Here’s a small update on that. This very topic, of employee pilfering, happened to come up last night while I was talking to a bar owner of my acquaintance. He told me he sets a limit on how much pilfering can occur he’s willing to look the other way for, and he makes sure all of his staff know what that limit is. Cash, alcohol, anything. If that limit is passed, he starts firing people. An odd system, but it seems to work. Indeed, I’ve heard of this before. Wages are low here, and so petty theft is quite common.
One might ask why he doesn’t simply pay them more. The answer would be that if he did, he’d be paying them more AND the pilfering would still occur. Hard to explain, but many people don’t really even think of it as stealing over here.