The whole gratuity situation can get pretty muddled once you’re outside of the US. In some countries, people don’t even tip, or tip something like 10 percent because the waiters’ paychecks already account for their work. It’s complex stuff.
Thanks to a dumb mistake that could happen to anyone, Olesja Schemjakowa accidentally entered her pin number as her tip, resulting in a charge of $7,709. According to Munchies, she found out that she’d done this a month later when the bank mailed her monthly statement.
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Olesja is Russian and was having a snack with her son near Zurich at a restaurant called New Point Cafe. Her meal cost around 23 Swiss franks, which equals to $22. This means that she tipped the restaurant 32,000 percent. For whatever reason, the restaurant thought this was normal and that they somehow deserved that amount of money, because they didn’t report it.
A Swiss news outlet reports that Olesja hasn’t been able to get her refund because, according to her bank, an accidental charge isn’t the same as a fraudulent one. Sorry.
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The restaurant’s owner did say that’d he’d refund her the seven grand, even though he later stopped all contact with her and New Point recently filed for bankruptcy. This cautionary tale demonstrates that the world is out to get you and that, from now on, you should seriously consider tipping in cash.
