If you have no idea what tip shaming is, a waitress in Knoxville, Tenn., can show you how it works. She was allegedly denied a tip Monday by a Donald Trump supporter who was insulted for having to sign a receipt using a pen from the Bernie Sanders campaign.
The photo of the receipt from Barley’s Taproom & Pizzeria, shows the Sanders pen and receipt featuring the following phrases:
“Make America Great Again!!! I wouldn’t steal this pen if it was the last one on earth…Trump. If you vote for Bernie you should also give one of those dollars to the poor.”
The Barley’s receipt is an example of a trend in social media known as tip shaming. As was the case in Knoxville, the process involves posting a photo of a receipt in which a patron has left a paltry tip or none at all.
It happened in September 2014, when the Philadelphia Eagles’ star player LeSean McCoy was publicly chided after he allegedly left a 20 cent tip on a $61.56 bill
“We have some policies around posting of photos of credit card receipts,” Lee said. “ This one is more about the political commentary of it. This would be more about tip shaming, which is technically under that.”
The manager admitted he was caught off guard by the photo and did not know how it made it to the Internet. Since Lee joined the restaurant, he has never seen this happen before.
It is unclear whether the Barley’s patron tipped the waitress with cash.
The restaurant has no formal political affiliation. It has informally hosted meetups for local Sanders organizers.
Running a restaurant — which is often a narrow-profit, high-risk operation with frequent staff turnover — is not easy, and those employees and owners who do work hard sometimes feel like they only hear complaints from customers. So it’s not entirely surprising that some restaurant folks choose to use social media to shame bad customers.
What you may not realize when you post that receipt with the customer’s name on it — or when online detectives figure out the alleged bad customer’s true identity — is that you could be making this person the target of a nasty harassment campaign that goes much longer and to a much greater extent than you could have ever imagined.
Video via You tube
While it may seem that this is an amusing story aimed at highlighting a Trump supporter’s overreaction to a slogan on a pen, serious consequences can occur for both the patron and the business.
Featured image by Flapitou via Flickr available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license
