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Many criticized the unfairness of her termination and called for better protection for restaurant staff.
By Megan Quinn
Written on Mar 23, 2024
A former server has encountered a whirlwind of chaos over the last couple of months after a customer came in one night and ordered 66 chicken wings and a lemonade. Before paying the tab, the customer excused himself to go to the restroom and never returned.
After the server took to social media to share what had happened, revealing the customer’s name and other personal information, she never could have predicted what happened in the weeks to follow.
The server was forced to pay the $100 bill of a customer who dined and dashed.
Braylee Anderson posted a video on TikTok on January 17, detailing her experience with a customer who dined and dashed.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, “dine and dash" refers to the act of eating at a restaurant or establishment and then leaving without paying the bill.
According to Anderson, the customer, came into the Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant one evening where she worked as a waitress. He ordered 66 chicken wings and a strawberry lemonade. After asking for a few to-go boxes to bring home the remainder of the wings he didn’t finish, he left a fake credit card on the table and told Anderson that he was using the restroom and would be back.
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However, he snuck out the back door before she had the chance to confront him over the fake payment method.
Anderson had no choice but to pay out the customer’s $100 tab and left that night with only $36 in tips.
“So thanks for that,” Anderson said in her since-deleted video calling out the customer for his ruthless actions, threatening to send it to his coach and family members.
After the incident, Anderson was able to track down the customer’s mother on Facebook and sent her a message asking her if she could ask her son to pay her the money she deserved. Initially, she seemed remorseful for her son’s actions and apologized to Anderson on his behalf.
The customer’s mother claimed that her son was suffering a ‘manic episode’ when he dined and dashed.
“He’s bipolar and was having a manic episode. He ended up in New Mexico and I’m leaving to go get him and get him checked into the hospital,” she wrote in a Facebook message to Anderson.
The mother also asked Anderson what Buffalo Wild Wings she worked at so that she could call the restaurant and give them her credit card number to cover her son’s unpaid bill. She also requested that Anderson remove her social media posts about her son given the difficulties he was enduring.
“The bill is done with. I had to take care of it,” Anderson informed the woman. “I might consider taking it [the video] down if he apologized to me personally and paid me back.”
In a follow-up Facebook post, the mother stated that law enforcement was now involved and urged people not to send Anderson money. She also accused the server of fraud.
To prove her story, Anderson shared a photo of the customer’s receipt, along with the to-go boxes and wings he’d left behind.
Nearly two months after sharing the videos about the customer online, Anderson received an unexpected call from her employer.
The server learned that she was being fired for ‘bad press.’
Anderson recorded herself being terminated from her position via phone call.
“It has become very apparent that our morals, values, and beliefs aren’t really aligned. So for that reason, you are terminated,” her employer said.
When Anderson asked what was being done about the customer who “stole from the company,” she was told that they would be “looking into it” and could not share any further information with her.
Many people believed that Anderson was unfairly terminated, considering that the customer never paid her what he owed.
“I never understood why waiters get penalized for dining and dashing customers,” one TikTok user commented.
Others vowed never to eat at Buffalo Wild Wings again until they changed their policies and treated their staff fairly.
Some people urged Anderson to get legal help to build a wrongful termination case.
In most cases, even when customers dine and dash, their servers are not expected to cover their tab.
Restaurant servers are protected by federal law in this regard.
Employers cannot force their staff to make up for the financial loss of customers who dine and dash if it means their pay would be less than the mandated minimum wage. That does not seem to be the case for Anderson, however.
It is not a server's fault if a customer decides to forego paying their bill, and it is not their job to babysit them on top of all of their other obligations.
Servers, chefs, and other restaurant staff rely on tips and wages to make a living. When customers dine and dash, it deprives these workers of their rightful earnings.
They should also not have to face the risk of being fired on top of losing their hard-earned money.
Megan Quinn is a writer at idatingyou who covers entertainment and news, self, love, and relationships.
