Sadly, this story does not involve Patrick Swayze throwing people through doors.
If you want to treat your servers like dirt, the Texas Roadhouse restaurant in Findlay, Ohio is the place to go. Not only can you tip 10% or less on a meal over $50, if your waitress goes on Facebook to complain about bad tipping in general, you can print out her post and have her fired. That's what happened to Kirsten Kelly, an Ohio mother who was working as a server at the casual steakhouse until she was fired for exactly that reason.
Kirsten, pictured here with the reason she cares so much about money.
Kirsten had a disappointing Friday night (as I imagine pretty much everyone who ended up in the Texas Roadhouse restaurant must have), and went on the social network to express her opinion that "if you are going to come into a restaurant and spend $50 or more, you should be able to tip appropriately for that." This seems like a pretty reasonable statement to me, but then again, I am not Mr. Pink from Reservoir Dogs. Ms. Kelly claims this was the extent of her venting, and that she never referred to any specific customers or even to the Roadhouse restaurant.
The ultimate "oops, why did I post that?" face.
There's a reason you don't complain about bad tippers in public, however. You don't complain about them because you already know they're absolute scum who are not above anything, and that includes taking a screenshot of your Facebook post, walking into a restaurant and saying "That's me. I'm the bad tipper, and I'm offended." Obviously, shame is not possible for such people. Apparently, the rude customer was a former classmate of Kelly's, which was how they saw the post. This is a person who stiffed someone they went to high school with and then tried to get them fired. Unless Kirsten slept with that person's boyfriend once, there's really no excuse for that behavior.
According to the Roadhouse, Kelly also called the customer a mean name, although she denies that. The Roadhouse also insists she "knew what she was doing" when she posted that.
All this begs the question: why are we protecting this customer's identity? Why are we protecting the manager's identity? If we're firing people over stuff like this, everyone involved should have their names and pictures next to it, all the way up to the Roadhouse CEO.
This story is dedicated to the memory of Patrick Swayze, who would never have allowed any of this to happen in his Roadhouse.
(by Johnny McNulty)