Googling “arrested for not tipping” yields scads of hits, with plenty of pros and cons for mandatory gratuity.
But it seems cut and dried: “If you do this (come in with x number of people) you will be charged that (18%), which you must pay or else you go there (jail).”
“I’m a good Christian,” is no more an excuse than “it took half an hour for our order to arrive.” The management didn’t raise the price while you were eating like in Weimar Germant: you agreed on the deal, then skipped.
I’ve seen a lot of bum checks posted behind bars and cashier stations; albeit by management, not servers. Overall, though, this fits the same description.
I suspect Applebees will be at the receiving end of it as well.
I DO eat at Applebees (not often, but its a convenient place to go with kids and the food is completely average, but edible) and I just sent them an email that I won’t anymore. Violating your customer’s trust is bad - but since it was a scrawled sig, the waitress didn’t intend that. Violating your employees trust is as bad.
Wow, that’s a public relations disaster. At this point, Applebee’s should tear out their kitchens and trade them for shuttle vans to serve Chik-fil-A takeout. Because if you serve something people really like, you can do whatever the fuck you want.
Oh my god, that is one of the saddest things I have ever seen. They really just kept digging and digging. Best part is whatever muppet kept making these painful-to-read status updates will not be fired, but the waitress who posted a receipt was.
But wait, there’s more! It gets funnier. I checked out their FB page, and in the midst of this shit storm, they’re trying to have actual updates. So there are all these “Look at our food” or “Come in late for cheap eats” posts, and all of the responses are “You suck!” I love it.
Did I read correctly that the person that posted the receipt DIDN’T EVEN WAIT ON THE GROUP IN QUESTION, and they’re the one who got fired?
If that’s true, I have absolutely zero sympathy for them. If anyone had the right (morally or otherwise) to post the receipt it’s the waitress that the nasty note was directed to. This is a classic case of sticking one’s nose in someone else’s business where it doesn’t belong. Life has enough battles to fight without adopting someone else’s battle … especially when the other person isn’t even fighting.
I continue to be amazed at the number of companies that just don’t understand social media PR. How hard is it to hire someone who’s familiar with Facebook, has a marketing degree, and isn’t a nitwit?
You’re correct. My thoughts are as follows, though:
The person who posted it was, at worst, thoughtless: she didn’t understand the amazing sleuthy powers of the Internet, and probably it didn’t even occur to her that anyone would be able to figure out the name of the pastor in question. She thought she was just posting something horrible and funny to amuse other people, with no chance of violating anyone’s privacy.
When it turned out that the obsessives who populate the Internet started trying to ID the pastor, the server freaked out and was begging people to stop. As soon as she realized it could be a privacy violation she regretted her action.
Therefore, there’s zero chance she’ll commit a similar offense in the future. If Applebee’s had put a reprimand in her file and made her sign an acknowledgment of the privacy rules, that would have more than handled any risk going forward.
Even if they’re a soulless evil corporation–which no doubt they are–the evidence at this point is that firing her was a terrible decision, because it turned the funny Reddit story into a wrath-of-Reddit story, which is going to be a lot worse for Applebee’s than a wrath-of-a-self-centered-patron story.
Even if they’re a stupid corporation who’s going to fire her, the way they’re handling it now is even dumber. They need to clamp down on their social media for a bit until the Look A Squirrel! Internet notices a squirrel and stops caring about them. THe more they talk, the longer the internet will pay attention to them.
And they should have NEVER confirmed she was terminated. To simply say “we take our customers privacy concerns seriously, but it is against our policy to comment on employment matters” would have been a far more consistent position than to say “we take the privacy of our customers so seriously that we are willing to violate the privacy of our employees.”
Applebee’s really is handing this debacle amazingly poorly, but omg they fired a server when they shouldn’t have. They’re not stomping on puppies. People need to calm down.
I could agree if the person that posted the receipt was, oh, 12. Anyone above the age of 18 or so that knows enough about the internet to post something ON the internet knows when you post shit online, it’s there forever. The pastor’s signature was pretty easy to figure out as well. We can debate all night about whether the shitty customer had it coming, but let’s not kid ourselves – the person that posted the receipt had EVERY intention of publicly shaming the customer by name, otherwise she’d have covered up the signature.
I’m sure she did regret her actions. Oh well, what’s done is done. Make your bed, gotta lie in it. People lose their jobs every day through absolutely no fault of their own, I’m not gonna shed too many tears over someone who lost their job who would still have their job had they not done something colossally stupid.
Agreed that there’s 0 chance she’ll ever do it again. Whether she should have just been reprimanded or not is up for debate, of course. I don’t think Applebee’s had a chance of winning either way. Fire the waitress and they’re evil and don’t defend their employees when customers are being assholes. Don’t fire the waitress and they’re suddenly perceived as a restaurant that will allow their employees to talk shit about the customers online and call 'em out by name.
Meh. Yes, they’re getting bad press. Given the attention span of the internet, though, it’s not likely to be permanent. Applebee’s will most likely still be around 5 years from now.
COMPLETELY agree on this one. Their only comment on this situation should have been “We regret this happened, we’ve taken steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again and we don’t discuss our internal business stuff with the press.”
PandaBear77… were you aware that Applebees did JUST this same thing on their official page a while back, posted an image taken by a waiter of a receipt with personal information about the customer. Then of course they took it down when Chelsea was fired. They are fucking hypocrites. It’s not about personal information at all. They were perfectly happy to post identifying information in an image when the note was a nice once that benefited the company directly. Applebees deserves to die a fiery death as far as I’m concerned.
I think you’re just wrong here. If you were right, she wouldn’t have been freaking out about people tracking the pastor down before Applebee’s found out. She has every appearance of being naive in this respect.
…except that the folks with Reddit accounts are the ones most likely to hear about this story, and they’re much likelier to side with the waitress, and that was predictable. I suggested earlier that they could have turned this into good news for themselves by discussing both increasing training and the need to tip generously; by doing so, there’d have been a minor Internet huzzah for them for standing up for the little guy (i.e., the waitress).
No doubt. This is likely to show up as a minor blip in sales for this week only. The only lasting effect of it that I can imagine is that it might become a case study used in PR courses.
Honestly, I disagree. The only clear part of the signature was the last name, Bell. The first name looked like “Wes” to me; nothing like “Alois.” And frankly, I’ve never heard of the name Alois, so there is no chance in hell I would have correctly figured out the name from that scrawl, and very little chance that anyone else not already acquainted with that scrawl would have either.
There are a lot of people named “Bell” out there. It was going to be more a problem of innocent Wes Bells getting undeserved internet fury, than the internet managing to find and violate the privacy of the right person.
So I believe her when she said she believed the name was illegible and that she had no intention of shaming or having it come back to anyone. Especially taken with her after-the-post attempts to get people to stop trying to track the customer down.