A restaurant guest was shocked when a waiter told him that his 35 percent tip “didn’t count” for a very specific reason.
The topic of tipping is becoming increasingly controversial in the USA. Opinions differ on how much and when to tip.
Others, on the other hand, are critical of the tipping model as a whole and instead advocate paying waiters a higher hourly wage.
Tipping can be a hot topic. (Flashpop / Getty)
Disputes over tips when visiting restaurants have become commonplace, as this one customer recently discovered.
On TikTok, the restaurant visitor explained that she had met a friend for breakfast.
Everything was fine until she wanted to pay at the end of the meal and left the waiter a generous 35 percent tip.
For those who don’t know, a 20 percent tip is a good baseline, and 35 percent is definitely more than the required tip.
However, there was a problem: when the waiter saw the tip, he told the customer that it “didn’t count.”
The customer said she paid with a gift card. (TikTok/@tinysparksvixen)
This is because the customer made the payment, including the tip, not with cash but with a gift card.
This caused some confusion in the comments section of the video, and while no one seemed to think it was explicitly wrong to tip with the gift card, others suggested carrying cash as a precaution for such occasions.
The TikToker recalled the moment when the waiter confronted her after the meal and told the guest: “I don’t know if you know this, but it’s really rude not to tip the waiter.”
When the customer explained that he thought he had tipped, he described the waitress’s reaction: “She said, ‘No, it doesn’t count if it’s a gift card.'”
The customer was confused and added, “I thought to myself, ‘I don’t think gift cards work like that…’ Maybe she’s right – doesn’t the tip count if it comes from a gift card?”
Most people in the comments agreed that it was OK for them to tip with the gift card, but some pointed out that whether tips are accepted may vary from place to place.
One wrote, “Most restaurants I’ve worked at don’t allow tipping on gift cards,” and a second posted, “Some places allow it, some don’t.”
Meanwhile, a third commented: “I always donated the remaining amount (plus a little more if it wasn’t enough) and no one ever gave me any grief!”