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Staff at a US restaurant were left gobsmacked after a customer left a whopping $10,000 (£7,935) tip - before revealing the poignant motivation for his gesture.
The team at Mason Jar Cafe’s in Brenton Harbour, Michigan, said they usually see tips raging from around 15 to 25 percent while serving customers at the busy venue - but every so often they’ll be lucky enough to receive one that is slightly higher.
However, until earlier this month none of them had ever had a customer leave a whopping 30,835 percent.
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Speaking to The Hill, manager Tim Sweeney said: “Typically, we’ll see every now and then $100 (£79.35). But not ever anything of this gratitude or magnitude.”
The customer, who has been identified only as Mark, ran up a $32.43 (£25.73) bill at the restaurant and when it came time to pay he happily added a $10,000 tip.
Naturally, with such a large chunk of cash offered, Sweeney wanted to make sure the customer hadn’t made some sort of mistake.
He added: “We went back and forth. I had a conversation with him. He wanted to proceed.”
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It was then the kind-hearted stranger revealed the touching reason for the generous tip.
Server Paige Mulick said: “It was in memory of a friend who had recently passed and he was in town for the funeral.
“It was just really an act of kindness that impacted so many people.”
The team at the restaurant opted to split the $10,000 nine ways between staff - meaning everyone took home a little more than $1,100 (£872.88).
Newly graduated Mulick has said she’s going to put her share of the cash towards her student loans.
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She told The Hill: “I’ll lower that interest every bit I can!”
She then went on to praise her co-workers for their hard work and stressed how much the unexpected windfall meant to them all.
Mulick told the publication that on the shift in question there were ‘so many incredible women working that day, so many hard working mothers … just who really deserve this’.
“Every dollar counts at a job like this,” she continued. “We work hard. We know that some days you’re going to make more and some days you’re going to make less. That’s just part of how it goes. But we hustle hard and I think that a lot of people really deserve this.”
Claire Reid