Arkansas waitress fired after getting $4,400 tip | Hacker News Reader

Arkansas waitress fired after getting $4,400 tip

washingtonpost.com

32 points0xedb82 comments

Moral of the story: Do your excessive tips in cash without cringy fanfare.

Its humans in a barrel at the bottom, they’ll always pull each other down if you provide transparency.

You must literally only know and experience truly awful human beings, or! You might be one.

People that give big payments for their own content creation are truly awful human beings. This should have been a normal tip that just happened to be a few magnitudes larger than others.

Yah but CEOs get highly publicized bonuses to reward them for 'excellence' despite it being the company behind them making the actual products. Why should a waitress have to take money under the table to keep her explicitly customer-granted bonus, when CEOs get to brag about it and it's much harder to draw a link between those bonus funds and a direct service activity?

Those on the bottom of the totem pole need the recognition, esteem, and resume building much more than the CEOs.

I don't think it's the CEOs that are publicizing their bonuses. It's the anti-business media and political circus mainly.

No doubt those bonuses would be secret if they could be. Fortunately they are required to be transparent, so the only option is to brag about how well-deserved they are.

How is that anti-business?

Exactly.

On other hand, the msn article is so badly written, I'm not sure I understand exactly what happened in this case.

If it was the company behind giving the waittress a highly publicized tip, then there would be a discussion to be had here. As it stands, there is no similarity for this heartfelt dystopia.

Power.

The fanfare is the point here--film the ecstatic waitress. Tipping the kitchen staff could have happened instead, specifically did not.

US tipping culture is just awful. For anyone that comes with „yeah but you can show appreciation towards the servers“. When was the last time you tipped your plumber, mechanic, cashier, programmer, nurse or lawyer?

I live in Europe and I remember all the people I've tipped, which isn't many, because they went above and beyond to serve a customer. US-style peer pressured tipping is ridiculous and worse is people defending the practice. Just pay your damn employees better.

Oh man, wait till you hear the rationale from workers that are recipients of tips! You almost want to sympathize and be convinced (or maybe you want to be intimate with the server that you're on a date with, which incentivizes being supportive)

And then you realize they aren't educated enough to really have an objective opinion about the economics behind their predicament

I've heard people saying to tip as high as 40% and not to go out to eat if you can't do that! haha, what a rip off, but then it illuminates how any percentage is just as arbitrary.

Broken system that should be fixed. Also, many states do pay their wait staff a real wage but the consumer doesn't get to tell the difference, and is peer pressured into an amorphous American tipping culture.

All the time?

I don't tip every person I hire for every job, but if they go above and beyond somehow, I thank them for it in the form of a little extra cash or a gift card.

Just recently, I hired a young man to rebuild my front porch, he did a great job and got it done fast, so I padded out his check out by 10%.

When my father was dying of alzheimer's, we made a point of giving $100 gift cards during the holiday to the 3 or 4 nurses who treated him like a person instead of a job.

This is definitely cultural but also personal issue. I regularly tip cashiers, nurses (usually in the form of chocolate or some small gift), car mechanic, hair dresser, programmers (as in monthly donations to FLOSS) etc.

> After getting the tip, however, Brandt said her manager told her that she and the other servers who worked the party couldn’t keep all of it. Instead, they would have to split it among the bartenders, cooks and food runners, something that had never happened before, Brandt said. Normally, 7 percent of a server’s food-and-beverage sales at Oven & Tap are automatically deducted from their paychecks to pay those people, while tips are left untouched, her lawyer, Bill Horton, told The Washington Post.

I could understand the difficulty in handling this as a manager. Sure the other staff should be happy for the waiters receiving the tip, but in actuality there would likely be hostility among the rest of the staff that's likely paid less and have harder jobs.

She ended up being fired for going back to the person who gave the tip and telling him she was unable to keep it. Firing her was an over-reaction, but a restaurant should have a policy where the waiters should not be allowed to discuss tips with customers. It would avoid confronting customers about tip amounts or being pushy.

