h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A few weeks ago I was at a local bar. A friend works there and she was getting ready to clock out, so she was sorting out her receipts. She showed me one on which the customer had given her a $1 tip on a $50 bill. At regular rates, a $50 bill should have elicited a tip of somewhere around $8 - $10, but that wasn't what made us all (there were other people at the table including more servers who were already off work) do one or more of

The customer had written a bible verse on the receipt. I don't recall what it said exactly, just that it was something about tithing and it was condescending.

This morning I read this http://consumerist.com/2013/01/31/waitress-who-posted-no-tip-receipt-from-pastor-customer-fired-from-job/ and it made me so angry that I broke my four-year duck and tweeted something.

Most of you are very probably well aware that two of the things which make me mad as hell are religion and over zealous customer service. This story brings them together in a perfect storm of bursting Gosho's blood vessels

Firstly, let me say here that the waitress in question made the mistake of leaving the signature in plain view. That was a dumb thing to do for reasons of identity theft, security and privacy concerns. She says she didn't think anyone would be able to read it. That was naive, since she'd just posted it on teh interwebz, and anything on teh interwebz can and will go viral.

Secondly, I'm confused about the tipping in this instance. The customer wouldn't have needed to offer a tip anyway because there was an automatic 18% gratuity on parties over a certain number of people, and this one was, so as far as I can make (maybe I'm missing something), no-one got stiffed, unless the restaurant is one of those that doesn't always pass on those gratuities in full, or at all. Yeah, that happens more than you'd think.

“All throughout the comment thread on the Reddit post, I withheld any identifying information,” Chelsea explains, adding that she provided an inaccurate physical description of the customer just to throw people off."
I'm not sure why she needed to add any physical description at all.

"I had no intention of starting a witch hunt or hurting anyone — I just wanted to share a picture I found interesting."
Again, very naive. The internet doesn't play by the rules your parents taught you when you were a child, about treating people with civility and having good manners, and no matter what your intentions might be, when you post anything online whether it be words, images, art, anything, it will assume a life of its own.

"Some time on Wednesday, Chelsea says the customer who had left the receipt contacted her Applebee’s location, demanding that everyone be fired, from the servers involved to the managers."
Now here's where the Streisand effect takes hold. If that person had kept quiet there's every chance the story would have been forgotten within a matter of days and it'd be as if it had never happened. But no, they got all bent out of shape and pulled the old "I'm going to get you fired" trick

"We make $3.50 an hour"
I honestly wonder how many people who've never worked in the service industry know this? Oh, and $3.50 is $1.25 more than you'd get if you worked in Texas. While it's true that some people in certain bars and restaurants can make a lot of money waiting tables or tending bar, that's not the case for the majority, especially when you're starting out because you don't get the good shifts straight away.

Paying waiters and bartenders a pittance and having them make their money off tips is bad system and it should be done away with, but it's what we've got right now (unless you work here http://www.blackstar.coop/ where there's no tipping and workers are paid a living wage) and if you protest against it by not leaving a tip you're depriving someone of their hard (and honestly) earned wages, so unless you got crappy service, leave a good tip.

So the waitress got fired. She has to take partial responsibility for that because, although she says she went out of her way to make it impossible to identify the incident, she left the signature visible on the receipt. It's impossible to say whether or not the customer would have got wind of it had the signature not been there, but either way, once again a business has backed down in front of an arrogant customer. Once again a business has sided with a customer instead of an employee. Once again a business has bent over, dropped its trousers and said "Here's my fundament, please do what you want with it" to the great god customer.

I have a friend who was fired from his job simply because of a bad review on Yelp. It didn't matter that the reviewer had exaggerated what happened, the company fired him. He'd been there for five years with hardly a blemish on his record - not bad when you hear some of the stories he had to tell (he worked at the box office) about the sheer arrogance, ignorance and downright... the phrase 'You're not on this planet, are you?' can be applied to so many people when they wear the role of customer. I honestly wonder if that's how they are in other areas of their life, if they treat other people that way and if they know they're doing it. I have to conclude that they must be in some kind of a trance because no-one could be that preposterous and disconnected, often to point of raving, without being in need of serious psychiatric evaluation, perhaps incarceration.

I'm so sick and tired of hearing stories like this. I'm so sick and tired of seeing customers behave in what can only (and at best) be described as irrational, childish and immature ways, only to be lavished with apologies, gifts and freebies while the employee who had to deal with it gets written up, or worse, because most companies who have the general public as customers have neither a spine nor a pair of spherical objects.

Grow some! Don't you know anything about human nature? When a behaviour is rewarded it's reinforced. Reinforce it enough times and it becomes an expectation. Do it a few times more and it becomes a demand. Once people start demanding something they've already begun to see it as a right. Perhaps if you start standing up to these idiots you might actually win over some people like me. Would you rather have a clientèle of angry, mindless and unstable people, or people who treat your employees with respect and civility?

I read about this incident. Your comments are spot on.

It's insane that one negative remark carries more weight than a thousand positive ones.

I think insanity is the basis of most customer service these days Hyp

That waitress did get stiffed. The pastor tried to circumvent the automatic tip for large groups by requesting separate checks, even though the pastor paid all of the bills. However, the computer system was able to circumvent the circumvention and apply 18% tip to each check. The image of the check circulated on the Internet shows the pre-printed gratuity crossed out and the total written in for the pre-tip amount.

I have words to describe that pastor, but then I'd have to Yikes myself.

Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification, Witty.