Today an article was published in The Hawkeye (ULM’s newspaper – formerly the PowWow) entitled Why I Don’t Tip. It is unclear whether the author, Joseph Roberts, is on staff at ULM or merely a student, but this much is startlingly clear: he is an asshat.
In his article, Mr. Roberts explains that he does not tip the local wait staff at places such as Coda or Kyoto, even if he receives excellent service. He thinks that it should be up to the restaurants to pay its employees a livable wage.
I can’t begin to illustrate the many ways that this article is offensive to our local servers – I’ll let you read the comments to his article for that. However, I can express my outrage that ULM has allowed this piece to be published even though it contains blatant racial remarks.
In his article, Mr. Roberts writes about his time as a Big Star Grocery employee - “Just imagine swaths of gleeful minorities all coming to shop on the same day, and you get to carry out truckloads of free groceries for them, and then find a way to stuff everything into their cars which are already full from every other store they looted at the beginning of the month.”
Clearly, Mr. Roberts does not like the fact that minorities are allowed to use food stamps and implies that they are “looting” stores when their welfare checks come out.
Wow.
Such a loaded statement for an article about tipping. It makes me wonder why Mr. Roberts would even be compelled to use that statement in his article in the first place.
Maybe he thinks that controversial articles get more publicity. If this is the case, he would be correct.
Maybe he really does think that food stamps and tipping are related. In this case, he is still correct – if no one tipped their servers, many of them would be forced to apply for food stamps.
However, I tend to believe in the principle of Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation for this phenomenon is that Joseph Roberts is a racist wanker.
And the ULM staff who allowed this article to be published? I’ll let you decide.
