7 June 2026

"How to steal $80K" - a guest post by Danny H

Substack wouldn’t let me add Danny H as an contributor, but please welcome him as the author of today’s guest post!

Our own Danny H ran a Chick-fil-A location in Austin back in the early ’90s. He went on to work in HR leadership and taught at the college level before moving into executive coaching and leadership assessment work. He’s writing here as someone who has stood in the Operator’s shoes and knows what day-to-day restaurant operations actually look like.

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How to steal $80K

by Danny H

Source: Forbes

Last month, news came out about a former Chick-fil-A employee in Texas who had apparently created roughly 800 fake mac-and-cheese tray orders and refunded himself nearly $80,000. The story received national attention largely because of the size of the theft from a single fast-food restaurant. The dollar figure was high enough to raise obvious questions about how something like this could happen.

I knew precisely how such a scheme could work. For several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was the Owner/Operator of a Chick-fil-A unit at Barton Creek Square mall in Austin, Texas. That kind of creative theft was not entirely foreign to me.

Most fast-food chains use either a corporate-owned model, a traditional franchise model, or a mixture of the two. Chick-fil-A uses a much less common Operator model. Understanding what it is actually like to run one of their units may help answer many of the questions surrounding the recent theft.

My own path to that role began in the early 1980s in Houston. My parents, as heads of a conservative Christian household, required my brother, sister, and me to have a job by no later than age 16, but they would not allow any of us to work on Sundays. They were firmly opposed to me taking any fast-food job at 15. They had heard too many troubling stories about questionable managers, late hours, and the ever-present risk of robbery.

Then Chick-fil-A entered the Texas market. A close friend of my mother’s was looking for work and heard about the company’s emphasis on family values and its policy of remaining closed on Sundays. She was hired at the store in our neighborhood mall and thrived there, and her positive experience convinced my mom to give the green light. Just before I turned 16, I started my first real job beyond the neighborhood lawns I had mowed.

I kept that job all through high school. When I went away to college, I transferred to the Chick-fil-A near my dorm. The company was expanding rapidly, and working new store openings meant significant overtime, which as a college student, I badly needed. I took every opening my schedule allowed and, in the process, met many people from the corporate office. I was growing disillusioned with college, but I was genuinely enjoying working for Chick-fil-A.

Around that time, the pastor of our family church became president of a Christian college in Atlanta, and his wife eventually became the executive assistant of Truett Cathy (founder of Chick-fil-A). The relationships I had built during grand openings, combined with that personal connection, helped me secure one of the highly competitive Business Intern positions. I spent some time working at the corporate office in Atlanta, but I soon returned to Texas. When the Operator of the Barton Creek Square store had to resign suddenly due to illness, I was asked to step in. At 23 years old, I became the Owner/Operator of what would shortly become a million-dollar restaurant.

The daily rhythm of running that store was relentless. At the time, virtually all Chick-fil-A locations were still inside malls; free-standing units were being planned, but had not yet been built. Malls did not open until 10 in the morning, but my day started much earlier with administrative work, followed by all the operational responsibilities of running a restaurant. Even though Operators were technically independent contractors, Truett expected us to forgo traditional managers and work a minimum of 60 hours a week, with 70+ hours being more common. This expectation came directly from his own early experience running the original Dwarf House, a 24-hour restaurant across from the Ford assembly plant in south Atlanta. He and his brother split 12-hour shifts and were simply too exhausted to open on Sunday. That practical reality became the foundation for the company’s closed-on-Sunday policy.

Each morning, I worked the front counter, while the kitchen staff—almost always young mothers who needed daytime hours that ended before school let out—handled an extensive from-scratch prep operation in the back. They made mayonnaise, coleslaw, potato salad, chicken salad, and more. Chicken breasts had to be filleted so they would not curl in the fryer. We squeezed fresh lemons for lemonade, baked lemon pies, and brewed tea. It was genuinely labor-intensive work that has largely disappeared today, replaced by centralized pre-made products for consistency and scale. I still see that change as a quiet loss.

