin said she had a friend who worked there is college and shared the employee handbook. They all stopped eating there because of the things employees were allowed to do. While this was a long time ago, not much would surprise me
I have a knack for ending up on bartenders "spill tab" and get comped beers without ever directly asking because I start off tipping well. I know how many beers I drank and what my tab should be so I tip accordingly where it comes out close to the same price. Lots of $5 tabs where I'm tipping $10-20.
My favorite way to phrase it- I spend a lot of money to get free beers.
I will never play the "tip the bartender until they like me enough to give me free stuff" game. If I am going out and getting drunk enough for a bartender to get to know me on a personal level that's a personal failing of my own. At that point I owe my liver reparations.
I just tip 15% on drinks and dining out as standard and it can go up or down from there. Just serving a drink I ask for is 15%. Doing it with style and doing me a solid gets you more. Slow service, bad drinks, etc. gets less.
More people are like you than me and that's perfectly fine. I go to the same spots and it's usually where I can bring my dog, during off peak days/hours, and never have more than 2-3 beers. Actually 2 months in of not drinking so I might have 1-2 NA beers or Topo Chicos.
Where I draw the line on tipping well is counter service or to go orders.
It’s weird though, because bringing you a beer is arguably less work than ordering counter service food or even to go. Especially if you’re ordering at the bar. So why does the person who opens a bottle and gives it to you more entitled to a tip than the people who take your order and make your food?
I have done both and I agree that working the to-gos is far more work and way more stressful 97% of the time.
But I’m one of those people that Reddit hates because I tip 20-30% on all food and beverage transactions regardless of what I perceive to be the required effort of the job, and I tend to tip pretty well for shit service too. Idgaf, I spent too many years of my life working for tips, like my mother before me, I’m down to make someone’s day better for a few extra dollars.
Tipping a bar tender for a beer or shot is so weird. Lots of people argue against tipping at to go or quick service places. But all of those people are doing 100 times more work than the bar tender who just took a bottle top off for you or poured some liquid in a glass real quick.
I'm with you that I never see the same bartender more than one night. But for that reason I try to tip more on my first drink, 50%+, so when the bar is busy they see me and take my order first. The rest of the drinks I round up to tip 15-25% and they're still cool. Works most of the time.
You don't have to be going out to get drunk. I shoot darts and throw bags in leagues. We're at our home bar every other week. The bartender obviously knows me and the team. Having a few beers while you hang out with your friends and opponents is a good time.
Just understand that the thirstier/hungrier you are when you walk in the door, the more it will directly affect your perception of time. This has been studied and proven.
Most of the time when someone says that they had to "wait 15 minutes for a server to come over," it's more like 5 minutes. They were just really hungry and that made it seem like more of an ordeal. If you don't believe me, check your watch next time you enter a restaurant/bar, and check it again when your drinks arrive. Compare that to what it felt like and you'll see what I mean.
That's not to say you don't get hosed sometimes. I have had bad servers, and I have been a bad server at times. It happens, but more often than not, the person complaining is just being a bit of a drama queen due to low blood sugar.
I was a pretty severe alcoholic and I was never a regular at any bar. I was just thinking to myself I don’t know what time bars legally close in my state. I rarely went to them.
My wife and I lived about 1/2 mi from a local brewery in SW VA, both our apartment and the brewery had those hourly bicycle rentals and our apartment gave us the first hour of every rental free.
We would routinely go to that brewery and drink and shoot the shit with the bartender, probably 5 beers for me and 2-3 for her, and get a like $10-12 tab. So many times I tipped $20+.
The poster of the receipt on twitter is not the same person who posted here. I remember this being posted months ago and the guy WAS mad that the employee could have discounted the meal but didn't tell the customer so that they got an extra large tip. That OP would probably have liked to pay less money if they had the opportunity.
Apparently there's no minimum dollar amount for fraud, but I don't think this would actually be legally persuable. At most it is a violation of company policy on using discounts.
The title of the post is: ‘looking out for each other.’ I don’t understand how is anyone looking out for anyone else. It’s only the waiter who looked up for themselves.
Yeah the customer doesn’t care, but the employee essentially transferred $13 from the company to themselves once the customer gave a firm total.
This customer doesn’t care and I wouldn’t either, and I certainly don’t give a shit about dennys as a corporation, but it’s pretty objectively petty theft and Dennys certainly cares
Petty theft raises prices for everyone. Including families that barely have enough money to eat out. There’s no victimless crime here, although of course it’s tiny in magnitude.
As a practical matter this one event does not matter at all, but I do think it’s the type of thing that builds. If you let it slide once, does it stop happening?
It also feels more sinister to me that they deliberately applied the employee discount. Pretty routine for a bartender to give a regular a beer on the house, for the regular then to tip the bartender extra. Everyone wins, a little more money for the bartender, a free beer for the regular, and the house is maintaining a good relationship that secures future business. Similarly the restaurant might bring out the wrong dessert, let you keep it and comp it since it was their mistake, you probably tip extra.
This isn’t that, there’s no relationship angle to this, the customer experience hasn’t been bettered and has arguably been worsened.
From an objective standpoint I’m opposed to it, even though again in this context it doesn’t matter.
Seems fine? You were already set to pay a specific total, I don’t see a problem putting the discount on to pocket the savings. Company still made a profit even after the discount, employee got a decent tip, and customer has not been cheated or exploited.
