Before February of this year, I had no idea what a bottle service was. I live in New Orleans, but surprisingly enough, I’ve been to 2 bars in my entire life. I’ve never seen the inside of a nightclub and I really don’t have the desire to do so. One of my good friends is a manager at a nightclub down in the French Quarter. She always liked to hear my stories of shoplifters and employee theft cases and we were swapping stories on my birthday after grabbing a late dinner. A thought came to mind so I asked how employee theft in a nightclub was. I was sure that there was a way to steal liquor, or cash but never being inside a club, I was curious.
She told me a story of a bartender who was making extra cash by selling alcohol from the bottle service area to normal patrons. That service, if you don’t know, is where you can buy alcohol by the bottle at a club and they serve it to you with mixers and usually you also get some special treatment, since the markup on the bottle is some unforgivable number. Her bartender would be catering to a VIP table that had their own (or several) bottles of their favorite sprits. As the night progressed and drinks kept flowing, she would begin to sell shots from those bottles to other patrons in the bar and pocket the cash. The VIP guests wouldn’t notice 4-5 missing shots and the bar’s inventory at the end of the night wasn’t impacted. It was a clever scheme and the bartender pocketed a few extra dollar each night. The manager then watched this happen over the next few shifts before she was eventually confronted.
Seemed like a very simple, yet effective way for a dishonest employee to steal sales from the club. I wanted to know more, as this, for whatever reason, piqued my interest. It was an area of investigations I had zero experience in. I had to know how she was eventually caught, especially since there was no impact on the club’s inventory at the end of the night. Well, to my disappointment there was no crafty investigation involved. Her dishonesty was caught by accident. The manager just happened to be watching the bar for a minute and witnessed her take a shot from the bottle service area and bring it to a customer at the end of the bar. Had it not been for that, her actions would have probably never been caught. My theft stories were always better, anyway.
I left dinner feeling like a learned something new. I almost wanted to go to a few nightclubs and order a bottle of my favorite beverage, just to see if I could catch a dishonest bartender. That didn’t happen, but I did walk away with a new perspective on losses I had no idea occurred. I also learned that some people will pay $200 for the same drink I can pay $30 for at the gas station. To each their own, right? It’s all about the VIP experience.
For more information, contact us at Bottle Services, or call 1.770.426.0547