UPDATE 2/27/17: An attorney who represents a diner accused of leaving a racist note on a restaurant receipt said the incident never happened.
Daniel Hebda told WTOP that his client, who was not identified, left a tip of $.01 and a note saying “terrible service.” The local NAACP chapter told the station the restaurant was looking into the matter.
Original story follows:
A black waitress in Virginia was refused a tip because of the color of her skin, according to a receipt posted online by the Loudoun County NAACP.
“Great service don’t tip black people,” a message on the receipt read, along with a slash drawn through the gratuity line on the $30.52 bill for a meal at Anita’s in Ashburn, about 30 miles northwest of Washington.
“I looked at the receipt three times,” Kelly Carter, who served the couple on Saturday morning, told local radio station WTOP.
Carter didn’t seek attention over the incident. Instead, two regular customers who witnessed it shared an image of the receipt on social media, where it went viral, Washington ABC station WJLA reported.
The NAACP said it had confirmed the incident with both the waitress and the restaurant manager.
“It’s real,” Anita’s president Thomas Tellez told the Loudoun Times-Mirror. “It did happen.”
Tellez told Fox 5 DC that he’d never seen anything like it during his 42 years of running family restaurants.
“It’s just appalling, disheartening, outrageous ― all of the above,” he said.
Will Estrada, Loudoun’s Republican chair, denounced the racist customers:
The Loudoun County NAACP shared angry comments about the incident on Twitter, with some folks claiming that the receipt was fake and others saying that the handwriting on the note didn’t match the signature above it.
A YouCaring page has raised more than $2,000 for the waitress. In addition, the restaurant told WJLA that customers have been asking for Carter to serve them and leaving generous tips.
Carter said that if the couple came back, she’d serve them again.
“Just me serving them will let them know they did not get the best of me,” she told the BBC. “And I truly mean that.”
(h/t Raw Story)
Before You Go
