We walk in off the street, fairly nondescript in club terms. Just two regular guys dressed down for the night, looking for a place to sit and order some stiff drinks. Within moments, we fade into the woodwork of loudmouthed, cocktail-sodden hipsters. Talking loudly to each other, laughing with anybody who happens to walk past, we fit in.
The bartenders, both females dressed in black, are huddled together down at the corner of the bar with some regulars, looking unhappy. The tall one, a brunette, slouches sullenly, her lower lip set in a pout. The stocky blonde stands with one hand on her hip, the other one poking holes in the air as she tells a story. We make eye contact; the brunette comes down to take our orders. Thanks. Two bucks for the tip jar, and we fall back into conversation.
Time passes. We sit patiently at the bar, carefully avoiding the puddles of slopped drinks and melted ice cubes, hopeful that one of the bartenders will notice the filthy bar and our empty glasses and perhaps deign to serve us. Finally, the blonde shuffles over, swatting at the bar with a rag, not so much wiping up the puddles as much as rearranging them. Coolly, she asks if we'd like another. We smile and say Yes, thank you, tipping her another $2 for her trouble.
Sure, its bad service, but we don't sweat it. It's OK because there's karma. Karma can be a cast-iron bitch, and the things you do will come back to you—in spades if you do it to a spotter.
Like the secret shopper or "loss prevention" or any of the other little euphemisms applied to those trying to limit "shrinkage," spotters are part of the city's urban landscape. And, according to Nico Segal, it's more important than you might think. "We go in and we help," says Segal. "Anywhere that they need help we go in and we help our clients." He and partner William Smilie own Mechanics, a city-based beverage-consulting agency. They run about twenty checks a month for clients (he's not naming names), including some of the most exclusive and high-profile establishments in the city, along with some of the most average. Put simply, a spotter walks into a bar, club or restaurant anonymously—just like you or me—and observes how efficiently, or not, it operates.
"When we go in," Segal says, "it's a whole story: from the moment our people get there to the moment they leave. Our clients receive a twelve-page report and it takes them right with us through the club. They know exactly what we're doing; they can see us buying the drinks, they know what that bartender is doing."
It's understandable, of course, that service industry workers might not care much for spotters. At the most basic level, restaurants, clubs and bars, and the people who work in them, aren't so different from any other small business. They have their own ways of doing things, and its been working fine for years, thank you very much. No one wants somebody coming in and telling him or her how to do their job, even if they are doing it completely ass-backwards. Worse still, the spotters are usually former industry types. Just as regular cops hate internal affairs, nobody likes getting busted by one of their own.
"Conventional" wisdom says that spotting is simply a means for the owners of restaurants, clubs and bars to get rid of employees, and that the spotters themselves are skulking around in the dark, causing trouble.
And, yeah, that's kinda true. A spotter's job is to ferret out the corruption and inefficiency in a joint. Spotters look for the bartender who's giving himself a raise out of the till, the waitress who tacks on a personal surcharge to deliver a drink to your table, the doorman who figures the money you brought to spend would fit better in his pocket. Spotters slide into the spot and lay heavy eyeballs down, and, because of their former insider status, they can be very effective: A bartender watching a bartender is going to pick up all the nuances. "We check out their pour count [the number of seconds a bartender pours liquor from a bottle]—how much are they pouring? We measure all that because, yeah, it's easy to say 'What's the difference if I pour a little more?'" Segal says. "Well, it's a difference if the owner is getting thirty drinks out of a bottle or if he's getting ten. It still comes out to lost money."
So what's the worst case scenario, the most diabolical pilferage ever uncovered? "The most clever one," Nico says, "was damn clever. We had one of our agents at a club downtown. He thought he was noticing something, and he couldn't believe it so much that he called me up. I went down to the club and met up with him there. What we found was this bartender had this sheet of paper next to the register. This bartender [who would overcharge patrons for drinks] would then take a pen and mark the sheet of paper every time something was put in the register. But when the piece of paper was no longer next to the register, there was nothing on it, the paper was blank. At the register, marks, two feet away from the register, no marks. Then we figured it out. Black lights. The marker would only show up under a black light."
Seems the bartender was making marks on the paper to keep track of exactly how much extra he was sticking into the register. That way the he could avoid suspicion by simply dumping all the money into the register as if it was a regular transaction. Then, at the end of the night, when the bartender totaled out the register, he would just skim off the cream. Sheer artistry. "Yeah, we had to call the owners right then. They're very hands-on, so they were in the club. I told him, 'Pull this bartender's drawer right now and take this sheet of paper with you.' So he looks at me like 'Huh?' I tell him, 'If you pull the bartender's drawer right now, it will be over, and if you can figure out the code for the marks to the amount of cash, it'll come out the same.' Boom, busted."
