Being in the service industry can be hard. People have to spend long hours on their feet, deal with repetitive movements that can create pain and sometimes interact with not so nice customers. When you rely on tips for survival on top of everything else, it can feel like a bit of a gut punch when someone decides not to leave you one despite how good your service was.
One customer must’ve realized the disappointment that can occur after not receiving a tip when serving tables because he went out of his way to give one. In a post shared on Reddit, a customer revealed in a letter that he realized he took the wrong receipt after leaving. Instead of taking the blank one, he took the merchant’s copy which holds the tip amount and his signature.
The error was discovered when he was checking his bank account and saw the amount taken off of his card was not the amount he expected. That’s when he decided to check the receipt from that day and saw the error.
Instead of just brushing it off and moving on, the man wrote out a note explaining what happened with a sincere apology along with a $20 cash tip and delivered it to the restaurant.
The note read, “When I checked my bank statement Tuesday (1/2) I noticed that the pending withdrawal tied to my and my wife’s lunches did not appear to be correct. Relying on memory (never a good thing) I had in mind that the scheduled withdrawal should have been larger. I pulled my receipts and discovered that I had inadvertently retained the signed merchant’s copy of my VISA receipts when I left your restaurant Saturday (12/30) afternoon. As a result, while the food was fully paid, the tip which I had intended to leave for our server, Hope C, was not relayed back to VISA. I can only trust that Hope will forgive my blunder. Please find the enclosed her tip in cash. That was no way for either of us to end 2023. Here’s to a fresh start.”
from MadeMeSmile
Ted, the forgetful patron ended the note with an apology to the manager and the server. After the photo went viral on the social media platform, commenters told their own stories of people going out of their way to make things right.
One commenter writes, “Been about 30 years or so but my grandfather would take me on trips in the summer to visit relatives. We were driving to Florida and we stopped to get gas. We leave and drive 50 or 60 miles. My grandpa pulls over and says I never paid for the gas. We turned around and drove all the way back to pay for the gas.”
Another says, “I once forgot to pay for my dry cleaning when I picked it up. I went back the next day to give them the cash and they said ‘You came back!’ the second I walked in. I was very surprised that this wouldn’t be the default behavior of everyone.”
The Reddit thread shows that there are still good people in the world that will go out of their way to correct a mistake or make someone’s day.