BONUS: Two Founders Exposing Hospitality's Biggest Secret

Sure.

Sure, absolutely.

So I think through all of this, the elephant in the room is just why, and I think this question of why can be very frustrating.

I know you mentioned earlier, like, these are, these restaurants, these legacies, they're losing them because they are kind.

And some, the obvious question is why would someone do that? So Johnna, you dove into the psychology of why employees steal, how they justify it.

I don't wanna give everything away 'cause we gotta read the book, but what did you learn? You know, give me a tidbit of that mindset of who and why are people doing this.

Yeah, um, she talked about the person in the drive-through.

Some folks are, stealing is their job, and they're just looking for their next target.

So, you know, in that respect, you just wanna be very upfront that you have loss prevention, and hopefully they'll move on.

But aside from those people, you really have a lot of folks who think the companies are making a lot of money, so whether it's a mom-and-pop or a large corporation, they just don't think the co- the company will miss it, so they overestimate the profit margins, and they take it there.

Have the, the employees that feel, you know, underpaid, overworked.

You, you know, I think the audience is probably familiar with that.

And so they start helping themselves because they're not sure that, you know, they feel like they're not being compensated fairly.

There's a other couple things that I wanted to point out that I found really interesting in the industry.

The hospitality industry has the highest rates of substance abuse, i- of any industry, and that's government statistics.

And so really important, I think, for restaurateurs to, to have active drug testing and to monitor some of that because as anybody knows, addicts will do desperate things to feed their habit.

And then the last is, um, the hospitality industry also has, because it employs so many people and so many people just beginning their careers, has a lot of food insecurity.

So there's some desperation, and we talk about in the book that, uh, there's ways restaurateurs can support any of their employees that may be having some food insecurity or that, you know, their spouse lost a job or something.

So they can support those employees in an aboveboard way, um, in a budgeted way instead of the, the employees feeling like they have no choice but to feed their families by stealing food or stealing money.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

So one last question for you all before we head into our game for this episode.

Chloe, for restaurant owners who are thinking, "This could never happen in my place.

I am so watchful and so careful," and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, what would you say to them?

You know, it's a tough conversation, as you s- referred to it earlier as the elephant in the room.