Customer tips $10K at Michigan restaurant, explains generous gesture before leaving - The Hill

Generous customer tips $10K at Benton Harbor restaurant | WOODTV.com

BENTON HARBOR, Mich. (WOOD) — The staff of a Benton Harbor restaurant got the surprise of a lifetime when a customer left behind something completely unexpected.

Wait staff at the Mason Jar Cafe usually see tips ranging from 15% to 25%. Once in a while, manager Tim Sweeney said, a customer will leave a bigger one.

“Typically, we’ll see every now and then $100 (tips),” he explained. “But not ever anything of this gratitude or magnitude.”

Monday, which is considered the restaurant’s slowest of the week, had one extreme outlier. A customer named Mark left a $10,000 tip on his $32.43 bill. That’s about 30,835%.

“Absolute disbelief to begin with,” Sweeney said. “We went back and forth. I had a conversation with him. He wanted to proceed. (The waitress) was absolutely shocked. “

The reason Mark gave staff the five-figure tip was personal.

“It was in memory of a friend who had recently passed and he was in town for the funeral,” waitress Paige Mulick, who was also working that day, said. “It was just really an act of kindness that impacted so many people.”

The money was split nine ways among the coworkers for more than $1,100 each. Mulick, who recently graduated from Western Michigan University, said her share will make a huge dent in paying off her student loans.

“(I’ll) lower that interest every bit I can,” she laughed. “We had so many incredible women working that day, so many hardworking mothers … just who really deserve this.”

“Every dollar counts at a job like this,” Mulick continued. “We work hard. We know that some days you’re going to make more and some days you’re going to make less. That’s just part of how it goes. But we hustle hard and I think that a lot of people really deserve this.”

Sweeney added, “Anytime you can lend a hand and change somebody’s life — whether it’s a small act or a large act — it’s very important to just keep that in the forefront, keep that top of mind. A little bit goes a long way. In this situation, a lot goes a long way.”

Asked how long it takes for a restaurant like his to make $10,000 in tips alone, Sweeney laughed and answered “many, many, many months.”