“Our objective is to show them where they can save money,” Bowler said. “A lot of times it can be thousands of dollars.”
Richard “Gus” Gusler hired Bevinco nine months ago when he suspected employees might be stealing at Players Retreat bar and restaurant in Raleigh.
“I kept looking at what was going on in the bar and how much I was buying and how much I was selling, and it just didn’t compute,” Gusler said.
He hired Bevinco without his employees’ knowledge, letting Bowler and his staff in during predawn hours to weigh every bottle of liquor and every keg of beer and count the full bottles in the bar.
That data was put into a computer, which compared the amount used with the amount that the bar’s computer system said was sold.
The first week, there was a little more than $2,000 in missing alcohol (translation: missed sales). The second week, it was $2,660.
“It turns out, that first week was a slow week,” Gusler said. “Twenty percent of what was going out of here wasn’t getting paid for. That one week, we lost an entire keg of Carolina Pale Ale.”
After two weeks of data, Gusler told his staff he was watching. He eventually fired two people.
Good business is good business. That said, bar and restaurant owners that use this or similar services need to be very careful about appearance of being “stingy”. One day we went to our favorite watering hole and suddenly there’s 1″ of head on the beer. Bad impression. In my mind, it’s better to raise prices a tad and not appear to be stingy to your customers.
Wastage, stealing, have at it. Just be careful the impression made on your customers.