Lunch was the busiest period. Afterward I made the daily bank deposits (everything was cash back then), ran errands, and handled more administrative tasks. By late afternoon the high-school and University of Texas students arrived to work the evening shift, supervised by shift leaders I had trained. Inventory, hiring, maintenance, and bookkeeping filled whatever pockets of time remained, often late at night or on Sundays when the store was closed.

The most difficult lessons came from employee theft. Some of it was ordinary theft, like register skimming, quick-change artists, or giving away food to friends. The theft described in the news story would be of this type (on a grander scale). The most common way to skim money like this would be to first find a product that rings up very close to round dollar amount, say $2.50 or $4.00, to make it easy to keep track of. But the scam works best on large orders (typically $100+), where customers are less likely to scrutinize every item on their receipt. It would work like this:

1. Customer places a big order. The employee rings up everything, but adds an order or tray of mac and cheese that the customer did not order (mac & cheese is a common, relatively expensive side).

2. Customer pays the total. Most people, especially with large orders, pay without carefully checking the receipt. The customer has now unknowingly paid for the extra mac & cheese.

3. Employee removes the mac & cheese from the bag but does not delete the charge. They quietly take the mac & cheese out of the bag (or never put it in) and return it to the kitchen without saying anything to the customer. This keeps the actual food cost to the restaurant unchanged while they customer is overpaying for their order.

4. The extra money stays in the register. The restaurant has received payment for an item it never actually gave away.

5. Employee pockets the money later. Before the end of the shift, the employee pulls the exact amount of the overcharge(s) out of the register. The theft is now complete, and the books look balanced because the extra food was never actually served.

An employee can do this on smaller orders, too, but they need a way to remember how many times they ran the scam. A common trick is using the change drawer as a counter—for example, dropping a penny into the nickel slot for each theft. At the end of the shift, they count the pennies to know exactly how much extra money to remove from the drawer.

It’s hard to catch because most customers don’t notice. They assume any receipt discrepancy is just an honest mistake. If someone complains, the employee simply apologizes, refunds the difference or remakes the order. Chick-fil-A’s strong brand reputation works in the thief’s favor—people give them the benefit of the doubt. It works on both cash and credit card orders, but cash is cleaner. Smart thieves limit the amount per shift and target the busiest registers during peak hours to blend in.

These kinds of thefts were difficult lessons, but larger betrayals cut deeper. One young father, who worked days for me and evenings at the neighboring cafeteria, seemed genuinely dedicated. With a new baby and mounting hospital bills, he needed the two jobs to make ends meet. Then my food-cost numbers began rising steadily and finally spiked. I asked the manager of the jewelry store next door to watch the back entrance after hours. He soon reported that my employee was using his key to enter the closed store and essentially grocery-shop for his family. The losses ran into the thousands. Terminating him remains one of the most heartbreaking things I have ever had to do.

The most expensive case involved an employee who picked the lock on the desk drawer where I kept the business checkbook. He stole blank checks, forged my signature, and cashed nearly $10,000 in a single night—an enormous sum in the early 1990s, when store volumes were much lower. The owner of the check-cashing business became suspicious and called me. By the time I discovered the drawer had been tampered with, the damage was done. I pressed charges, and the employee served a short jail sentence.

Each incident reminded me how thin the margin is in a restaurant, made much more difficult with losses that seemed to only occur when I was not at the store. I had a young child myself, and the pressure from all sides was immense. Between driving the business as an owner and managing the restaurant as a manager, little time was left for anything else.

The financial arrangement was another eye-opener: a modest base draw amount, after which Chick-fil-A took 15 percent off the top of sales, and then split any remaining profit 50-50. In a low-margin business, that often meant the company captured 20 percent or more of total revenue. Operators were independent contractors, responsible for their own taxes, Social Security, health insurance, and anything else a typical employee would receive. Selection to be an Operator was extraordinarily competitive, far more selective than admission to Harvard. Being selected almost always required a pre-existing relationship with either a Chick-fil-A unit, the Cathy family, or one of the many Southern Baptist churches in Atlanta.

