Customer Tells Waitress She Can Keep The Change If She Smiles At Him — 'I Stared At Him Dead In The Face'
It's time we stop making these inappropriate comments to women.
Inside Creative House / Shutterstock / Reddit It’s one of the most infuriating comments a woman can receive from a man: “You should smile more” or “Give me a smile.”
Having a customer making the same remark toward you while working is no different. One male customer told a waitress to smile at him if she wanted to keep her change, and she handled it ruthlessly.
The waitress stared at the man ‘dead in the face’ after he told her to ‘give me a smile’ if she wanted to keep the change.
Sharing her story to the subreddit, r/TalesFromYourServer, the waitress vented about how frustrating it is when customers demand that she smile more while on the job.
“I know this is common but being told by customers to smile while I’m working is so annoying,” she wrote. The waitress argues that she does smile when it is appropriate.
“I DO smile when I greet customers, take food/drink orders, or sometimes in casual conversation,” she reveals. “I do NOT need to be grinning from ear to ear when I’m pouring a beer or bussing a table, I would look like a maniac!!”
While the waitress admits that she does tend to have an “RBF” (resting b–--h face), and will sometimes smile to lighten the atmosphere, it is difficult to continue smiling after a long and exhausting shift dealing with unruly customers.
Photo: Reddit
She adds that it is even “more insulting” when a female customer instructs her to smile than when a male customer does. “I expect it from men, and women know how irritating it is for some dude to tell you ‘smile, honey.’”
One evening while she was working, the waitress served a man a beer and asked him if he needed change.
"He said, ‘You can keep it if you give me a smile,’” the waitress wrote.
At her breaking point, she shared that instead of smiling at the man she “stared at him dead in the face, RBF in full force,” before placing his change in front of him and walking away.
Photo: Nicoleta Ionescu / Shutterstock
Redditors praised the waitress for her response to the man’s uncalled for comment.
“You are not a clown performing in a circus. Tell them you have more important things to do than pretending to be a marionette,” one user commented.
“May he never forget the lesson he got that night,” another user wrote of the man.
Other women shared their own stories about men telling them to ‘smile more.’
“A man in a hallway once said 'smile, it can’t be that bad' to me as I walked past. I said, ‘Actually my friend just got the call that her mom died so…’ and walked past. Idiot,” one user revealed.
“I worked at a dive bar that offered a great deal of latitude with guest interactions. So I would get that ‘You should smile more often!' My go-to response was, ‘You should mind your own f–--ing business more often,” another user wrote.
It just goes to show you that we are never truly aware of someone’s reason for not smiling and should really find better things to comment on.
Megan Quinn is a writer at YourTango who covers entertainment and news, self, love, and relationships.