We only tip citizens

Lawyer denounces restaurant patrons for message they left his granddaughter
ABA Journal Daily News Blog
By Debra Cassens Weiss
Posted Aug 23, 2016 08:00 am CDT

A Virginia lawyer used Facebook to denounce two restaurant patrons who left no tip for their waitress and explained why on the credit card receipt.

In the line reserved for the tip amount, the couple wrote, "We only tip citizens." The 18-year-old waitress was a citizen and the granddaughter of John Elledge, a lawyer in Harrisonburg, Virginia, the Washington Post reports. WSVN and the Huffington Post also have stories.

Elledge took a photo of the receipt, which included the woman’s signature, and posted it on Facebook. "You are a complete and total piece of dung," he wrote.

Elledge tells the Post he flunked out of college and spent time in the Honduras in the 1980s working for the Episcopal Church as a bilingual English teacher. He met and married a Honduran woman and adopted her two children, one of whom is the father of the waitress.

"We’re a totally bicultural family," he says.

Elledge had also posted on Facebook that he would "happily do the jail time if I could get just one solid punch in to the face" of the person who wrote the note. But he didn’t carry through on the threat when he learned the angry couple returned to the diner.

Elledge tells the Washington Post that the woman demanded to know why she posted the receipt. "I said obviously, it was an insult—your signature against my granddaughter—darn right I’m going to post it. And no apologies."

Hat tip to Bloomberg Big Law Business.