Linsey Boyd Michigan waitress at Mason Jar Cafe fired days after receiving $10,000 tip on $32 bill as co-owner, Jayme Cousins at the Benton Harbor restaurant insists axing had nothing to do with giant gratuity. But did it?
A Michigan waitress who received a whopping $10,000 tip on a $32 bill has been fired by her employer, who insists the axing has nothing to do with their worker receiving the gigantic tip.
Linsey Boyd was fired by her employers at the Mason Jar Cafe just days after receiving the over the top gratuity, according to WNDU.
The tip was made last Monday by a customer who wanted to remain anonymous. He was reportedly in town for a friend’s memorial service and tipped a generous amount of money in honor of his friend while dining at the Benton Harbor restaurant.
‘Personal matter…’
Of note, the tip came on one of the slowest days for the cafe in a long time.
After Boyd received the tip, the server split it between herself and the other servers.
Now, many questions are still unanswered regarding why Boyd was fired. Social media posts allude to a wave of toxicity among the wait staff in the wake of the outsized tip.
Cafe owner, Jayme Cousins told WNDU that there was little she was able to divulge about the firing, while insisting it had nothing to do with the tip nor anything to do with what followed the tip.
While Cousins continued to remain tight lipped as to what led to Boyd being fired, in an instance which Cousins describes as a ‘personal matter’, she did tell WDNU that the tip bested the prior best tip of $1,200 a guest had given to a server.
But then a few days later amid ongoing controversy and brimming business, Cousins and her co-owner husband, Able Martinez felt compelled to address the firing publicly, writing on Facebook: ‘I will say it had nothing to do with the tip. She did receive the entire tip, she did not pay taxes on it (the business did). Yes, she shared the tip at the request of the man that left it.’
A business decision
It is not thought that Boyd shared the tip with the proprietors or volunteered to pay some money towards the tax the business was now required to pay on the giant tip – which raises the question, should a worker be compelled to pay their employer’s taxes or be able to also share in on their worker tips, despite some restaurant owners in fact taking a slice of the gratuities for themselves, whether legally or not.
Boyd has since responded saying that she ‘drove out of town to spend time with family and get away,’ while also stating it had been a rough week.
The waitress said things went awry after she was asked to take a mental health day from work, just days after the giant tip, in a now-deleted Facebook post.
Boyd then said management reached out to her to take an additional next day off as well.
Boyd suspecting something more was going on reached out to her employer, asking if she was being told ‘in a professional way to not come back.’
The following day Boyd was fired via phone call, WSBT-TV reported.
‘One week I’m such an amazing, hardworking employee, awesome mother … couldn’t have happened to a better person,’ Boyd’s post reportedly read. ‘Now, I’m without a job, for the first time since I was 15 years old.’
The restaurant’s management has since refuted Boyd’s claims, claiming the firing had nothing to do with the tip or the aftermath that followed, while also saying they couldn’t go into details because of labor laws.
‘We do truly care about our staff,’ the couple added. ‘We’ve had the same crew for 5-6 years. We have college girls that come home every summer and have been for four years now, we take our staff up north at the end of every summer season, we give donations for college funds for them, we kept them employed through Covid, we do everything in our power not to lose staff.
‘I know there is a lot going around that we let her go because of the tip and that’s just not logical,’ Cousins told WOOD-TV. ‘(W)e have a staff that has continued to work for us for years and college kids that come back every summer and we give chances after chances to our staff, so we clearly would not let someone go for no reason at all.’
Cousins also stated the decision to let Boyd go did not come lightly and that firing an employee is something the restaurant tries to avoid.
‘In this case, it was purely a business decision,’ Cousins said.
It remained unclear if Boyd has since found a new job.
