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Show HOTEL KLEPTOMANIA Women Principal Offenders Annual Cost of Loot Heavy. It is tho fashion in our modern hotels ho-tels to write off $10,000 a year as the loss for silverware and china taken by i guests in the course of. twelve months. Many persons will havo souvenirs of their vista to New York, and take spoons, knives, forks and any sort of small silverware they can slip in their fiockets. The craze has grown so that he big hotel men now purchase cheap hardware for the use of transient guests, but the figures of loss run up in three of the cit3' hotels to the $20,-000 $20,-000 mark. The women are blamed for this sort of theft and tho proof seems to bo against them. Probabl' the best know hotel man in the city said to me: "We know it is tho women who take the stuff, and many of them are New Yorkers. When there is a big diunor at the hotel, attended at-tended by women as well as men, wo use a special set of spoons and other tableware made at little cost and stamped with tho name of our hotel. We lose one-third of them, but the cost of late years is figured in the dinner din-ner at so much por plate. The spoons don't cost us 6 cents each and are not much to look nt after one night's use. Tho knives and forks are worth less than 15 cents. When we have a dinner exclusively for men, wo put good plate on the table and don't loose 2 per cent of it. This good table servico is cut out at tho mixed dinners. Our greatest loss is in the transient out-of-town trade. One-half the women wom-en must have a souvenir of the St. Regis, the Waldorf or ho Holland house. They seem to think a trip to New York is a failure inless they have a few pieces to show. Many women chango about at tho hotels, so as to have a collection of odd pieces. They don't mind showing their' country friends tho loot they have won in New York. It is not regardod as theft, but as a smart fad, and I have yet to hear of one woman denouncing the practice. On the ocean steamship this souvenir business has grown out of bounds. On one trip of a New York liner to this side one-half the butter plates and one-third one-third of the spoons were out of service before Sandy Hook was reached," New York Press. |