In the earliest days, the Operator relationship was little more than a handshake. The shift to a formal written Operator Agreement came only after a revealing lawsuit involving the Operator in Temple, Texas. That Operator discovered substantial markups on key supplied items, most notably the season coater used on the chicken. Similar markups existed on other products like soda, logo cups, and napkins. He began sourcing some paper goods locally and buying Coke directly. When corporate noticed the mismatch between shipments and reported sales, he received a visit from senior corporate leadership. The Operator refused to stop. Corporate threatened to revoke the store. He sued, arguing that none of these profit streams had been disclosed. He largely prevailed in court, though the matter ended with nondisclosure agreements and his relationship with Chick-fil-A ended. I have read the original suit, since I knew the guy and he let me read it one day, but obviously I’ve never seen the full judgement. That case led directly to the detailed Operator Agreement I signed as one of the earlier participants.

I continue to hold deep respect for the Cathy family. Their philanthropy, such as support for orphanages in South America, Truett’s long-term commitment to teaching fourth-grade Sunday School at his church (a quiet pipeline for future Operators), Camp WinShape, and extensive college scholarships was substantial. Truett has passed away, but from what I have heard the family has kept his giving spirit. The company’s purpose statement, which appeared during my tenure, felt genuine to me: “To glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us. To have a positive influence on all who come in contact with Chick-fil-A.”

I embraced that mission. I met and hung out with most of the Cathy family at one time or another while I was an Operator. Through the foundation of business knowledge, personal development, and very hard work, my experiences at Chick-fil-A shaped the rest of my career: senior HR roles at a Fortune 50 company, university teaching, executive roles in two financial services companies, and my current practice in executive assessment, business strategy consulting, and coaching.

Yet there was also a harder, more ruthless dimension to the business. Several experiences eventually led me to leave. I achieved the sales growth required to ‘win’ the company’s coveted car-incentive program—a new vehicle for a year in recognition of a 40-percent sales increase, with the vehicle’s title awarded if repeated the following year. But because I had taken over as an intern in November and became the official Operator on July 1, corporate ruled me ineligible. Truett himself made the final call, reportedly saying a 23-year-old should not receive that kind of money. It was the first time I felt deeply betrayed.

Later, when the other Operator in Austin lost a large amount of food inventory to a freezer compressor failure, Chick-fil-A covered the full cost because he had children in college. When the identical problem happened at my store, I was told my higher volume and profitability meant I could absorb the expense. On another occasion, my heavily Latino crew asked to prepare fajitas and fresh salsa for a family party using store ingredients. I agreed as long as I could attend the party and test the items on the menu. Corporate responded with mystery shoppers, along with a cease-and-desist letter rather than a conversation.

Finally, as free-standing units were starting to be built and Austin’s economy boomed, I inquired about opportunities to move to one of the new units. Executives flew into Austin, told me the Austin market was unsuitable for a free-standing unit, and, according to a friend of mine at corporate, had decided my aggressive style made me a poor long-term fit. I still get a chuckle remembering the meeting where the President of Chick-fil-A at the time told me the Austin market couldn’t support a free-standing unit.

I resigned, tried opening my own restaurant (which did not succeed), and moved into corporate America.

As I look back, I am very thankful for the habits of operational discipline, personal integrity, and developing others. What was cultivated during this time of my life played a very large part in shaping who I am as a person. Chick-fil-A possesses a compelling backstory and has employed many genuinely good people.

At the same time, it is a business, and like any business it can prove uncompromisingly ruthless when its interests are challenged. That tension—between stewardship and self-protection, between mission and margin—taught me more about leadership and human nature than I could have learned in any classroom. I would not trade the experience, and it remains one of the most formative chapters of my life.