My understanding based on a previous discussion of tips is it's actually the opposite: everyone else is paid better, and that's why splitting tips with them is so contentious.

Their expected tips are considered when their fixed comp is set. They still get paid more than line cook or bus boys and I would argue have easier jobs for the most part.

However this breaks down if someone drops a huge tip on them. I could understand the other workers being resentful.

I very much enjoy Bentonville for mountain biking. I was just there Friday because there was a nice 72 degree day.

Oven and Tap _was_ one my favorite restaurants. The food _was_ amazing and it is a nice classy atmosphere, but until they apologize for taking legal action against a waitress for telling the truth, I'll be voting with my dollar.

The restaurant is so in the wrong here. They want it both ways: to short change their waiters by deducting 7% of their wage from their paychecks, and to seize tips. Unfortunately this is common practice, but it needs to be eliminated completely.

  “ Normally, 7 percent of a server’s food-and-beverage sales at Oven & Tap are automatically deducted out of their paychecks to pay those people, while tips are left untouched, her lawyer”

This is nuts, this can’t be normal. They deduct wages based on sales? So sell more, get paid less!?

Edit: As someone outside the US (in the UK) it’s seeing stuff like this that makes me realise how the “gig culture” type statups took off over there and have spread around the world. This would literally not be legal in the UK.

Or if you don't get tipped, the server still has to pay the 7% of sales. So it sounds like the restaurant was trying to shove all the risk on to the server and also take the upside of the generous tip.

Only if tips average less than 7 percent.

If someone doesn’t tip (for any reason, forgot/foreign/unknowledgable) the server themselves pays for 7% of the meal… call me crazy but that shouldn't be legal.

It seems like a reasonable compromise to share tips with the back of the house, without the effort and degredation involved in tracking exactly who tipped how much to whom. Nothing's perfect.

Well take the 7% from the tips not the wage then.

Then you're back to counting the tips. You add labor all around, and have to make sure that the wait staff isn't holding back, degrading everyone.

in all industry I have worked, including being a waiter in europe, I have never seen people treat/talk about workers this way.

what a low level of trust

Then just get rid of tips, add 20% to your prices, pay your staff properly and manage them. If they perform badly train them better, promote and give pay rises to the best staff. If you really wanted to have a bonus system based on customer feedback. You know, the way normal business work.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/restaurant-owners-comm...

As if they are going to come out and say, yeah we fire her because of the tipping event.

Even if they don't admit to themselves, that probably was the reason of the firing, or some quarrel about it, we humans are petty.

Management told her she had to share the tips with other staff, the tippers insisted it was for her alone, managers handling brought bad juju. As a former cook, this is all hard to take.

I think this is nuts. First you need tips to survive if you work in restaurants because the owners pay too little, then the owners take the tips and distribute them around. What's the next level? Make tipping mandatory? May as well put it in the price.

Just ban tipping and pay the employees a fair wage. Will be better and less stressful for all parties. Customers, employees and owners.

> What's the next level? Make tipping mandatory? May as well put it in the price.

It’s called “automatic gratuity” and it definitely exists.

That’s not the suggestion though as that is still hiding the charge and not folding it into the price on the menus. If “automatic gratuity” is 20% just put prices up by 20%!

This is not as easy as you think.

I have met some wait staff that has gone to school for hospitality and while they make shit pay, I have had friends easily making about $2000 a week and they don't want to go to a wage system.

I have never waited, but I get the point, if you do good you can make good cash. It's the same with comission jobs.

Where tips suck is if you are at a dead place, cheap place, or you are a lazy shitty waiter.

Good service gets good tips. If you are on your phone making TikToks when you're supposed to be taking an order, and you smell like an ashtray every time you come to the table, that is why you have shit tips, and it's the same reason no one would hire you at some sort of normal wage.

Some people believe they are not paid for their worth, but it's actually heartbreaking to think how many people will flat out say NO to a job that's an actual career.

