Balancing a reliance on tips when customers go too far
In dealing with abusive customers, servers and bartenders may feel they must choose between earning a good tip, or remaining silent
The balancing act plays out every day in restaurants across America: Servers who rely on tips decide where to draw the line when a customer goes too far. They ignore comments about their bodies, laugh off proposals for dates and deflect behavior that makes them uncomfortable or angry — all in pursuit of the $2 or $20 tip that will help buy groceries or pay the rent.
There was the young server at a burger joint in Georgia, Emmallie Heard, whose customer held her tip money in his hand and said, “So you gonna give me your number?” She wrote it down, but changed one of the digits.
There was the waitress in Portland, Ore., Whitney Edmunds, who swallowed her anger when a man patted his lap and beckoned her to sit, saying, “I’m a great tipper.”
And at a steakhouse in Gonzales, La., Jaime Brittain stammered and walked away when a group of men offered a $30 tip if she’d answer a question about her pubic hair. She returned and provided a “snappy answer” that earned her the tip, but acknowledges having mixed feelings about the episode.
“Literally every time it happens, I will have this inner monologue with myself: ‘Is this worth saying something, or is it not?’ ” said Ashley MainaLowe, a longtime server and bartender in Tucson, Ariz. “Most of the time I say, ‘No, it’s not worth it.’ ”
In the restaurant industry, the cultural reckoning over sexual harassment has felled celebrity chefs like Mario Batali and spotlighted pervasive misbehavior by managers and co-workers. But servers and bartenders also face abuse from another front: the millions of Americans who dine out every year and who, because of the custom of tipping, wield outsize influence over one of the largest groups of workers in the country — 3 million strong, according to federal data.
Working for tips means that each shift comes with questions that do not apply to millions of other workers around the country: How much money will I make, and how much will I tolerate to make it?
“When I first started, I used to get so creeped out and weirded out all the time,” said Brittany Gilbert, a server in Charleston, W. Va., who has struggled to afford housing. “If you want to make the money, you’ll learn to laugh.”
Uncertain of workplace rights
The music was loud and the lights glowed red at Asia de Cuba, a clubby restaurant in New York with other locations overseas. On the second floor, Dana Angelo buzzed around the cocktail lounge in her uniform, a silky black dress that stopped midthigh with slits reaching higher. Her section was full, promising a good night.
As she paused at a table, a customer who was walking past reached under her skirt and grabbed her crotch, then continued on his way.
She stifled the urge to scream. “I don’t want to do anything that makes these people leave and not tip me,” she said. “I’m looking at $200 in tips.”
Fighting back tears, she pointed out the offending customer to her manager, expecting the restaurant to take action. Instead, she saw the manager shaking the man’s hand.
“It was the second layer of hurt,” Angelo said. She has since moved to Los Angeles, and that location has closed.
With guidance from her union delegate she was able to inform upper management of the incident, which occurred several years ago; she said the general manager apologized and told her that what happened was unacceptable.
Managers can protect workers by switching a waitress’ table or asking an offending customer to leave.
But even for bosses with good intentions, misbehavior is difficult to police. Kaycee Lowe Wallace, who owned the Trolley restaurant in Hugo, Okla., did not know that a regular customer was groping one of her servers until she got a concerned call from the young woman’s grandmother.
Wallace questioned the waitress, Klaycey Oakes, who told her that the man had grabbed her thigh and even followed her to the bathroom. “I was like ‘Why would you have not told me?’ ” Wallace recalled. “She was like, ‘Well, he leaves me $20 every time.’ ”
Oakes, 19, said the man was elderly and she had not wanted to cause a fuss. As it is for so many women, waitressing was her first job. Seventy percent of servers are women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and nearly half are younger than 25.
“Their lives and experience of work is shaped by that initial experience,” said Saru Jayaraman, president of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, an advocacy group for restaurant workers. “I’ve had Hollywood actresses, senators, IBM executives, lawyers tell me, ‘I have been sexually harassed later in my career, but I didn’t do anything about it because it was never as bad as it was when I was a young woman working in restaurants.’ ”