Last month, a New York City waitress who’d just been fired after she refused to cover the $96 tab of a party who walked out without paying posted an angry message on Reddit. Her story earned sympathy from other Redditors and soon went viral, with a hand from Gawker. Many commenters on Gawker and Reddit were outraged by the unfairness of the restaurant’s policy—it doesn’t seem right that a server should be held responsible for a customer’s dishonesty. The truth is this practice is far more common than most people outside of the restaurant industry might realize. Many servers are forced to perform two jobs at once: delivering food and working as a severely undertrained and underpaid security force. The dine-and-dash is often looked on as a harmless prank, without any serious consequences. Restaurants anticipate the occasional walkout as part of their business plan, right? They should, but instead they often pass the buck to employees—and when you learn that servers can be required to pay for the losses out of their own pockets, it doesn't seem all that funny.

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