I worked in a family owned wing place in a blue collar city. For the most part, customers were absolutely fantastic. A lot had clearly been servers at some point in their life, had enough manners to treat me as a person if they had not and even some who didn’t know proper tipping procedure were genuinely nice enough to make me not care all that much. Dinner was always busy while late night was typically slow and easy going. I have two instances of being stiffed on checks over 100 dollars.

The first was an enormous (for the small place) party of 16. The family came in at 11:40 (when we closed at quarter to twelve) and were immediately rude, demanding and unorganized. It was apparent the check would be large, the tip little, my side work would wait while i answered their demands and they would try to get at least one thing comp’ed.

After a few sexually suggestive comments from one of the men at the table, having to wrap several left-overs of one or two wings for the entire party, fetch refills continuously because they never requested them at the same time and declined my offer of getting them one while i ran to refill others and fighting to get one woman in particulars attention to clarify her order when it wasn’t remotely on the menu the check finally arrived at $111. I was hoping for five bucks, The service? How I treated everyone, warm, patient and friendly. The man paying the (thankfully) single tab told me the tip was on the table. I noticed they left some of their leftovers so i ran to grab to give it to them in the parking lot noticing they didn’t tip at all. I thanked them for their patronage.

The second stiff came from a group of 12 from I believe India. One at the table spoke English, a male (often Indian men treat women harshly– at least from my experiences) he was no exception. They mostly drank Corona, were loud, disturbing others in the restaurant and had me split the check 12 ways after I had asked them in the first place if they wanted separate checks. They left me two dollars on a combined check of over a hundred. My coworker noticed that the two dollars a table getting coffee next to them didn’t have the two dollars on it anymore. They stole another table’s tip. We split the tip and laughed about it over a drink at the end of our shift.

And a good story too! Serving can be a lot of fin if you get a decent group of people. I had a party come in late before we were about to close. No problem, as long as you order before the kitchen closes (everyone knows kitchen folk get MAD when people order 30 minutes before close, even). It was large, about 10 or so, some ate, some got water and some got cocktails. We joked the whole time, they were from out of town and visiting the area, and the entire table was polite, funny and engaging and treated me with incredible respect. They stayed later than my manager would have liked but they were so nice no one really minded. Their check was only about 70 bucks, they gave my a hundred and eighty for the tab, told me I was a wonderful server and everything was excellent. Even without, my highest percentage tip ever for sure, they would still have been one of my favorite tables.

Submitted by: Bo