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Waitress Fired For Complaining About Tip On Facebook 49

Posted by samzenpus from the adjust-your-tip-status dept.
22-year-old Ashley Johnson lost her job after she complained about a poor tip on Facebook. She felt the $5 tip from a couple who had sat in her section for 3 hours was a joke, and wrote about it on the social networking site. From the article: "Brixx officials told Johnson a couple of days later that she was being fired because she violated a company policy banning workers from speaking disparagingly about customers and casting the restaurant in a bad light on a social network." Silly Ashley, as everyone who has worked in a restaurant can tell you, complaining on Facebook isn't the answer. If you want to get back at bad customers you overcharge them, or put something in their food.

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Waitress Fired For Complaining About Tip On Facebook More

Waitress Fired For Complaining About Tip On Facebook

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  • That is stupid enough to forget that they have people from work on their facebook and then gets fired over a post.

    • Yea people just don't get it. Posting on Facebook is actually worse then just bitching to your friends at the bar after work. What is shocking is that people are actually surprised when they don't get the job or are terminated over something they said on Facebook or twitter or whatever.

  • Boohoo (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SeNtM ( 965176 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2010 @11:54PM (#32260858) Homepage
    Boohoo. I was in a restaurant for a few hours recently, the waitress forgot our drink order twice (each time taking 15-20 minutes), gave our dinner order to another couple (incidently, it was a sushi place and the couple was ignorant to what they were eating), and then didn't bother to apologize or tell us we would be waiting (thirsty) for another 30 minutes. She was only waiting on 4 other tables. I made it a point to sit at the table till after she picked up the receipt so I could see her face when she looked at the $1 tip on a $90 check.

    I was in good company so the wait didn't really bother me. But when the service is bad the tip is how you show it. People feel so entitled to getting money without doing the work to deserve it.

    On the reverse side of the coin, when a waitress does well, I don't hesitate to leave 25%...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by treff89 ( 874098 )

      Why on earth did you leave her a tip at all?

      I realise that there is a difference between America and Australia when it comes to restaurant practices, but I am constantly amazed at just how ingrained the concept of tipping is in your culture, even if people do not deserve it.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by SeNtM ( 965176 )
        Because it is so ingrained. If I left nothing, I would appear like a tourist (I am in Orlando after all). By leaving a single dollar, I believe I sent her a message.

        Australia is an entirely different animal, especially in regard to minimum wage (I believe you call it fair-pay). The rate exchange for AUD/USD is something like 1:0.85. And after conversion, your minimum-wage (14.31AUD) is over twice that of the US (7.25USD).

        However, this US minimum-wage requirements don't apply to "tipped" employees. T

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by treff89 ( 874098 )

          Thanks, very informative. The More You Know!

        • What's worse about the fast food places is the cashiers get the regular minimum wage while collecting tips.

          That being, said I'm from Canada. I don't know when it started, but at some point in time we started tipping at the drive through. Now if you don't what to look like a jerk you have to leave something because everyone else does.

          It's only polite, Eh!

          • Fast food restaurant employees in the US do not, to my knowledge, expect tips. Of course, I think I've been to a fast food restaurant twice in the past year, so maybe I've just never noticed it.

            • I recently drove back from North Carolina, there are places where they have jars or cups marked for tips on the counter.

              It's also a common practice in Canada... Except at McDonalds, for some reason they're not allowed to accept tips.
              • McDonalds has their own children's charity that they put out boxes for instead of a "tip" jar. They would rather have your spare change go to that.

        • You can find tip jars at fast-food restaurants, coffee shops...I think I even remember seeing one at a gas-station recently.

          Yes, this drives me crazy as well. And generally it's not so much about a "tip" as a place for people to throw coins they don't want to carry.

          If I'm at a coffee shop, the only person who might be worthy of a tip might be the barista (if anyone), not the cashier (who sometimes does nothing except hit buttons and give change). But the tip jars are always located by the cash register. Why? They just want people to drop their change in... it has nothing to do with "tipping" in the normal context, since it

        • "By leaving a single dollar, I believe I sent her a message."

          Yes, the message is 'I'm a boob.' Proper tip etiquette is to leave nothing if the service was poor. Period. Not leaving a tip is touristy? Since when??? If you get poor restaurant service leave nothing, that's message enough.

      • Quite simply there's two parts to fix. If you are gonna stop tipping then waiters/waitresses need to get paid a fair wage. Also, it's kind of like a performance based thing. For instance, you have two people waiting tables. One does an amazing job and one is slacking and being rude to the customers. It is pretty much impossible for a manager to focus their attention on the waitstaff when running a restaurant. So, tipping is a good incentive for the waitstaff not to be pleasant and timely with the customers.

      • Why on earth did you leave her a tip at all?

