Dear Hearts, there are thieves, there are honest men, and then there are fellows who have worked out a private definition of honesty so elegant that you almost hate to disturb it. The Old Git has known a few of those. They don’t necessarily think of themselves as stealing anything. They have simply rearranged the rules until what belongs to somebody else has wandered, by a perfectly reasonable chain of events, into their pocket.
There was one of those fellows managing a Church’s Fried Chicken next door to Taco Torch #1. Red didn’t know what was going on at first. Nobody did, which was rather the point. The manager wasn’t sneaking boxes of chicken out the back door or stuffing twenty-dollar bills down his britches. He had come up with something considerably more sophisticated than that.
He was bringing chicken in.
Now, Dear Hearts, you’ve got to admire the direction of travel. Most theft-prevention systems are designed around the proposition that the rascal is trying to get something out of the building. This fellow went to the grocery store, bought chicken with his own money, carried it into the restaurant, and added it to the chicken already there. His chicken was cut and prepared right along with Church’s chicken. It was seasoned, cooked in Church’s fryers, and served to Church’s customers. But when one of his portions was sold, the sale wasn’t rung up. The money went into his pocket.
Somewhere inside that man’s head there must have been a tiny accountant wearing sleeve garters who had examined the transaction and stamped it FAIR AND SQUARE. He bought the chicken. The chicken therefore belonged to him. He knew what each portion cost him, knew what he sold it for, and the difference belonged to him. You could almost hear the little fellow in the sleeve garters saying, “What’s the problem?”
Red had heard reasoning like that before.
Sylvester Had Already Invented the Accounting System
Years earlier, back on the farm, there was a tenant farmer named Sylvester who had a similarly advanced understanding of property rights. Sylvester made moonshine, and moonshine required corn and pig food. Daddy happened to possess corn and pig food. From time to time, some of Daddy’s corn and pig food found its way into Sylvester’s still.
Now Sylvester didn’t consider himself a thief. He borrowed it.
And, Dear Hearts, he returned it.
After the corn and feed had done their Christian duty inside the still, what remained was still slop. Still slop was perfectly good hog feed, so Sylvester fed it to Daddy’s hogs. There you have it. He had borrowed Daddy’s corn and pig food, used it for a little private enterprise along the way, and then returned it to Daddy in a somewhat wetter and more spiritually exhausted condition.
From Sylvester’s point of view, the books balanced.
Daddy’s point of view may have involved a different accounting convention.
That is what Red eventually came to recognize in the chicken man next door. He wasn’t operating without a moral system. He had one. It was just a Sylvester accounting system. If the thing I started with was mine, and I put back approximately what I borrowed from you along the way, then whatever happened in the middle belongs to me.
It is a remarkably convenient philosophy if you happen to own the middle.
He Had Solved the Chicken
The Church’s manager had actually thought his scheme through rather well. If he simply took company chicken and sold it without ringing up the sale, sooner or later somebody would notice that the store was buying more chicken than its recorded sales could explain. But he wasn’t taking company chicken. He supplied his own, so the chicken inventory remained more or less where it ought to be.
He knew what his chicken cost. He knew what a portion sold for. He could put his own product through somebody else’s restaurant and pocket the proceeds without throwing the most obvious inventory number out of whack. The son of a gun had created a little business of his own inside somebody else’s business, complete with somebody else’s building, customers, employees, equipment and name.
There was just one problem.
The chicken didn’t walk to the table naked.
It had to be prepared. It had to be seasoned. It had to be cooked. It used the restaurant’s equipment and labor, and when somebody ordered chicken, that somebody was apt to want something besides a lonely drumstick lying on a plate contemplating eternity. There were sides and all the other little things that accompany a meal. The manager had carefully accounted for the cost of his chicken, but he hadn’t accounted for the cost of everything Church’s put around it.
And those other things began getting out of line.
The Mashed Potatoes Told on Him
That’s the lovely thing about a business. Everything is related to something else, whether the fellow stealing from you realizes it or not. You can fool the chicken count, but then the potatoes start talking. Or the seasoning does. Or the napkins do. Somewhere, something that ought to move in step with something else starts limping.
Corporate noticed.
I don’t know which number first raised its hand, and I’m not going to improve the story by pretending I do. What Red knew was that the sides and spices weren’t matching what the recorded sales said ought to be happening. Somebody started looking. Once they did, they found the extra chicken coming in, the unrecorded meals going out, and the money taking a private route to the manager’s pocket.
They bagged him.
The poor fellow had calculated the chicken right down to the portion and overlooked the gravy.
That’s the Part Worth Remembering
There is a temptation, when you’re running a business, to believe that if the numbers balance, everything must be all right. But the interesting question isn’t merely whether each number looks reasonable by itself. The interesting question is whether the numbers recognize one another when they meet.
If you’re selling seven hundred meals, there ought to be roughly seven hundred meals’ worth of things disappearing from the building. Not exactly, because real businesses aren’t laboratories. Somebody drops something. Something spoils. A cook gets generous. An employee eats supper. Earl does something involving a five-gallon bucket that nobody can adequately explain. Life happens.
But when one number wanders away from all the others and stays gone, don’t immediately decide somebody is stealing. Don’t decide anything yet. Just go looking for the story.
Maybe you’ve got waste. Maybe you’ve got bad portions. Maybe you’ve got a procedure nobody follows because it was stupid when you wrote it. Maybe you’ve got an employee who has discovered a better way to do something and neglected to tell you. And maybe, every once in a while, you’ve got a fellow buying chickens at the grocery store and running his own restaurant inside yours.
That’s why The Old Git would rather ask a question than make an accusation. What is happening here that ought to make something else happen—and isn’t?
Follow that question far enough and eventually you’ll find the answer.
Sometimes you’ll even find Sylvester standing at the end of it, returning your corn.