You walk into your favorite restaurant, ready to have your favorite meal with your friends or family or alone. After your meal, you are pretty satisfied. You get the bill and decide to give a pretty generous tip to your waitress. You leave the place feeling pretty damn good. Until you find out your waitress took out a bigger tip without your permission.
Like most of us, restaurant diner Whitney Anderson from Salem, Virginia, handed her credit card to her server without a second thought. But it never occurred to her that her trust would be betrayed…
Anderson said her family ate at Abuelo’s and noticed that more money than expected was drawn from her bank account the next day, WSLS-TV reported.
“It was $45.50 and I tipped $10 even, made it $55.50,” said Anderson.
Anderson said she looked at her bank statement and the numbers didn’t add up as she remembered. Anderson said the amount that was withdrawn was $65.50 instead of $55.50. When she went back to the restaurant to bring her concerns to the management, she asked to see her receipt.
Understandably angry, she went back to the restaurant and talked directly with the owner. Surprisingly, he didn’t seem concerned and refused to talk to the waitress to make her responsible for her action.
Anderson asked for the receipt, but he gave her a fraudulent customer copy. According to him, the servers of the restaurant filled out the blank customer copy of the receipt and threw the merchant copy away.
It was clear that the waitress forged a false signature and tipped herself $20 instead of $10. To make things worse, the owner told her that they would give her $10 back but only after ten business days.
After a brief investigation, she learned that it was not the first time the waitress had done the same as she had been fired from a handful of restaurants in the past for the same incident.
Anderson went to the local news station to report it and the restaurant immediately contacted her, gave her the entire bill back, and apologized for the ‘bad experience.’
She shared her story to make other people understand that it might happen to anybody. The best thing to do in such cases is to fill the customer copy to avoid the server filling it and check the account balance regularly.