Creative Employee Incentives

Recently I travelled overseas and made a stopover at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. I've travelled there a few times and visited the same little circle of restaurants. This time I noticed signs at the front of each restaurant:

"If no receipt is provided with your order, your order is free."

What an innovative way to ensure that your employees aren't shortchanging the customers (or the business)! One technique used by thieving employees is to not ring up the order and pocket all the money.  In another scenario, the employee rings up the order on the register for less than the real price and instead pockets the difference.

Say you order a hamburger for $5 and a soft drink for $3. Said thieving employee, in the first scenario, doesn't ring up the full order by providing a receipt and pockets the $8. In the second scenario, the employee could 'forget' to ring up the soft drink and only ring up for the $5 hamburger, thus pocketing $3 change. Bear in mind that, particularly with older registers, it can be difficult to track inventories of goods.

By providing free meals when no receipt is given, businesses are creating an incentive for customers to monitor their purchases and act as a check against the employee.

I live in Australia and this system is news to me. I believe that there is a newer type of cash register - generally widespread in Australia - that have a more efficient monitoring system and thus there is no use for this technique. But when I'm in Kuala Lumpur, I always hope that the employee forgets my receipt... but they never do.