Staff at a New Brunswick restaurant were shocked when they saw how much a customer had tipped one of their servers: 8,000 per cent.
“It was too high a number. I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Coffee Mill server Joselyn Sceeles told CTV Atlantic.
She said a mystery diner had left her an $802 tip on a $10.91 bill while he was at the Fredericton restaurant on Saturday. But while Sceeles is proud of her abilities, she’s chalking up the whopping tip to a mistake.
“Maybe he was trying to put his pin number in. [It’s] so easy to do and it happens all the time,” she said. “So it never crossed my mind if it was real. I always just thought: 'We got to get this money back to him.'”
By Tuesday, the transaction was already corrected by Moneris – the company that supplies the Coffee Mills’ debit and credit machine. So the mystery customer might not even see he gave a 8,000 per cent tip on his credit card statement.
But restaurant staff still want to track him down.
The day before, restaurant employees had begun trying to piece together the identity of the likely accidental generous tipper, director of operations Katie Martens told CTV Atlantic.
“We didn't get the name of the person, he had left by the time we noticed there was a mistake,” she said. “So I initially posted on Facebook and got a whole lot of traction very quickly.”
Within the first hour, the post had been shared over several hundred times. By Tuesday evening, it had garnered over 3,500 shares.
Martens said if she could see the customer again she’d have a little advice for him.
“I would tell him: 'Lucky you! You've got lots of money in the account!' But it's very important to check your slips, so things like this don't happen again,’” she said.
