I've got a true story for you. I worked at a movie theater for a summer when I was a junior in High School. The kids working the ticket booth would take the money from the patrons and tell them that the ticket machine wasn't working but they could still go in. The kids working the podium at the door would get a wave from the ticket booth and they would allow the customers to enter without a ticket. The ticket booth and podium workers would then split that money. Inventory and nightly accounting was done by popcorn bag and soda cup count. As a simple example, if you started with 500 soda cups and 500 popcorn bags and you ended the evening with 100 of each, the money in the till should correspond to the number of bags and cups missing from the count. The theater ushers would clean the theater after each showing. They would find popcorn bags that weren't destroyed, empty out the popcorn and wrap them around their legs, tucking them into their socks. They would then walk through the lobby and bring these bags to the concession workers who would flatten the bags and then add those bags back into their stock count and sell them to customers for the next showing. The ushers and the concession staff would then split that money. The concession staff had their own shakedown separate from their joint scam with the ushers. There were no calculators used when tallying the concession orders. Totals were calculated in your head on-the-fly. It wasn't difficult once you had done it a few times. When a couple who were clearly on a date came in, the staff would add a few dollars to the order knowing the guy would be less likely to question the total lest he look cheap in front of his date. Staff kept track of the extra cash by adding popcorn kernels to their till. At the end of the evening they would count the kernels and remove the appropriate amount of cash during their reconciliation. There were plenty of people working there that talked shit and didn't like each other at all, but everyone working at that movie theater was in on the fraud and worked together to enrich themselves. At the time, I had no idea that movie theater was operating exactly like the US government.