A dish served cold

After multiplying exponentially and splitting everything, these jerkfaces decided that a $3.00 tip was perfectly acceptable. When they asked if there was enough for a tip I replied with "Well, you left me 3 on 500, so I actually paid to serve you. Thanks a lot! They were insulted but I didn't give a rat's ass! They complained to my manager about my not splitting their bills, and he replied, "Well, you shared everything, what do you expect? She's not Rainman!"...

-- An anonymous waitress at a restaurant in Alberta

Bitter Waitress is a site where those in the food service industry bite back. The Shitty Tipper Database contains a wealth of stories on tight-fisted eaters. There are some celebrity names to be found, but they may have to be taken with a grain of salt. There's no verification of the stories, allowing some that may seem a little unlikely. What's more interesting are the regular horror stories, like this one:

The manager's wife comes in to eat every so often with 5-6 of her friends. The time I had to wait on her, there were 7 of them total. They were all drinking and being obnoxious. I took great care of them, as her manager husband was on duty that night, and told me to make sure she was happy. They were one of those tables where only 1-2 of them would order a drink at a time, but by the time you got back to the table with the drinks, another 1-2 of them needed another drink. They had appetizers, salads, entrees and shared a couple desserts as well as booze booze booze, and pretty much ran me ragged. At one point, when the manager told them I was going to school for music, they even asked me to sing for them, which of course I did. I am supposed to keep them happy, right? So they're finally ready to leave after taking up one of my tables for almost 3 hours, and the manager gives the whole table his 50% discount on their original $256 tab, which brought it down to a very affordable $128 for 7 people. They all threw in some cash, and then left, giving me a glowing recommendation to the manager. When I picked up the cash, they'd only left $145!!! The manager came up to me later and said, "So how did they treat you?" I told him what they'd left, and he just shook his head and said, "They could have treated you better" and walked away. The next time she came in, I got very busy with my other tables. I refuse to wait on her again.

It's always important to remember there's a person serving you, and that you're not living in 17th century France.

(via small dead animals)

Posted by Bruce Gottfred at July 28, 2005 02:39 PM | TrackBack