Profit margins for restaurants are typically in the single digits, so the company almost definitely lost money after the discount. A $25 tip for a $50 meal at Denny’s is a lot more than “decent”
I guarantee their employee meals aren’t sold at a loss, chain diners have the cheapest input cost of any restaurant because it’s all eggs, breakfast meat and bread
Those are not the only expenses. They'll have labor, rent, utilities, debt. I'm guessing labor is highest. After all that, their profit margins are <10%, so the employee discount meals are definitely sold at a loss.
Running a kitchen, doing nu.bsers for the restaurant. Yeah they ate it on this ticket. Labor is expensive af.
Restaurants exist to pay cooks, tip servers and bankrupt owners. If you're really careful the owners can make as much as the cooks. Probably not as much as the servers.
Okay, I will explain this outside of "corpos greedy"
It is meant as an incentive for good service. A waiter is especially attentive? They get a higher tip. Think of it as a performance bonus that office workers get.
Now, it is true they can be paid below minimum wage, however, if tips do not add up to 7.25 then they must be compensated from the employer. (This is rarely a problem. My sister, for instance, managed to make $25 an hour one shift due to tips).
It should also be noted that tips are no longer taxable, meaning every dollar in tips is more money than every normal dollar. And finally, you were gonna eat the price increase anyway, so atleast now you can guarantee your waiter is getting the money and not an executive.
Sit-in restaurants, delivery drivers, and a few other roles get exceptions to the minimum wage, so the employer pays them massively less than something like a fast food worker gets. Tips are explicitly meant to cover that gap, it's even written into the fed min wage law that way. It's not universal, although plenty of other places recently DO try asking for tips despite not being in the same situation.
No one gets paid only the minimum tipped wage due to customers not tipping. Either the employee makes enough in tips to bring them above minimum wage or the employer has to cover the difference, either way they still make at least minimum wage.
All service employees expect it. But wait staff in the food industry are the only ones that aren't paid minimum wage. Now there are laws in place that employers have to make up the difference to minimum wage if their tips do not cover it for hours worked. But most just won't do anything about it because they don't know their employer is required to or they may get fired for underperforming. The whole situation there is pretty screwed up. But at the same time, sometimes they make ridiculous amounts of money in tips.
Customer still paid 70. Worker gets an excellent tip. The company isn’t a living entity so I do not care what occurs to it.
Win-win-win
Edit: to re-iterate the company is not a living entity. It is a business without feelings or a soul. If your counterpoint begins or centers on “the company” as a defensible entity: it is immediately moot.
Take whatever position you want on this, but just for the whole context, Dennys is a franchise, so the guy being stolen from is Doug, the small business owner who might be a dick but might be a stand up guy, not Corporate Dennys.
I always find it fascinating that this kind of behaviour gets such a positive reaction almost across the board. When in reality it's essentially the same as the employee just stealing 14 bucks from the company (at least the end-effect is the same), which gets a lot less positive reactions.
Dennys treats its employees horribly and runs their empire on overexploited, underpaid skeleton crews. They are stealing far more from their employees than their employees could ever take from them even through direct theft, because the actions Dennys takes against their employees cause harm to human lives and not just to numbers on a spreadsheet. You are ridiculous if you defend fucking Denny's or basically any other restaurant chain here.
I know two wrongs don't make a right but I'm also willing to bet Deny's steals from the employees in every way imaginable at every possible opportunity. It's probably baked into the job, completely institutionalized and systemic. So no, I don't feel bad for the billion dollar corporation that exploits their workers.
what happened here is the tip was $11 and the total was $70. The employee added their discount before running the card so that the tip became $25 and the total was still $70... which they would have gotten away with if they gave the customer the signature copy and the original itemized copy but instead they gave the customer the updated itemized copy with the discount
I mean before the discount the bill would have been around $60 with tax included. You shouldn't tip based on tax but when you say round it to $70 you are.
I used to work at a restaurant where the POS system allowed you to apply the discount *after* entering the credit card payment details. So, you take payment, diner writes in a normal tip, you apply the employee discount, and then you enter whatever tip will equal the total that's written on the receipt. Another word for this is "theft" of course, but long as the table didn't request a second copy of the receipt, you could do this 10-12 times a week and not get caught. You could do the same thing with paper gift cards, which was a remarkably easy way to pocket $100 if the owners were treating you like shit that week.
I used to work as a server years ago and people got fired for this kind of thing all the time and that was before social media was really a thing. This person may lose their job over this being posted because the company will see it as theft.
The first restaurant I worked at was a chain and the servers used to clip coupons and promos to use for tables who paid cash. BOGO entrees, $10 off of a bill over $50, etc.
So he's a thief. And this was logged in the POS system and the idiot probably got themselves fired over it at whatever point the manager decided to audit the Promos. Which is done at least weekly in most establishments.Lmfao good riddance
Not gonna lie, when i was a server/night manager, I did this shit all the time. Someone expecting a 80 dollar bill but you give them discounts on all of it and a free dessert for the trouble of waiting 3 extra minutes for the food? They'll pay the 80 and I can pocket the rest. Fuck the restaurant industry.
I had a manager at Denny's accuse me of doing this (I never did) and refused to oay out my tip for that order. I quit the next day. It was on Christmas Eve btw
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u/qualityvote2 1d ago edited 1d ago
u/Guitar-String, your post does fit the subreddit!