Segal, apparently, has seen it all. "Yeah there were two people behind the bar, [and] this one guy would just stand at the register. The other bartender is going regular speed; this guy was doing maybe a third of the drinks the other bartender was doing. He was standing there counting how much he was stealing in his head as he went along. It was obvious what he was doing; at the end of the night, the one guy rang up $2,000 worth of drinks, this guy did maybe $500 worth."
It's a hard business in which to stay honest. Every day is like the thorniest question in ethics class: If you were dealing with thousands of dollars a day in cash, and the only thing between you and you giving yourself a raise was nothing, would you steal? Segal, once a bartender, has faced that one down himself.
"Have I ever stolen? Yeah. And you can put that on the record if you want. Yeah, I have. In order to catch a thief, you gotta be one sometimes." Does he ever feel bad about busting other guys? "Do I feel bad about doing it? No. Do I feel bad when we catch someone; do I feel bad for that person? No. Their choice, they're the one that's doing it. Who do I feel bad for? I feel bad for the ones who aren't stealing. The owners of the club and the people who aren't stealing. Because there are all the old jokes. 'What's the difference between a bartender and a monkey? You have to teach a monkey to steal.'"
Besides, Segal says, in the end, he's simply doing everyone but the thieves a favor. "Spotting provides a service to all the good bartenders, and to the good people in the industry and the owners. Because if you've got somebody ripping the place off for $200 a week, $800 a month, $9,600 a year, that $9,600 could be paying two months' rent on the bar. That one bartender that's stealing money could be responsible for not only the owner losing money, but the place shutting down, which then means that the staff has to go out and find a job somewhere else. It's all general systems theory. Everything is related."
Spotting, however, is not simply about busting excessively entrepreneurial bartenders. It's about making the entire entertainment process run smoother across the board. It's not just the stealing aspect; it's about looking at a spot from the customer's point of view. "At some places," Segal says, "you can wait in line for up to two hours on a hot night. You don't need the door guy giving you attitude. I mean, 'Oh, I'm sorry Mr. Guy who's standing here at the door, making $10 an hour, while people are walking by, not waiting in line because they're giving you $50 so they can get in. I didn't bring $50 to blow. The $50 that I do have is going toward drinks and a good time inside.'" But Segal isn't too cocky about what he can and can't do. "Just by getting a spotter's report," he admits, "things won't change. Things will change if the owner goes, 'Guess what—we had a spotter's report, everybody read it, what the hell's going on? I understand that I haven't been here lately, things have been getting kinda shoddy. Guess what? I'm awake now. You wake up, too."
Starting at the intersection of Milwaukee, North and Damen, we pick two spots at random. The first is a smallish place; a well-known joint off the main bar strip, it's one of those places where friends go to hang out. We walk in on a Wednesday night, and the bar is packed. Segal goes to work.
"Agents walk into bar at 10:30, Wednesday night. No one cards us or says 'Hello' as we walk in." We sit down at the bar and order. "Agents ordered one call drink [a Vanilla Stoli] and a premium bottle beer [a Beck's], which the bar didn't carry. Bartender was polite in letting the agents know this, and the agent ordered a domestic bottle beer [MGD]." Overall, we both thought that this little bar was great, due largely in part to the thoroughly professional bartender. On this, a night when the bar is understaffed, she's on top of the situation: Everybody gets their drinks with alacrity, the bar top is impeccably clean. She even changes our ashtray twice in the hour and fifteen minutes that we're there. Any complimentary drinks she gives away are properly rung into the register, and every time she takes money it found its way into the till. The only rough spot in her performance is a tendency to over-pour, between eight and twelve counts per drink (a shot is a four-count, and yes, it was a nice drink, thank you). Later on she'll pour herself and her bus staff a shot, which, in light of the night she's having, is difficult to fault her for. That Segal and I mosey out feeling good about the experience is a testament to her prowess.
Whatever good feeling we'd built up at the first establishment evaporates almost upon entering the second, a larger place right in the heart of party-land—and the place mentioned at the beginning of the story. But after a night out with Segal, you don't mind the nasty bar or even the bad service. Just think one day, maybe soon, a couple of nondescript guys will walk in here and quietly have a seat. They'll fade into the woodwork and tip well for the poor service. And they'll leave as quietly as they came. Boom. Busted.
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.