        If you don't leave a tip, the waitress might think you forgot, or maybe that you left cash on the table for her and someone else swiped it. Leaving a tiny tip says, "yes, I remembered - you just don't deserve more than this."

        I'm a great tipper, to the point that the wait staff at a certain local restaurant argues about who gets my wife and me. I've seen a fist-pump and "YES!" when the winner didn't know we were watching. I'm willing and ready to leave a $0.04 tip when appropriate, though.

      • Tipping in restaurants is traditional in America to the point where waitstaff actually make a significant portion (even the majority) of their income from the tips. The minimum wage for waitstaff who get tips in the US is set significantly lower than the minimum wage for the rest of the working population.

        Leaving a very tiny tip (a penny is more traditional than a dollar) shows that you didn't forget about the tip, but you put some thought into choosing an amount that really expressed your feelings on the

      • People have pointed out how the minimum wage is especially low for tippable employees. Well, there's also the fact that it's not just the server. The cooks, bartender, and house might all get a cut of the tip. Depending on the exact splitting rules, a person can actually make negative money to wait on your table if you're stingy like that.

    • the $1 tip on a $90 check.

      That's about $2 too much.
      You're not obliged to pay what they put on the bill - the bill is just a starting point for negotiation with the business. As long as you don't *leave* until the negotiation has come to a mutually acceptable end.

      The manager is quite likely to accept the $89 offered - he really doesn't want to be negotiating with a clearly disgruntled customer in front of all the other customers.

      What happens to the waitress is her lookout. If for some reason you feel guilty,

      • Paying short and getting my waitress sacked for "stealing" is pretty low.

        • Paying short doesn't get the waitress fired for stealing, it comes out of their paycheck. So, when people do a Chew&Screw for 60 bucks, you basically stole 60 bucks from the waitress, not the restaurant.

          Least, thats the way it works in Canada.

        • Paying short and getting my waitress sacked for "stealing" is pretty low.

          That's not what GP was suggesting. See this:

          As long as you don't *leave* until the negotiation has come to a mutually acceptable end.

          In other words, he was suggesting that you complain and say you didn't get acceptable service, and therefore you think you shouldn't have to pay full price... and if the manager has to get involved, so be it.

          I've eaten at restaurants a few times where I've had things go really wrong, but waitstaff or managers make up for it. For example, once I was having drinks with some people, and it turned into dinner. We all started ordering stuff, but for some reason th

          • No, that's exactly what the GP was suggesting:

            "What happens to the waitress is her lookout. If for some reason you feel guilty, you can always donate the missing dollar to the business so that there are no ground for her to get the sack that night."

            • No, that's exactly what the GP was suggesting:

              No, that's exactly what you're reading into what I wrote, not what I was meaning.
              I was, of course, assuming that you were writing the value of the "tip" into the space for it on the bill, which is the norm here. Whether it's the norm in your country, and whether your tax authorities allow the waitresses (tipped staff in general) so much leeway to dodge tax, I don't know. Different taxmen, different regulations.
              So, what the waitress puts in the till is (in prec

      • Making somebody pay for the honour of serving you is dickish, even if they did a poor job. It's not "her lookout" anymore if you're deliberately taking from her to prove your point. If you pull a stunt like this, you better have been physically hurt by the server.

    • incidently, it was a sushi place and the couple was ignorant to what they were eating

      Ignorant plebs. That's what they get for not ordering in Japanese, or better yet, Klingon.

  • One things that's cool about being in Japan is you don't have to tip. Of course, there's a downside. Even when a restaurant makes a mistake, you will *NEVER* get comped. This was about 10 years ago, but I was eating and a cockroach appeared on the table. No joke. The waitress was mortified and came over and immediately killed the roach and cleaned the table. I then had to pay full price for my meal. Hello? A roach shows up on the table and I still pay? They should have paid ME! Other than that, you don't
    • You've been living abroad for ten years and yet you *still* expect the host culture to imitate the one that you left? Let me guess, you don't speak Japanese despite living there for so long...I know the type...
      • Actually, I not only speak the language, I have a degree in it. :) Relax man, I meant it tongue in cheek.
        • Sorry. In my experience, foreigners who use Japanese names on English sites tend to be the worst sort of douchebag.
          • Hey, I didn't claim I wasn't a douchebag. :) I know what you mean, though. I used to bitch and moan about being here a long time ago. Got over it. I guess I grew up.
  • That's one reason I like to eat out at fancier restaurants. Yes it costs more, but the wait service pays a lot more attention to you, the food is generally better, and god forbid if a mistake is made you'll be taken care of. For instance, in a local chain tex-mex place (and tex-mex is never THAT fancy), my girlfriend and I discovered a rubber band in our salsa. We didn't want to make a big deal out of it, and weren't all that grossed out (hey, I'd rather find that than hair). We just wanted a new bowl of s

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