Waiter in "disbelief" after customer leaves $18,200 tip
Topics: Restaurants and bars, US Food
Rachael Davis
Featured Image Credit: UCG via Getty Images
Topics: Restaurants and bars, US Food
A waiter in Texas was blown away by the generosity of one of their patrons.
The server, posting anonymously on Reddit, shared a photo of the tip they received at a fine dining restaurant.
Having been celebrating a 50th birthday, the guests spent $33,557.50 on their meal. If that figure wasn’t eye-melting enough, they also left a tip worth $18,200.
Speaking to Newsweek, the anonymous waiter said: "I work at a fine dining restaurant in Texas.
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"This happened back in January 2024 —someone was celebrating a birthday."
The bill’s automatic gratuity came to $6,200, but the service clearly warranted a fair chunk more.
In an incredible move, the guests added an extra $12,000, bringing the total tip to $18,200 and the bill as a whole to $51,757.50.
"I have somewhat become used to getting crazy tips because it's fairly common where I work, but never anything like this," they said.
"The customer just thanked me for my service and told me everything was great. After they had left I went and checked it and I stared at it for a while because I was in disbelief.
"I thought he had just written an extra zero, but when I saw the total it confirmed it."
The generosity blew several minds on Reddit.
"The idea that someone can drop 50K at dinner is a hard one for me to wrap my head around," said one Redditor who’s articulated something a fair majority of us will be thinking.
"I am apparently working at the wrong places," said another.
"Seeing enough money to change the entire course of my life on a tip line is perhaps a bit jarring," another added.
Others pointed out that the tip alone would cover many people’s annual salary.
Tipping culture in the US is notoriously pernicious as compared with the likes of the UK and Europe. Generally, serving staff aren’t paid much as a base salary in service jobs over there, with the rest of their earnings being made via tips for good service.
While there are plenty of misers out there who won’t tip anything more than the minimum, or at all, the culture’s drawn plenty of stories of incredible generosity.
Another example came when staff at a Benton Harbor in Michigan were treated to a $10,000 tip by one diner.
Tim Sweeney, the manager at Mason Jar Cafe in Benton Harbor, said tips are rarely anything more than $100 – even that sounds like a hefty sum!
Most patrons leave between 10 and 20% tips, but this $10,000 gratuity was paid on top of a $32.43 order. The tip therefore amounts to 308 times the meal’s cost.
“Typically, we’ll see every now and then $100 [tips],” Sweeney told The Hill. “But not ever anything of this gratitude or magnitude.”
The generous tipper, known only as Mark, said there was a heartbreaking reason for his kind act.
“It was in memory of a friend who had recently passed and he was in town for the funeral,” said cafe waitress Paige Mulick.
“It was just really an act of kindness that impacted so many people."
The waitress who received the tip, Linsey Boyd, shared it with her colleagues but was reportedly fired from the cafe for unrelated reasons soon after.
“More people than I can count thought I should have just kept all the money and not shared," she said. "The thought hadn’t even occurred to me, but hindsight is always 20/20. Here we are a week later, and I’m out of a job.
The service industry in the States really is a game of dramatic highs and lows.