Before we get to the details of the following story, we have a quick question to ask:
WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?!?
We think you’ll be asking this same question after hearing about what Sadie Elledge just went through.
She’s an 18-year old waitress who was recently working the lunch shift at Jess’ Lunch, a restaurant in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
As recounted in the following video, Elledge explains that she served a couple that ordered two gyros and a salad and then brought over the bill.
Business as usual, basically.
Speaking to WHSV reporter Isabel Rosales, however, Sadie goes on to say that the response was anything but usual.
Elledge believes she gave the couple perfectly decent service. Yet when it came time to pay the $ 26.11 bill, there was not any tip.
Instead, there was a horrible, racist, ignorant statement scrawled on the bottom of the receipt.
“We only tip citizens,” it read.
Yes, really. For real. This is what it said
See for yourself:
Not that it matters one bit, but just for the record:
Elledge’s father was born in Honduras and her mother was born in Mexico. Sade is a U.S. citizen who grew up in Harrisonburg.
So the patrons were mistaken in believing that she wasn’t a citizen. But that is far beside the point, of course.
“I thought it was real disrespectful,” she told Rosales in the Facebook Live interview we’ve shared above, adding that she’s sadly used to these kinds of insults:
“I’ve had people make comments like ‘Go make me a burrito,’ but that’s at school and I don’t pay attention.”
She’s a bigger person than we would be in her shoes, that’s for sure.
Elledge’s grandfather, John Elledge, told The Huffington Post that he as “far more upset” about the incident than his granddaughter
Sadie didn’t even tell him about what happened.
It was another granddaughter, who works as a secretary at John’s law firm, who passed along the receipt and the story behind it.
“She told me and I flew off the handle,” John says, adding that he went ahead and shared a photo of the disgraceful bill/message on his Facebook page.
“You are a complete and total piece of dung,” he wrote to the person who left it.
Thanks to social media and also to the restaurant pulling surveillance footage to try and identity the customers, John says the incident has become a popular topic in Harrisonburg.
“The way I understand it, the woman who signed the receipt is at the restaurant this very second with the police,” he said Thursday afternoon.
“She’s angry and the police are there. Apparently, she just signed the receipt. She didn’t write the comment.”
What is Sadie’s take on all of this?
She is looking for money or even an apology. She would prefer to send a broader message.
“It doesn’t matter whether I’m Hispanic or American or whatever you want to call it,” she says. “I’m still a person and you should still treat me with respect.”