Instead of dealing with the offenders... punish everyone - workers and customers (with delayed/crappy checkout experiences). That's great management, sure. Situations like these - which I noticed as a kid - contributed to my early-onset cynicism.

If it's too hard to detect, management doesn't have much choice.

It would be smarter for that feature to require a manager's key, and then the manager could actively monitor the situation. But since the manager can't implement that feature, they have to work with what they have.

It read like they DID know how to spot it, and the reaction was... "never again for anyone under any circumstances".

Blanket bans like the one described are always wrong. ;)

If there's a problem, monitor it after every shift, or every day, or weekly. You know who worked what registers; monitor/scan/review, then take action against the offenders.

I worked food service with POS; we had to review things every drawer change, and discrepancies were noted. Repeated discrepancies (either money or between food usage and money) would be tied to someone (or multiple people) and action was taken. It's not always that hard, just a bit time consuming, but... it's part of the job (or was for me).

Solving personnel problems with policy is unfortunately common at companies in the small-medium space. Very small companies tend to be more person oriented, and very large companies tend to have outgrown it (though they may still do it at the department level).

It is also one of the most annoying mistakes I see frequently repeated at startups and young businesses.

Solving problems with policy is common in all companies. It’s programming at the organisation level. Every policy is either a good candidate for automation or an indication of automation limitations.

It's incredibly easy to detect.

Presumably suspend your partner in crimes transaction receipt is printed walk away. Partner slips you some money later.

Solution: don't hire scummy people, pay enough that you can afford decent folks, watch for a friend that always comes to a certain cashier especially while alone, watch for cashier being nervous when observed, watch for partner to break off transaction if observed, "forget card", or return goods shortly.

It's also obviously trivial to catch with the receipt but they will probably refuse to show it. A transaction log will also trivially show it if matched with register and time.

Anyone could potentially get away with this once but any dishonest person is going to want to do this repeatedly.

There is basically no excuse for not catching this as a manager and I see no reason to deny associates this useful feature.

The cashiers would 'fake' the completion and instead just suspend the transaction.

Management didn't bother checking for unusual rates of suspended transactions nor 'check off' on abandoned transactions.

It's almost always a management failure, as it's most likely they just didn't want to do the work instead of wasting time hitting on the inappropriately young employees...

Shouln't that be easy to spot if the items are never returned and inventory doesn't match up? You'd think any abandoned transactions would require signoff by someone else that the items were actually returned (or trashed if perished).

As I said, management is lazy and would rather engage in inappropriate conduct than try to actually do a good job.