This is not simple as it sounds and it immediately takes a tangent direction  with regards to tipping, ignoring the whole tweet war altogether. And in the whole context of the article, yes the tweet war is stupid (take note of you folks who tweet), and the tipping issue becomes central. I still have faith in people.  Read the comments section too.

Food Truck Justice: Heated Tweet to Financial Firm Gets Worker Fired

New Yorker Brendan O’Connor lost his job last week.

Normally, this would not make for a particularly newsworthy story, but O’Connor’s tale is different, in part because it all started with a tweet of his, shown below.

Brendan O'Connor @OConnorB_

Shout out to the good people of Glass, Lewis & Co. for placing a $170 order and not leaving a tip. @glasslewis

Thing is, the @GlassLewis in question above is the San Francisco-based shareholder advisory firm of Glass Lewis & Co., which didn’t take too kindly to the public tip-shaming. The company called O’Connor’s boss at Milk Truck, a food truck business specializing in grilled cheese sandwiches, to complain about the accusatory tweet. Two days later, O’Connor’s brief career in food service was over. Milk Truck publicly apologized and the episode was put to rest.

Milk Truck @milktrucknyc

@glasslewis rgrding yest. tweet by an employee--it was flat out wrong. we do NOT in any way support or condone this behavior-our apologies.


 Glass Lewis & Co. @GlassLewis

@milktrucknyc We appreciate it, and look forward to doing business with you again!

Except that it wasn’t.

Turns out, O’Connor moonlights as a reporter for the New York City culture blog The Awl, and he wrote a lengthy article on the firing, including lurid details about Glass Lewis’s tip-snubbing employees, that ran it on Tuesday. It read, in part:

    "This group placed a huge order: three of this sandwich, four of another, three of the one that takes forever on the grill, two of the one that takes forever to assemble. Five or six milkshakes. The order came to just under $170.

    "I was making sandwiches, another worker took the order and a third made the milkshakes and watched the grills. A line grew while we worked, and we had to tell other customers that their lunch orders would take longer than usual. They paid; I asked my co-worker who was dealing with the money how much of a tip they’d left. They had left actually no tip at all. (They had paid with a card so we checked the cash tips to see if there’d been a bump. There hadn’t.)

    "I asked some of the group as they were picking up their orders if they had intended to not tip. They hemmed and hawed and walked away."

The reaction was swift and impassioned. Readers swarmed social media to berate Milk Truck and Glass Lewis over the incident with expletive-riddled rants, in an effort that at times seemed to suggest Americans had found a new reason to distrust the financial services industry. O'Connor quickly became a folk hero among service workers.

and onto the comments