Do Restaurant Workers Have to Pay to Clean Up After Customers?
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Image via TikTok/@teelagata

Server serves a table of children who rack up $60. Then she’s forced to pay 5% and clean up after them: ‘there are evil people’

Paying to Work, Apparently

Tee, who posts under that name on TikTok, opened a recent clip by holding a payment receipt up to the camera before turning it toward the booth she had just cleared. The table was still covered in dishes, used napkins, and leftover food, while a high chair was pushed against the seat. Food was scattered across the floor, some of it feet from the table itself.

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The receipt read $62.42. “I am paying the restaurant 5% of $62.42 to have the privilege to clean all this up,” she says at the top of the clip, walking the camera over the mess as she talks. The 5% she’s describing appears to be some kind of charge tied to the bill rather than anything she chose herself, and by her account, it’s money coming out of what she’s paid for a table that left her nothing.

“Not even 5 f***g cents from these people left with a smirk on their face,” she says, before adding that she still has to pay the restaurant “to be able to have the privilege of cleaning this s**t up.” The video’s on-screen title is even more pointed, reading, “There are evil people in the world. Service workers are not your source of entertainment.” It’s the kind of complaint that often shows up from servers describing rough tables, like the Tampa server who says a table asked for free items and then left her a single cent.

People Had Their Own Take

The comments quickly turned toward Tee’s employer and the tipping system. “Your EMPLOYER should pay you,” one comment read. Another put it more bluntly, writing “This is pure insanity! Somehow in US the employers have convinced you that it is customer’s duty to pay your salary.” Others sided with Tee over the mess while still questioning the tipping system, with one writing, “even if you don’t believe in tipping, you don’t believe in cleaning up after yourselves what.”

@teelagata

There are evil people in the world. Service workers are not your source of entertainment. Eggs are not a squishy toy for your toddler to play with instead of eat. EDIT: Update posted #hospitality #havemanners

♬ original sound – Tee

Tee doesn’t spend much of the video talking about the fee itself. She’s more focused on the people who walked out of the mess. “Why? Why do people go out if they’re not going to have fucking manners, man?” she asks partway through, still filming the debris on the floor. It echoes another recent story out of a restaurant, where a server who worked a 40-person party for over an hour says she was told afterward that no tip was possible at all.

By the end of the clip, Tee has stopped trying to explain the math.“Like, home training doesn’t fucking exist,” she says, closing out the video with the camera still pointed at the booth. The mess is visible throughout the clip, but none of the customers Tee is describing appear on camera.


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Mrinav Dehingia
Mrinav has been covering entertainment, gaming, celebrity news, and internet culture for a while now. When he is away from the keyboard, you'll usually find him watching movies, exploring sounds, or outside.