Millennial Fired For Tweet
theawl.com
theawl.com
When I order delivery, I always tip generously because somebody actually got in their car or bike and came to my house with food. That's extra effort in my book. Same goes for when I eat in and have a waiter or waitress waiting on me, refilling my water, etc.
Certainly $170 is a large grilled cheese order, but more generally, I'm asking if it's expected to tip when you are not getting service beyond having your food handed to you.
I've had $100+ orders from Chick-filla before, but I don't think I need to leave a tip for those...
The exception to this is that I tip bartenders when I am standing at the bar/counter. I attribute this to my looser attitude towards tipping while drinking, since I absolutely never tip baristas in otherwise identical situations. This sort of tipping isn't hard and fast for me though; one of the places I use to drink was a "pub" inside of a Wholefoods (the situation was constructed to get around state laws about selling beer. A building inside of a building with it's own cash registers, beer on tap, some seating and bar nuts, etc). You would walk to the walk-in fridge to get your own beer then walk it over to the counter to pay, so I never tipped there.
It gets trickier here in the future because if the business is using Square and you pay with a card there's always a tip solicitation screen before the signature screen. This has caused the unintended effect of me always paying for my third wave coffee in cash.
Perhaps this is dysfunctional of me, but if you bug me about a tip, I'm definitely not leaving you one (that hasn't happened yet though).
That said, I don't think anybody deserves to lose their job over a tweet, given what happened here. However, if this guy's boss asked him to apologize and he refused (which sounds like it would have happened), then by all means, open fire.
I would immediately call up the restaurant and complain if their employee calls me out for not tipping enough.
The fact that this is on Twitter has nothing to do with it (nor does their being a "millenial", but that's another matter), they could just as well have shamed their customer on any number of platforms online or offline and the result would have and should have been exactly the same.
This one didn't.
Every few weeks, we have a story about someone who lost their job because of something they said on Twitter or Facebook. Has everyone already forgotten "Adria Richards got fired over Twitter comment" story that ran a few months ago?
The bigger issue is that if you are employed, you represent the company you work for and shaming customers via Twitter is never appropriate.
If I'm a customer and I hear this, this is what I could be thinking:
1. Jeez, that's not very nice.
2. Wait, I don't tip when I order from any food trucks. Am I gonna get called out tomorrow for it?
3. I'm going to start bringing my lunch.
Especially since this is an industry where the cost of replacing a PTE is especially low, it doesn't seem like the owner did anything wrong besides protect his revenue. He didn't even try and coax an apology out of the guy.
"If social media is going to be used in one way to monitor worker productivity, why can it not also be used to advocate for a more civil exchange between worker and consumer?"
... right, because putting things up in public on the internet encourages "civil exchange".
Not saying that it's unreasonable to advocate whatever position you like, but that is an incredibly silly justification.
Not only did he make the mistake of shaming a customer online, a poor customer service practice in and of itself, but he went on to repeat that same mistake by writing an entirely unapologetic article about it.
Why would I want to hire someone that doesn't know how to bite his tongue? He seemingly lacks any of the necessary social mores for interacting with even moderately challenging customers, a skill I've seen better mastered in your average drive-through window.
It's not a fear of saying the wrong thing and getting fired... it's the fear of saying just about anything at all with such a huge megaphone attached to your mouth (and the fact that your shouting will be recorded forever.)
HN comments are about the closest I'm generally willing to go to that sort of ultra-public commenting, and even then I'm generally pretty careful. Some people seem very cavalier about it.
I limit my social networking to other planets entirely.
Not sure why he thinks he is entitled to a tip, a tip is voluntary. It is a gift.
I can't help but feel that he should have just taken this as a learning experience and shut up. At least he shares his name with a comedian so potential employers may not discover that he likes to publicly shame customers...
Greatest Generation -> Baby Boomers -> Gen X -> millennial (f.k.a. Gen Y)
If you set generation length at 20 years, and the anchor point of 1946 as the beginning of the baby boomers, you get a definition of millennial of 1986-2006. That is about right IMO for people who grew up with pervasive internet.
No one knows what the 2006-2026 generation will be called, the oldest of them are barely out of elementary school.
1. Yes, you should tip at a coffee shop/food truck/counter restaurant if the staff are slammed–especially so if you're the reason they are slammed. These employees are likely underpaid and the people at Glass, Lewis & Co probably make 5-10x what this dude makes. I don't think a 15-20% tip is necessary, but some type of tip is appropriate IMO.
2. While the tweet was a mistake (he admitted so in a round-about way), I don't think he should have been fired and Glass Lewis & Co's overreaction just backs up my opinion (established by them not tipping) that they're jerks.
3. This guy used the same Internet to "shame" a customer that people use to give 1-star Yelp reviews for the most ridiculous reasons. The door swings both ways. For all we know, GLC's $170 caused bad reviews by other customers who had to wait.
I hate it when customers belittle my customer service employees in help tickets and I will jump in and tell them to back off at times. Granted, none of my employees have tweeted about a jerk customer–but even if they did, I wouldn't fire them (I would definitely apologize and try to make it right).
Second of all, "standing up for yourself" would be verbally nudging the customers as to whether they wanted to tip or not, as he did. Publicly tweet-shaming them is, in my opinion, something else entirely, and not worthy of receiving any kind of support from the owner.
After McDonalds, you will get on Twitter and complain loudly about the food after work.
But, was the employee expecting to make 20% tip on a $170 order? Does one normally tip more than $1 at a food truck, if at all?
Was the business owner expecting to post big profits for the day and not compensate the worker a bit more for that day?
At the end of the day, the worker may have a right to be upset watching everyone greatly profit but himself.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that no, the owner was not going to share his extra revenue with his minimum wage employees.
And to answer your third question, I'm quite sure the business owner would not be doing any profit sharing.
* the owner to constructively handle issues like this (maybe like educating the 'offender') * the 'offender' to learn from his mistake and understand it in a broader context
All we have here is action: twitter-shame non-tipper; result: fired. Very short-sighted.
As far as the story itself goes - tipping is optional (even for large/huge orders), so the guy was in the wrong to begin with.
Unfortunately, it's a tip -- and there's no obligation for someone to tip unless they feel it's deserved, especially if there's no waiter or delivery involved.
I do tip non-servers sometimes, but I do it for exceptional service in an attempt to reward it. Plus, it makes me feel good.