I’ve seen the people who collect the quarters from parking meters (the traditional kind) in the early morning. They open the meter, and pour the quarters in a box that they pull around on wheels. If one of them were to just grab a couple quarters every few meters when no on is looking, they could boost their hourly wage considerably. How would the boss know if the intake were a little short. I realize they have to have a place to hide the quarters, but that wouldn’t be too hard. What’s to stop them from doing this?
Decency?
There are all sorts of jobs you can steal from if you’re willing to do that sort of thing. In retail, they call this “shrink” or “shrinkage”, and a certain amount of inventory loss is expected in a given period.
(not all shrink is attributable to employee theft; it includes customer theft and shipping errors and pretty much anything that might result in you having less stuff at the end of the day than you ought)
I’m sure you could get away with it for a while, but eventually, you’d get greedy, and get caught. It happens all the time if you watch the papers.
For one part, it’s decency; after all, the money from parking meters goes to the municipality; in other words, embezzling money from them would be stealing from the community, and there still is a general sense that this is wrong (stealing from private individuals is, of course, just as wrong, but the taboo of stealing is stronger if it is to the detriment of the general public).
Another aspect is a certain disproportion between the risk of embezzling coins from the meters and the advantages to be gained. If the collector keeps a quarter here and there, the probability of being caught is slim, but then again he won’t make too much money doing this, and in any case not enough to be worth risking all the nasty consequences in case he really gets caught. If he does it on a more regular basis, he might be able to make a sizable side profit from this; but every time he does it, he runs an additional risk of being uncovered, and one day, me might really get caught.
One of the important lessons we hope you’ve learned in life by the time you become an adult is that morality is based not upon what you won’t do for fear of getting caught, but rather what you won’t do regardless of whether you might get caught or not.
Fortunately, most of our society learns this lesson fairly well. Mind you, it would be nice if we learned it with respect to things like speed limits and paying taxes. 
There is also security available to prevent pilferage. From POM
The coins are in a sealed container, which only unlocks when inserted into the collection cart, which can only be unlocked at the depot.
These guys also sell a “smart key”, the collector inserts a card into the electronic meter, which releases the box, and audits the meter at the same time. If you pilfer, the amount in the cart won’t match the amount listed on the card.
They can also rotate shifts. Unless everyone on staff pilfers the exact same amount, you’re going to get variances in the amount collected that will be obvious in the most rudimentary analysis. You can also do a “ride along” with an auditor, significant changes to the take will become obvious then as well.
I also found this report showing some pretty heavy pilferage from a decade ago, so it does happen.
What Cheesesteak said. In the absense of a more high tech approach many areas rotate their collection staff through multiple zones. So a location that averages $500 a day drops to $400 while one person or team is on duty that week is going to raise a flag.
Here is an anecdote: I used to be one of those guys. My partner and I were collecting and he spotted a silver dime. He had no coins in his pocket, so I put a quarter in for him and he took the dime out.
By the time we had gotten back to the office someone had reported him for stealing.
You’d be amazed at how closely people watch.
As others pointed out too, they pretty much know how much a lot or a row of meters will yield.
I always thought the meter had a… meter… that measured the number of turns or something so you could compare it to the cash pull. On the other hand, I’ve never seen a parking meter in real life so I might be thinking too hard.
Someone here in Grand Rapids was busted for skimming from meters because he kept going to the same store to use the Coinstar machine. :smack:
From the Globe & Mail circa 1996:
"Edmonton, Alberta, transit worker Salim Kara, 44, was sentenced to four years in prison in March for a 13-year scheme of stealing coins from fare machines. Using a rod with a magnet on the end, he had patiently amassed $2.3 million (Cdn). No one suspected Kara until he bought an $800,000 house on a salary of $38,000. "
I remember it was a very nice house.
For state of the art in parking meter tech see:
http://www.ionet.net/~luttrell/current.html
$2.3 million Canadian? What’s that, like 50 real dollars?
Well, thank you for the sermon pastor Young. I’ve been an adult for 15 years, and I don’t need any lessons in morality, thank you. I’m talking about other people who might want to take advantage of the situation. Actually, I was asking if the employers had a system to prevent it.
I read the papers every day, and I’ve never seen any news about parking meter workers getting busted.
Not in L.A. Not in San Diego.
That makes sense to me, but how could they prove it? I guess they would just observe that person on the job.
Mechanical meters don’t store data, and even so, most municipalities don’t have the resources to check every meter separately.
So, it would be like 5 EURO in real money.
I run a couple carwashes for the owner of the business, and one of my jobs is doing deposits. We have several change machines there and the bills need to be removed and included in the deposits with our wash sales revenue.
The change machines have mechanical counters in them that tell you how many dollars have been taken in against how many quarters have been dispensed, numbers which I have to include on my deposit reports.
I suppose I always assumed parking meters had a coin counter in them that a “meter manager” could look at to verify the take. Change machines and meters are pretty simple devices, and a counting mechanism is a pretty simple device, too.
Well, I’ll be damned. I always thought the coins fell into a vacuum tube and were whisked straight into the safe in the mayor’s office.
Wasn’t long ago our dollar was worth more than your ‘real’ dollar.
There was a case in Houston in the early 80’s I believe (sorry, no cite) where the embezzler was caught because the city had raised the cost of the parking meters but the amounts being collected didn’t go up.
It is worth more than the yankee dollar today. Checking CBC.ca, I see that Cdn$1=US$0.9839.