Growing up, I always assumed that tipping your waiter or waitress every time you ate at a dining establishment or for take-out orders was the norm. I thought that everyone did it; it was law. Little did I know, there are greedy and cheap people out there who think that tipping is optional and unnecessary.

It didn’t hit me until I was forced to get a second job during the weekends due to financial reasons. I was a hostess at a moderately expensive seafood restaurant, and I happened to overhear a conversation between some servers about that night.

It was a Saturday, so it was very busy and our waitlist had reached the two-hour mark a few times. I figured the servers had made tons because of the traffic and the fact that it was a high-priced restaurant where two people could come in and spend almost $100 for two entrees.

Surprisingly to me, both servers had gotten lousy tips or absolutely nothing tipped at their tables at all! One got a $5 tip on a $200 bill, and one got a $7 tip on a $412 bill. Later I was told that a server who took on a party of twenty-five who showed up without a reservation and without politeness, left them absolutely no tip on their extremely enormous bill that is probably the amount one spends on rent each month.

Now, if you didn’t know, most servers are paid $2 an hour, so really these servers weren’t even paid enough to be considered minimum wage for the whole night because of crappy people who cling to their money and never let go. They were too selfish to correctly tip someone who did their job correctly or beyond correctly.

It’s not fair to the servers who had to deal with rude, picky customers to be paid indecently. It isn’t fair for the servers who had been on their feet all day to go home without enough money to even buy themselves a good dinner after a long workday.

So, please, if you don’t have even enough money to spare a tip that’s at least 20% of your initial bill, don’t bother wasting the server's time by going in to eat or order food. Don’t go to a restaurant if you will not tip properly! Servers definitely do not deserve to have to basically pay for you to eat your meal out of their pocket since you decided to skimp or just tip very low on a high bill.

Don’t be that jerk.

If you do decide to still be a cheap customer even after reading all of this and knowing that servers don’t make any money except off of tips they get, I hope that your server spits in your food and does the worst absolute service for you since you decided to suck so much.