On her TikTok page, Saydie, a server from Arizona, recounted an experience where she noticed a check placed ‘face down’ on the table.
In the video, she remarked: “These people left the tip slip face down. You know what that means…
“Let’s see if I’m right. I haven’t looked at it yet. Ready? Three, two, one. What is it?”
At this point, it could go one of two ways.
Either the customer left an exceptionally low tip and felt awkward about it, thus attempting to hide the amount by placing the slip face down.
Or maybe the tip was surprisingly generous, and they wanted the server to have a pleasant surprise?
Saydie later revealed the tip was $15 on a $93 bill, stating, “Yeah, not the worst, not the best.”
It didn’t take long for social media users to jump into the debate on what constitutes a satisfactory tip.
A TikTok user commented: “I leave mine that way sometimes because I internally panic that I did the math the wrong way and don’t want my smart friends to judge me.”
“It’s even scarier when they sign and dip in seconds like every time I know it’s gonna hurt,” another chimed in.
A third commented: “You just can’t win with servers that’s a generous tip!”
Saydie responded: “Never said the tip was bad, I was saying I was expecting worse.”
“At this point just leave nothing, they’ll complain no matter what,” a fourth remarked, to which Saydie replied: “Where am I complaining here lmao.”
In another comment, she clarified: “Wasn’t disappointed by this tip at all! What I meant by that was ‘It’s not 20 percent but it’s not bad at all either’”
When another user noted that a 16.1 percent tip seems ‘perfectly fine,’ Saydie agreed, stating ‘it is’.