Tim Sweeney, manager of the Mason Jar Cafe in Benton Harbor, said he occasionally sees $100 tips but has never seen a $10,000 tip.
One day in mid-February, a male diner identified only as Mark left a tip many times larger than his $32.43 bill.
Waiter inside the cafe
Sweeney was "in complete disbelief" when he saw the bill with the tip on it and immediately ran over to talk to the customer.
"I had a chat with him to confirm and the customer still wanted to tip that amount," the manager said. That's when Mark revealed the sad reason for his surprise gift to the staff.
"The gift was in memory of a friend who had just passed away and was in town for the funeral," explained waitress Paige Mulick.
The restaurant decided to split the large tip among nine employees, each taking home more than $1,100.
Mulick, a recent college graduate, said that "there were a lot of women working in the restaurant that day, a lot of hard-working mothers… people who really deserved this." She said the money would help a lot of people, mentally.
Bill with $10,000 tip
However, under the post on The New York Post , more than 200 comments left have caused a fierce debate, surrounding the restaurant manager's money sharing.
There was also information that the restaurant fired the waitress who received the tip the following week, for reasons unrelated to the tip. Many readers said that the tipped waitress should be the one to decide how to split the money, not the restaurant... "Whoever served the guest should keep the tip. Divide it into 9 parts and deduct taxes for each person, it's not a large amount of money," one commenter said. Another asked: Why didn't the guest write the waitress a separate check for $10,000, and if he did, it wouldn't be divided into 9 taxable parts...
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