Gucci Little Piggy

Kicking. Squealing.

My Wheelhouse

I’m salivating over this one.  (h/t Jim Goad)

There’s plenty to chew on here, but I’ll just point out one particular point.  The reporter uses the phrase “that’s when things got ugly” to describe the scene after the woman being interviewed refused to pay her full tab.  The restaurant is then cast as the villain in the situation.  We mainly get that impression because she’s the one being interviewed and is allowed to speak freely and also *must* be the person who contacted the news station – why else would anyone care about the story?  The lead was “family locked inside restaurant”…because they didn’t tip.  Should have been “family tries to avoid paying bill”…held as thieves.

But a reasonable person would have said “Hmm, guess I’ll check the menu or ask about the gratuity policy next time, eh.” That’s what well-adjusted people do.  “Things” should have never become “ugly.”  If a customer feels that they got burned by the rules then they should learn the rules, not try to change them.

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24 Responses to My Wheelhouse

  1. Dick Boss 05/03/2012 at 4:05 pm

    I don’t know about this one. First of all, an automatic grat on a 5 top or above seems unreasonable to me, so if you didn’t see the disclaimer on the menu (which isn’t as conspicuous as it should have been) you would never have thought that a 5 top would get grated. I think 8 or above is the norm, but they never said how many people were in the diners’ party so it’s hard to tell how this particulare issue should be interpreted. Second, if it is true that the service was really bad then that would be grounds for not paying the tip- even one mandated by the restaurant’s policy. An automatic tip isn’t some ironclad rule that can never be overturned; rather it is one side of the agreement supported on the other side by the promise of good, or at least adequate, service. If the restaurant failed to uphold their bargain then the diner wouldn’t be required to pay the tip. And at the end of it all, locking a customer in was a bad idea. That’s false imprisonment and opens the store up to a lawsuit.

  2. A/G 05/03/2012 at 4:07 pm

    The customer is almost never right. the customer is usually an ignorant d-bag.

  3. Rivelino 05/03/2012 at 4:32 pm

    the most interesting aspect of the video to me was how masculine the in studio commentator was. she has a very strong jaw, a michael jackson nose, tons of makeup like a trannie — just gross.

    i think it was particularly shocking because i just finished watching this video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvAQ3bl_aGE

    the story itself almost felt like an onion piece. but as for the issue being discussed, i kinda disagree chuck. “after the woman being interviewed refused to pay her full tab” is not right. tip is not mandatory. the 17% added on is kinda sneaky if you think about it.

    here in europe people don’t tip, and the service sucks.

  4. Days of Broken Arrows 05/03/2012 at 4:33 pm

    In the Baltimore region, which is around 20 miles from me, one of the diners has a built-in gratuity policy on weekends, on parties over 5 (I think) and even on evenings, if I remember correctly. When I asked my friend why this was, the reason came down to “demographics” — a subject I’m sure a lot of people here will comment on after seeing the above video.

    Also, the on-the-scene reporter in this vid is really shrill and annoying. I think women TV reporters have jumped the shark. My ears are bleeding.

  5. Rivelino 05/03/2012 at 4:34 pm

    “or ask about the gratuity policy next time”

    not true. a calm assertive person addresses the issue as it’s happening, not “next time”.

    i think there might be a racial component here in your thinking.

    if i got crap service and they had already tacked on 17%, i might go ask the manager to reduce it too.

  6. Rivelino 05/03/2012 at 4:36 pm

    “the on-the-scene reporter in this vid is really shrill and annoying. I think women TV reporters have jumped the shark. My ears are bleeding.”

    i see i am not the only one distracted by the reporters.

    look at the very beginning, from 0:00 to 0:06, she has massive tits. even a black sweater can’t hide them. fake of course.

  7. DMann 05/03/2012 at 5:36 pm

    There’s so much I wanna say about this story……

  8. Blog Raju 05/03/2012 at 6:03 pm

    Why would a restaurant have such a strict gratuity policy? Surely the business does not want to anger its patrons. Here is a possible sequence of events leading to this situation:
    1. Patrons refuse to leave an appropriate tip.
    2. Restaurant institutes stringent mandatory gratuity.
    3. Patrons refuse to pay the mandatory gratuity.
    4. Restaurant decides to demand the gratuity by force.

    This refusal to pay has probably happened a few times in the past, which is why the restaurant decided to lock the non-payers inside and call the police.

    On the other hand, if service was bad, I would also refuse to pay the gratuity.

  9. betasattva 05/03/2012 at 6:21 pm

    There was a New York case where a court decided that tips are optional even if they are automatically added to the bill. As for locking up the patrons, unless there is a law making failure to pay an autograt a felony, I expect the restaurant is liable for false imprisonment and will lose a lawsuit.

  10. nick digger 05/03/2012 at 7:02 pm

    I can’t figure out why they locked those people in. It surely would be worth 17% to get them the fuck outta there. I suspect it “got ugly” from the get-go. When she says she “asked the manager if the gratuity could be removed”, i doubt she said please. As for automatically demanding 17% for shitty service? Fuck that.

