It’s Your Prerogative to Check
Updated: Sep 4
This is Part Three, the last part of a three-part series.
Goods Receiving - Part 3 : The Discipline
£50,000 a week came through one loading bay.
Two deliveries of drink, the rest food, roughly a third beverage to two-thirds food. Two goods receivers on it full time, a third just for busy days. Industrial scales built into the bay itself.
Nothing got signed until it was weighed.
Every delivery, checked against what was actually being paid for. When a shortage turned up, it wasn’t logged and forgotten, it was phoned through to the supplier that same day, credit requested there and then, chased if it didn’t land.
Not occasionally.
Every time.
Here’s what that builds, over time, that the scales alone never could: a reputation.
Suppliers learn which sites will catch a short delivery and which ones won’t. Get it wrong on a site like that often enough and it stops being worth trying. So the depot starts getting it right before the lorry even leaves - not out of honesty, out of knowing they’ll be identified if they don’t. The check isn’t just catching problems. It’s training the supply chain to stop sending them.
That was a 900-room hotel. Most operators reading this run nothing like that scale, and don’t need to.
A pub doing one delivery a week doesn’t need two receivers and an industrial scale. It needs ten minutes and a delivery note. The principle is identical, check before you sign, it just costs less time to do it at a smaller site.
I’ve run sites where every food delivery got stripped down before anyone signed for it. Cages emptied, pallets broken apart, everything counted, every time. Drivers didn’t love it. Some got moody about being made to wait, or ended up helping just to speed things along and get back on the road. That’s fine. It’s not our job to make their round easier. It’s our job to know what we’re paying for before we put a signature on it.
And that gets to the real point underneath all of this: you were being coerced into signing without checking, and the driver knew it. The moaning, the impatience, the occasional bit of bluster, none of that is a personality quirk you have to work around. It’s a tactic.
If someone’s leaning on you to sign faster than you’re comfortable with, that pressure itself is worth noticing. Ask what they’ve got to gain from you not looking.
None of this works without two things, and neither of them is headcount.
First, whoever’s doing the checking needs to know the stock. Not vaguely, properly. What the product actually looks like, what it should weigh, what the right pack size is. That’s what makes the check fast rather than a hold-up. Someone who doesn’t know stock is slow at this. Someone who does can check a full delivery in minutes without ever feeling like they’re the one causing a delay.
Second, and more important: they need the backbone to hold the line when a driver pushes back. Not rudeness. Just the confidence to say no, this doesn’t go through until it’s checked… even when someone’s trying to make that feel unreasonable. Confidence, not confrontation. But confidence that doesn’t fold the second someone raises their voice or starts looking at their watch.
Go back to the keg in Part One. One check would have stopped it, line on the note, keg in hand, do they match. Go back to the Amstel on the twenty-fifth floor. Same fix. Every mechanism in this series, the disguise, the pressure, the over-delivery, breaks against the same simple discipline: check what’s in front of you against what you ordered and what the note says, every single time, regardless of how busy the driver is or how confident they sound.
It’s not complicated. It’s not expensive. It doesn’t need software or a consultant or a system overhaul.
It needs someone who knows what they’re looking at, and who understands one thing clearly: it’s your business, you’re the one paying, and it is entirely your prerogative to check before you sign. Nobody else’s convenience outranks that.
You can’t control what you don’t have. And you’ll never know what you actually have until someone checks.
I'm David Holden. I've spent 30 years working across hospitality audit and operations, helping hotels, pubs, restaurants and bars identify where profit is being lost and put practical controls in place to stop it.
Even a small £30 shortage, once a fortnight, is £780 a year nobody notices until it's pointed out. If you don't know whether that's happening on your site, get in touch. I'll help you build a receiving discipline that holds up regardless of size.
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