'Do not come here and dine with us'': Internet turns on business owner for mocking customers that don't tip servers, gets 1-star review bombed

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

Jun 22, 2023 12:00 PM EDT

Well, this backfired…

While it's easy to agree with the sentiment that "You shouldn't be eating out if you can't afford to tip," the last person you want to be hearing that message from is the owner who refuses to pay the server a living wage in the first place. It's like burning your own house down and then handing your neighbor the box of matches, declaring, "What have you done!" No, buddy—you burned your own house down—and you pay your own staff a living wage, don't rely on your customers to do it for you.

Predictably, this nuance is lost on some restaurant owners who have heard the phrase, "Don't eat out if you can't afford to tip," parroted online and decide to champion the cause, conveniently supporting a movement, in turn, supports a system that allows them to get away with paying their staff less than minimum wage. They'll probably try and tell us that they're just trying to have their worker's back's but probably denied them a $0.10 raise they asked for last January.

But we get it; it's hard; like any industry with brutally razor-thin margins, there isn't a lot of room to wiggle financially, especially when the owner has to meet payments on the mortgage for their second home and their brand new Porche. This means that employee compensation is criminally low, even for managers, with one bartender recently posting that they would be taking a decrease in pay to move up to a management role.

That alone is an indicator of how the culture around tipping has gotten insane; some tipped workers in some specific businesses—working at certain times—make out incredibly well—like the cute bartender at the nightclub I frequented in my early 20s, who lived in a downtown sky loft off of the thousands in tips she earned a night.

Meanwhile, most servers scrape by, barely making enough to pay bills, earning a base wage below the minimum that leaves them totally reliant on tips.

When this restaurant owner posted a message on social media, chiding customers for daring to eat out, they can't tip—it didn't have the effect that they hoped it would. Instead of rallying around a business owner who was "fighting for their workers," the internet instead turned on the business, bombarding it with 1-star reviews across Yelp, Facebook, and Google, which forced them to take their pages down to weather the storm. Meanwhile, screenshots of the social media post went viral and earned the ire of those who saw it across the internet.

Read on for the original message, which was allegedly posted online by the business owner, and to see some of the reactions that were shared online. Next, check out this Karen, who told staff they were "heroes" and then walked away and hit them with a 1-star review.