Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [48]
America’s fast food restaurants are now more attractive to armed robbers than convenience stores, gas stations, or banks. Other retail businesses increasingly rely upon credit card transactions, but fast food restaurants still do almost all of their business in cash. While convenience store chains have worked hard to reduce the amount of money in the till (at 7-Eleven stores the average robbery results in a loss of about thirty-seven dollars), fast food restaurants often have thousands of dollars on the premises. Gas stations and banks now routinely shield employees behind bullet-resistant barriers, a security measure that would be impractical at most fast food restaurants. And the same features that make these restaurants so convenient — their location near intersections and highway off-ramps, even their drive-through windows — facilitate a speedy getaway.
A fast food robbery is most likely to occur when only a few crew members are present: early in the morning before customers arrive or late at night near closing time. A couple of sixteen-year-old crew members and a twenty-year-old assistant manager are often the only people locking up a restaurant, long after midnight. When a robbery takes place, the crew members are frequently herded into the basement freezer. The robbers empty the cash registers and the safe, then hit the road.
The same demographic groups widely employed at fast food restaurants — the young and the poor — are also responsible for much of the nation’s violent crime. According to industry studies, about two-thirds of the robberies at fast food restaurants involve current or former employees. The combination of low pay, high turnover, and ample cash in the restaurant often leads to crime. A 1999 survey by the National Food Service Security Council, a group funded by the large chains, found that about half of all restaurant workers engaged in some form of cash or property theft — not including the theft of food. The typical employee stole about $218 a year; new employees stole almost $100 more. Studies conducted by Jerald Greenberg, a professor of management at the University of Ohio and an expert on workplace crime, have found that when people are treated with dignity and respect, they’re less likely to steal from their employer. “It may be common sense,” Greenberg says, “but it’s obviously not common practice.” The same anger that causes most petty theft, the same desire to strike back at an employer perceived as unfair, can escalate to armed robbery. Restaurant managers are usually, but not always, the victims of fast food crimes. Not long ago, the day manager of a Mc-Donald’s in Moorpark, California, recognized the masked gunman emptying the safe. It was the night manager.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) attempted in the mid-1990s to issue guidelines for preventing violence at restaurants and stores that do business at night. OSHA was prompted, among other things, by the fact that homicide had become the leading cause of workplace fatalities among women. The proposed guidelines were entirely voluntary and seemed innocuous. OSHA recommended, for example, that late-night retailers improve visibility within their stores and make sure their parking lots were well lit. The National Restaurant Association, along with other industry groups, responded by enlisting more than one hundred congressmen to oppose any OSHA guidelines on retail violence. An investigation by the Los Angeles Times found that many of the congressmen had recently accepted donations from the NRA and the National Association of Convenience Stores. “Who would oppose putting out guidelines on saving women’s