  11. LBD 05/03/2012 at 7:51 pm

    It’s obvious to me what’s going on. Like most black patrons, they wished to stiff the servers and were thwarted by the mandatory gratuity policy. That’s why they were so angry. Just google “black people don’t tip” and see the thousands of responses. All the nonsense about lousy service is just that, nonsense. It’s just a post hoc excuse for their low class behavior. In other words, they lied to justify themselves. I am sure that losing their patronage will be a net benefit to the restaurant.

    In my area, a Japanese restaurant refused to serve an African American woman because on her previous three visits she left no tip, and the servers were tired of it. It made the newspaper, but most comments were sympathetic to the restaurant owner, especially from commenters who have worked in food service. Failure to leave a tip means the waiter/waitress is not only working for free but is paying to work that table, after tip-outs, imputed taxes on tips, etc. Blacks know it and it’s one of their “pay back whitey” moves.

    If the clientele were entirely non-African American, I’ll bet the restaurant would never have seen the need for the autotip policy, they no doubt got tired of their servers getting cheated by black customers.

    I have always been a very good tipper, having had rough times and menial jobs in my younger days. However, I’ve gotten to a place in my life where I will NOT tip a black worker. So many blacks have a policy of not tipping that I decided to respect their culture and return the favor.

  12. Prof. Woland 05/03/2012 at 9:07 pm

    Being in commission sales, I am a hyperaware of the service I recieve when I patronize a business. I always hate myself afterwards if I tip a waiter out of obligation when the service was shitty. In my business, If my service is lousy I don’t get paid at all, forget the friggin tip. While I respect someone’s labor and I don’t begrudge their need to earn a living, I often remind myself that TIP stands for to insure prompt service and not for getting pissed on for not feeling guilty.

  13. Lara 05/04/2012 at 6:17 am

    A/G,
    I couldn’t agree more.

  14. Lara 05/04/2012 at 6:20 am

    @Blog Raju
    “Why would a restaurant have such a strict gratuity policy?”

    Because in our diverse country people can’t be trusted to respect traditional mores. Therefore, they need to be forced to.

  15. superdestroyer 05/04/2012 at 6:29 am

    If one looks at Yelp or Tripadvisor, this places is very low rated. Based upon the incredibly low scores, I would avoid this place. I also looked at the restaurant webpage. http://www.la-fisherman.com/ It also indicates that the operators do not know what they are doing.

  16. Billy Chav 05/04/2012 at 11:12 am

    Lara is correct. Tipping is an artifact of a high-trust society, and black Americans increasingly exploit the situations where a high level of trust is still expected. Their venality and stupidity is rapidly pushing the US into a low-trust, low-security state from which it will probably not recover.

  17. Husquelle 05/04/2012 at 11:18 am

    This video is no longer available…. Thanks to Home Box Office.

    Fuck those copyright nazis! Boycott HBO!

    In the meantime would somebody mind posting another link?

  18. FirstComment 05/04/2012 at 11:24 am

    Couldn’t the customers just ask for two bills, one for three diners and one for the other two. Now they are no longer a party of five, but rather two parties of 2 and 3 and the gratuity is no longer mandatory.

  19. Husquelle 05/04/2012 at 11:26 am

    Never mind, I found it.

    God bless the Google and our beloved cousins of color over at
    http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/video.php?v=wshheuruVKHzmC5x9405

  20. nick digger 05/04/2012 at 5:22 pm

    Firstcomment, to split up the party, they’d probably have to sit at separate tables. One in the field, one in the house.

  21. William 05/04/2012 at 5:41 pm

    These sort of implicit contracts are slippery areas. It’s easy to exploit the unscrupulous with the fine print. But a mandatory tip is not a fucking tip. They should just put two prices for each item, one for groups under 5, and one for groups over.

    If the restaurant decided it needed this auto-gratuity policy because people were regularly not tipping, guess what! They should increase the price and pay their waiters a decent wage!

    These people might be lying about the service, but fuck this restaurant for thinking it has the right to lock people inside, especially over such petty bullshit.

  22. LBD 05/04/2012 at 7:26 pm

    It’s not petty bullshit, it’s a business FINALLY standing up to black people’s endless sense of entitlement and demands to be exempt from the normal costs of daily life that everyone else shoulders. Most would cave in due to fear of bad publicity. Good for them for not knuckling under.

  23. superdestroyer 05/05/2012 at 7:49 am

    If one looks at the website of the restaurant, there is also a change for extra condiments. My guess is that they got tired of blacks asking for ten tartar sauces or hot sauces.

  24. Anon 05/06/2012 at 5:54 pm

    I’d love to hear the waiters side of the story. Blacks frequently claim “bad service” to try to get out of restaurant bills; anyone who’s ever worked in food service knows this.

    My brother managed a Chipotle just outside of Washington DC and heard every BS story imaginable. He also had 2 foil-wrapped burritos thrown at his head football-style by screeching ghetto Mamas. Black customers were also relentlessly racist toward his hispanic workers in ways that would make Klansmen blush.

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