Couple Who Received Bad Service At A Restaurant Were Chased To Their Car For Not Leaving A Tip
Not tipping may go against etiquette, but was it really necessary to chase them to their car?
BearFotos | Shutterstock While many restaurant workers would be upset about not receiving a tip, few would chase their patrons to their car, demanding one. Yet that's exactly what one server did.
A couple decided not to leave a tip because their service was so bad, and the server was not having it.
A couple chose not to leave a tip because of poor service and were chased to their car by their server.
"My girlfriend and I decided to go to a local restaurant we had never been to before," the man wrote on Reddit. They were greeted as usual, but once they were seated, service was practically nonexistent.
“We [didn't] get approached with a menu or even offered a drink for 30 minutes,” he wrote. "We thought they might have forgotten about us."
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When they finally had the chance to order, they thought the service would improve. It didn’t.
“Same story again, no drinks, no food, and no one checking on us for at least another half hour,” he said, adding that no one apologized for the long wait time.
To top it all off, the food wasn’t even that good — "average for how expensive it [was],” he explained. “Whatever. We’re just hungry at that point and don’t care very much.”
After a lackluster meal, the couple was almost forced into an automatic tip.
“Finally while we’re still eating, they don’t ask if everything is OK, but do immediately drop off the check without a word,” the man recalled.
At that point, his girlfriend picked up on something interesting: “They added a 20% gratuity on top of the post-tax total — with a line to add even more.”
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While many establishments do this for large groups, it's certainly not standard for a party of two. Still, the man was inclined to simply pay the bill and not make a fuss.
“My girlfriend, however, was having none of it,” he admitted.
Things got worse when they requested that the tip be removed.
The couple found out that they technically didn’t have to pay the automatic gratuity.
“It said on the receipt that you can ask them to remove that charge — maybe in their eyes to tip cash instead,” he explained. “So we asked them to remove the charge, which caused a big fuss out of the waitress … She comes back with our new bill and throws it on the table.”
That’s when the real drama occurred. “We tip what the lady truly deserved and leave. We start walking out of the restaurant and in the parking lot I hear yelling getting louder and louder,” he recounted. “This lady really followed us out to my car! She yelled at us screaming how we were cheap and why would we leave her $0!"
“She yells back never to come back or they would cause a problem for us,” he added. “I yelled back she couldn’t pay me to return.”
This couple is not alone — many do not leave a tip after bad service.
A survey from YouGov found that 51% of diners “leave zero tip after receiving bad service.” This makes sense, as, in the eyes of many, a tip is meant to show gratitude for good service.
Yet, according to experts, it does not follow the rules of tipping etiquette.
Lizzie Post, the co-president of the Emily Post Institute, insists that diners should always tip at a full-service restaurant, regardless of the quality of service. “That in our minds is non-negotiable," she told the Washington Post. "You leave a tip no matter what, even if it was the worst service you’ve ever had in your life.”
If a server's performance is truly that terrible, Post recommends asking to speak with a manager rather than forgoing a tip.
So, the public may be on this couple’s side, but etiquette experts were not. Apparently, even if the service is horrible, you should still leave a tip. That certainly doesn’t mean it’s OK for a server to chase customers to their car yelling, though.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer for YourTango who covers entertainment, news, and human interest topics.