The Skim
Almost midnight. Closing again and everyone else is gone. Just Shelly-Ann’s here and I’m not sure what she has planned. It’s been about 3 months now since we started skimming...actually, come to think of it, she’s probably been skimming for way longer but she let me in on the secret about 3 months ago.
Okay so you may be wondering what we mean by skimming…
Anyone who’s worked in fast food or retail knows that there’s a certain amount of money that can leave the register that can go unaccounted for without alerting corporate (no snitching!). So at this particular establishment there’s been a looooong tradition of skimming. Shelly let me in on it recently and honestly sometimes I make more a night skimming than I get paid. Well, I don’t actually take home the skim. None of us do. Anymore…
The skim used to be about taking home more...Folks used it to buy food for their families, pay for school, diapers & formula, birthday presents, new clothes, take care of folks in the neighborhood, pay rent and...video games, and a little plant medicine etc. Honestly it feels like a way to stick it to corporate because they never loved us. They definitely don’t love our communities. I mean, we eat the food, but working here we know how gross it really is…
At that time the skim was super disorganized. People would take a few dollars at the end of their shift, make sure no one else sees. Of course you’d try to make sure you were scheduled to be on the register near the end of your shift...Eventually folks on the same shift began working together to do the skim and started distributing it across the folks on the shift. So we had it nice for a while.
But lately we’ve been realizing that corporate is...bigger, more amorphous than they seem...we’ve seen some things...things we weren’t supposed to see. Stuff that happens after the joint is closed...things in boxes, people coming and going that don’t work here. We ignored it at first. As long as it didn’t interfere with our business we didn’t care. But then Lisalee disappeared.
Lisalee was one of us. A worker. A fast food worker. She’d been here about 9 months before she got in on the skim. She had gone from line to shift manager in no time at all. She was smart and funny...is smart and funny...I guess. She’s really cool. Everyone liked...likes her. So after corporate folks started showing up at night we had to change the way we did the skim. The joint wasn’t ours the way it used to be. We never knew when they’d show up and at first we thought they had found out about the skim and were there to check in on things. But they pretty much ignored us and would be in the back room sometimes for hours. I don’t think it’s normal for dudes from corporate to come down to a tiny spot in the city but heck, what do I know? Anyway, I wasn’t there that night but Shelly-Ann was and she says right around 11:45 Lisaless went into the back to get the mop to get ready for closing. Next thing you know it’s 12:05, place is closed and Lisalee hasn’t come back yet. Shelly-Ann goes to look for her and no one is there, not the guys from corporate, not Lisalee. She thinks, hmm, that’s kinda weird but just locks up, assumes she left through the back. But she was the shift manager and didn’t close the register. Shelly just did it, mostly to make sure the skim still happened. Never said anything about it to anyone else.
You know what’s weird though? No one ever saw Lisalee again. Shelly eventually went looking for her cos she lives around the corner and her whole house was packed up like no one was living there. Like where the heck did they go?
So we had a choice. We could continue on like nothing happened or we could do some digging and find out why exactly Lisalee disappeared on the same night that those corporate guys were in the back for three hours.
To be continued…