It's like when Uber drivers get upset that they don't get full benefits but lose their shit when you mention spending 5 hours a week driving around isn't really a job.

> Good service gets good tips.

This makes intuitive sense but empirically is simply not true. Tipping is far more correlated with sex and race discrimination than individual performance.

> if you do good you can make good cash

Let me fix that for you: "if you look good (young/sexy etc) you can make good cash"

I'm a below average looking male and I worked in the restaurant industry before tech, both in the kitchen and front of house (serving, tending bar, management). When I served, I'd walk away from an average evening with a few hundred dollars in cash. I'm sure it's easier if you're attractive and flirty, but it's also possible to make good money by being professional.

People who have never had a job before don't want to believe you.

I've tipped beautiful women like I have tipped old men. If you can do your job then you get a tip.

Seems like people do a lot of projecting.

It's crazy to think all patrons are pervert men and all wait staff are sexy naive little girls.

It's ok to just admit you have never been to a restaurant, it's easier than sounding like some sort of Jack ass.

I don't understand what one has to do with the other. The owners should not rely on workers being able to receive tips in the first place. Tipping is not something involving the owner, as this is (except when contractually clarified) a direct transaction between customer and waiting staff.

To put it in a different context: I think I should pay the car rental shop less, because I know they have lots of money.

They would laugh at me.

So should the waiting staff.

Visit employee-owned restaurants more often. In San Francisco, there's Zazie and Arizmendi Bakery, they don't take tips.

If you eliminate tipping and pay the employees a fair wage then you will need to raise your prices in order to do so. Which means you are wrapping what was the tip into the menu price and in essence making tipping mandatory.

That was the point, yes. On top of that it would be fairer, because everybody will pay their share of the employees' wage. Freeloading cheap food, made possible by other people's tips would no longer be possible.

Tipping incentivises so many bad things, from these power dynamics where one benevolent human gets to look good and the receiver of alms is tugging their forelock in gratitude, to piss-poor wages and unequal distribution of money to those working, to 20% of turnover being completely off the books, and on top of that making a big fucking deal about a tip, the irony of rewarding a server while being self-serving!

All the rolling eyes I can muster while recoiling from this postmodern-Dickensian paradise.

> the restaurant normally takes a cut of servers’ credit card tips to divvy among other employees

This is the problem.

Management should not handle tips -- it should be done among the workers themselves. Some places split the tips with the back staff e.g. kitchen and porters.

Once management have collected the tips -- there is too much incentive to keep some of it. Staff will not know how much the tip "pool" is. The transparency is lost and thus trust or accountability.

"I wanted to do good, but I did not want to make noise, because I felt noise does not do good" I once read.

So the owner is seen as evil, the woman is fired, the co-workers are destabilized by their own unluckiness and the termination of their colleague...

I do not understand this fallacy to make a large tip and to advertise it: noise in the restaurant, video to the rest of the world... just to show off!

Just when I thought the antiquated concept of tipping couldn't get any worse. Where there's a bill, there's a tip to pay.

Can someone do the archive.is needful?

https://archive.md/7r31r

Announcing that you're gonna tip big is just baiting others to witness your wealth. Do it quietly and get on with it.

I think the person made the $4,400 tip didn't understand that the waitress was not the only one served them, not even the one contributed the most of the labor. Just imagine how other workers would think to let the the waitress alone take out the big tip.

The thing is, in the USA, there is a minimum wage, and waiters specifically are allowed to receive a wage much lower than the normal minimum because they're expected to subsist off tips. Other non-tipped restaurant employees get paid an actual wage for their labor. So if the waitress received a windfall, it's only fair that she get to keep it and not be forced to share with the other fully compensated staff.

What you said has nothing to do with what I said.

Given the article says the customer explicitly called the restaurant to check their tipping policy in advance; and to ensure their favourite server would be waiting on them that evening, it seems pretty clear that's not the case.

What you said has nothing to do with what I said. Server is not the only one serves the party, lots of other workers work behind to make it happen.

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