A Michigan restaurant server who recently received a $10,000 tip on a $32 tab says the establishment has since fired her amid a dispute over how many of her co-workers deserved a share of the remarkably large gratuity.
The story of the tip that Linsey Huff earned while waiting on a table at the Mason Jar Cafe in the western Michigan community of Benton Harbor on 5 February initially went viral on corners of the internet dedicated to uplifting news because it had been left by a patron who wanted to pay tribute to a late friend.
But as an increasing number of Huff’s co-workers sought a cut of the gratuity, the tale devolved into her dismissal from the Mason Jar as well as threats from ownership to sue her because she discussed her firing on social media, her attorney Jennifer McManus told the Guardian on Monday.
McManus remarked that Huff’s ordeal illustrated the disparity of power between those in charge of the US food service industry and the rank-and-file workers they employ.
“The people with the money … control the narrative, and the people that work for them understand that and often have to cower because of that,” said McManus, who added that she was mainly representing Huff in case the cafe followed through on threats to sue her client for damages.
Mason Jar managers did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday, though in a prior statement, the owners, Abel Martinez and Jayme Cousins, asserted that the firing was unrelated to the tip.
Huff had no idea what was in store for her when – as the Detroit Free Press put it – she served a middle-aged man in a dark suit who had lunch at the Mason Jar after attending his friend’s funeral. He paid for his $32.43 bill with an American Express credit card, left a $10,000 tip to honor the memory of his dead friend and asked Huff to share the gratuity with her waitstaff colleagues.
As word of the 30,836% tip spread, the Mason Jar’s manager, Tim Sweeney, told the political news website the Hill that the restaurant had “not ever [seen] anything of this gratitude or magnitude”. One of Huff’s co-workers said to the local television news station WNDU that everyone on the wait staff is “going through something different, so that amount of money [helps] us all a lot”.
Yet after Huff and seven of her fellow servers split the gratuity evenly, each getting $1,200, kitchen staffers who felt unjustly left out of the windfall became upset, according to McManus.
McManus said Huff had gone to her managers to inform them of the brewing discontent, but they had wanted to know exactly who had expressed having a problem with the way the tip was split.
Huff said: “I’m not going to give any of their names … because I don’t want to create a bigger issue,” McManus recounted. “I would just like some assistance in getting this resolved.”
McManus said the Mason Jar ultimately fired Huff – a divorced mother of two children – for refusing to name anyone.
Huff – who also goes by the last name Boyd – subsequently went on Facebook and recounted how she was asked to take a mental health day off on 11 February, a Sunday, before being told not to bother coming in on Monday, as the Free Press noted. She wrote that she had received a call on Tuesday and been told “that I am fired”.
“One week I’m such an amazing, hardworking employee, awesome mother … couldn’t have happened to a better person,” Huff wrote in the post after the tip saga turned sour. “Now, I’m without a job for the first time since I was 15 years old.”
Martinez and Cousins then published their own Facebook statement addressing what they described as “a claim” about an employee’s firing. They argued that the dismissal was neither based on the tip – on which the Mason Jar had paid taxes – nor “a decision made lightly or hastily”, though they didn’t elaborate.
“We do truly care about our staff,” the cafe’s post said. The post said the Mason Jar had had “the same crew for five to six years” – team members who were employed through Covid lockdowns – and that “we do everything in our power not to lose staff”.
Nonetheless, among the hundreds of comments in response to the Mason Jar’s post were some condemning the restaurant. Some commenters came out in support of the Mason Jar, but the Free Press reported that others called for a boycott of the cafe.
Huff, meanwhile, received a phone call from a restaurant boss telling her that the Mason Jar had retained attorneys who would file a lawsuit against her if she didn’t take her post down, McManus said. McManus said the threat was enough to bully her into deleting her post, even though it “truthfully” documented that she had been fired.
“They said that they will sue her for her full estate,” McManus told the Guardian. “She kind of chuckled [at that] and said, ‘Well, good luck – I’m a waitress. There’s not an estate here.’”
McManus maintained that it had been unnecessary for things to take such a seedy twist for her client.
“Through her own generosity, sharing this tip – honoring the requests of the person who had initially been so generous – she ended up losing her job,” McManus said.