A bartender has revealed how ill-intentioned servers can rip people off – including employers, colleagues and even customers.
Michelle Charlotte Kimball, of Raleigh, North Carolina, has more than 15 years of experience on the job at various venues.
The 35-year-old recently took to TikTok to share the shady methods she’s seen fellow bartenders use for their own financial gain.
“If I were a bar owner, these are the ways I know bartenders can steal from the bar, or from the customers, or from other bartenders, that I would be on the lookout for,” she began.
Michelle Charlotte Kimball, of Raleigh, North Carolina, has more than 15 years of experience working at various venues
The 35-year-old recently took to TikTok to share the shady methods she’s seen fellow bartenders use for their own financial gain.
In the clip, which has been viewed more than 1.9 million times, the first deception she highlighted would involve the bartender secretly exchanging a customer’s order with a cheaper alternative before then pocketing the difference in the bill in his pocket stitch
‘Say you order a Tito’s and soda. Tito’s and sodas will usually be $8.
‘The bartender goes over – and this is why you have to watch your bartender make your drinks – they pour house vodka and soda.
‘They give it to you, they say it’s going to be $8 – when house vodka is only $5.
‘So then you give them cash, say.
They’re going to laze (up) in house vodka (at the register), and they can keep $5 instead of $2,’ she elaborated.
Another potential scam would be in a bartender’s ability to get away with pocketing cash for a drink on draft because, as Michelle explained, ‘bottles, there’s stock. Concept, if you pour it, sometimes there is excess, there is foam, there are samples.’
She also suggested that bartenders could easily lie about a customer walking out on their tab: ‘You paid me $50 cash for your $50 tab.
“And then I dropped the cash and just told the manager they walked out,” she suggested as a hypothetical scenario.
Michelle has gained more than four million followers on the video-sharing platform by captivating viewers with stories from behind the bar
Other social media users were quick to flock to the comments section with one writing: ‘Looks like way too much work for a few bucks’
“They can also say that a drink was returned after they called it in because there was a bug in it or there was a chip in the glass or whatever, when there wasn’t,” Michelle continued.
“If they were paid cash for that drink and they just don’t pay it out.”
In another scenario she described – feasible in an establishment that ‘weighs the bottles’ to monitor the amount of booze being poured – she described how an unscrupulous bartender could ‘cut everybody, just a little bit.’
Then, knowing there was extra in the bottle, the next time a customer ordered that drink, they would give that customer a normal pour and pocket their payment for themselves.
‘So really, that one doesn’t steal from the bar – that’s stealing from all the customers you’ve thrown in short. Make me angry,’ she snapped.
Michelle, who has gained more than four million followers on the video-sharing platform by regaling viewers with stories from behind the bar, then shared a personal anecdote to illustrate the final downside she highlighted.
“It’s a way I’ve had a colleague steal from me before,” she began.
‘Every time we went to count our drawer, our drawer was between $50 and $80 short.
‘So say she took $80 out of the drawer and put it in her pocket. We had to split the cost of it being short.
‘Then I had to pay $40 out of my own pocket, and she only had to pay $40 out of her own pocket, but she got to keep the $80. So she made $40,’ says Michelle.
“She got fired for drinking on the job,” the content creator added triumphantly.
Other social media users were quick to flock to the comments section with one writing: ‘Looks like way too much work for a few bucks.’
Another added: ‘The way my brain would just never work like this. All this blew my mind.’
And a third said: ‘I had colleagues do it all the time, I couldn’t justify it.’