Act of Economic Crime: The Logic of Dirty Business and Normative Restrictions in the Swedish Restaurant Industry

• NCJ Number: 188856
• Journal: Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention Volume: 1 Issue: 2 Dated: 2000 Pages: 156-177
• Author(s): Tage Alalehto
• Date Published: 2000
• Length: 22 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Survey
• Language: English
• Country: United Kingdom

Annotation

This article discusses reasons why respectable businessmen commit economic crime from within the Swedish restaurant industry.

Abstract

The interview sample consisted of 119 restaurateurs and 12 representatives of authorities such as tax, police, accountants, and prosecutors. The typical restaurateur in Sweden is a man and probably a Swede. In general, restaurateurs see their business conditions as really difficult with the chief strategy of competition being a price war. The competition in a price war leads to a downgrading pressure on prices which leads to decreasing margins of profit. In order to survive this, the restaurateur has to reduce his trade costs in order to continue being competitive in the market. Almost 80 percent of the informants in this survey consider that restaurateurs in general devoted their time to unfair competition, irrespective of type of restaurateur (such as restaurant size, ethnic character of style of restaurant). Almost 50 percent of the informants said that “fiddling” with the cash register was the most common method of cheating to keep costs down. Cheating with the cash register also made it possible to cheat with other items of expenditure, such as purchasing black-market liquor and raw materials. The restaurateur developed a black budget that he used for black-market purchases and seeks to balance the black and white budgets separately so that officially it looks all right and consistent to the authorities. There was an overall feeling of uncertainty among the majority of the informants that the risk of being caught was fairly high. If the restaurateur commits a crime and gets caught, he is labeled as a criminal and loses his image as an honorable businessman. The act of committing economic crime has less to do with him being greedy than it has to do with keeping his social status, standard of life, and dignity. 39 references.