Horrible Customer to Waitress: ‘Here’s Your Tip. The Woman’s Place Is in the Home’
Waiting tables is one of the hardest jobs there is. You lift, you carry, you cater to entitled customers. And every once in a while those customers will turn out to be total tools, like the people who left a truly heinous letter as a “tip” for the server who they even said was an excellent waitress.
The waitress told KTRE that she was working at a Cracker Barrel in South Carolina when she served a friendly man and woman in their 50s with whom she chatted and had what seemed like a perfectly lovely transaction. Then, after they left, she found a loathsome letter left as a “tip” that chewed her out for having a job, because that was unwomanly, and that the Bible said she should be at home taking care of her husband. It even said that he was cheating on her, and it was her fault because she had a job.
The waitress doesn’t even have a husband, not that the letter would be any less ridiculous if she did.
Eater has a copy of the letter, which was written out on a napkin, and in addition to being illogical, ungrammatical, sexist garbage, it was really long-winded.
Thank you for your excelent service today your a good waitress.
Here’s your tip:
The womans place is in the home. You’re place is in the home. It even says so in the Bible. You may think that your contributing to your household by coming into work, but your not. While your in here ”˜working’ this is the reason your husband must see another women on his way home from a long day at his work. Because you should be takeing care of the household duties. You may think what you are doing ”˜working’ is right, it is really essentially a disgrace to his manhood and to the American family. So instead of coming to your ”˜job’ and looking for hand out’s to feed your family, hows about going home and cleaning your house and cooking a hot meal for your husband and children, the way you’re husband and God intended, and help make America great again. Praying for families and our nation.
Love, the [couple’s name generously redacted by waitress]
This letter is an onion of sexist, sanctimonious bullshit. Every time you peel back one layer of stupidity, there’s another one beneath it. Once you get past the idea that a woman working is a sin, you get to the idea that a man would have to cheat on his wife because she had a job. Peel that one back, and you’re faced with an astounding act of mental contortionism that allows the writers to excoriate a woman for “looking for a handout” while she is actually working at her job. How did they even sell that logic to themselves? It’s especially egregious because the letter-writers are the people effectively “looking for a handout” here, because they just ate a pleasant meal and are refusing to pay for the service she provided.
Restaurant workers in most states are paid well below minimum wage because everyone–their employers, the government, the staffers themselves–assumes that customers will be providing tips that will bring the servers’ wages up to a liveable minimum wage. Because of the tip credit, many restaurants pay their servers something like $2.13 an hour. The rest of the employee’s salary wages is supposed to come from tips, and servers are taxed on the tips they are paid. Because they refused to tip, their waitress has basically been forced to serve their meal and clean up after them for free. And yet they had the gall to say she was the one “looking for a handout.”
On top of that, according to their own words this couple thinks she has kids at home that she’s trying to support by working at the Cracker Barrel. What total assholes.
The waitress shared the napkin letter and said she was hurt and surprised by it, but that she did not want the customers’ name shared and that she would be “praying for them.”
