Server Shares How She Used To Trick Customers Into Giving Her More Tips. It Involved An Elaborate Scheme: ‘Fraud Tip Farming Is Crazy’

There’s the little white lie to elicit more tip money from restaurant customers. Then there’s the performance that includes supporting actors and guided improv.

One server took her situation to the extreme.

TikToker Lily (@lilylofi) planned a (possibly) less-than-ethical but legitimately funny scenario to extract more tips from her tables. The TikTok where she describes her method has been watched over 161,000 times.

Pity Tips

The video may or may not be rage bait considering the creator has “professional rage baiter” in her bio. Bait or not, the server tells a deliciously sketchy story. “Here are some immoral ways I made money at my first waitressing job. Allegedly,” she starts by saying.

“Basically, I would tell my homeboys to come in and sit in my section,” she says.

Then, she admits that she’d get them to heckle, roast, and insult her.

She recalls one Friday night when she had a “smaller section,” only six tables, so her friends came in. “All my tables were almost finished eating. And my homeboys would come in and just cause a f—— scene. I gave them free rein to make fun of me about anything,” she admits.

That included her looks, her job, whatever they could find to pick apart, she continues. She says she encouraged them to “just be as rude as you can.” Every time she walked up to her friends’ table, “they’d just say triflin’ a– s— to me.” It was so provocative that she says other tables would ask her if she was OK.

For her part, she says she’d play the part of “an innocent little server” who was plagued by terrible guys on a busy Friday night.

And it was effective. She says that four of her six tables tipped her at 20% and included little notes about how sorry they were for the other table’s behavior. Hopefully, the guests wrote, the extra money would help her out.

Lily says, “It was definitely immoral, but it definitely works.”

Low-Key Scammy Vibes?

Some viewers think this is standard operating procedure to lean into guest sympathy. But there are disagreements, too, one user even using the word “con.”

“Smart con job for effectiveness but so uncool. Playing off people’s sympathy and generosity. I’d feel like a POS,” one wrote.

“You gotta do what you gotta do,” another wrote.

TikToker @tizfred just says, “Fraud tip farming is crazy” about the whole thing.

For some, though, right or wrong didn’t play into it at all. They just want the next installment. Viewer @racc0nman21 asked, “Can this be a series?”

Do Servers Get More Tips If People Feel Sorry For Them?

Michael Lynn, a former server and current business professor at Cornell University, says tipping is “a complex social ritual shaped by psychology, social norms, economics and even national personality traits.” He should know; he just wrote a book on the subject.

Tipping is the rare instance, explains Lynn, where buyers voluntarily continue to pay after a service has been rendered. Though it ties into a range of emotions and cultural norms, it is also very emotional. The University of Kansas even supports Lily’s thesis: If people see a worker being treated poorly, the tip size increases.

Jonathan Beck, an assistant professor of marketing at the institution, conducted research into the “waiter rule.” That old adage that says you can tell the content of a person’s character by how they treat service workers. And he’s observed that when people see a server being treated poorly, they want to support them. But “often that support doesn’t come in the form of direct intervention or confrontation. Instead, it manifests through tipping,” he told the University of Kansas News.

Beck said the impetus for the study came from his own experiences during the pandemic. Service workers weren’t trained to deal with unhappy, scared, and mask-non-compliant guests. “I figured that if I see someone treated poorly, I can make them feel a little better by giving them a few extra dollars. Then I started wondering, ‘Does this apply to everybody, and why?” he noted.

So it turns out that Lily’s observation was correct. And in her situation, everyone wins: Guests get to feel good about themselves, Lily gets to pay her bills, and her friends got a discounted meal.

BroBible reached out to Lily via TikTok direct message and with a comment on the post. We will update this if she gets back to us.