When tipping becomes a way to discriminate

The restaurant business, like any business, can have issues with discrimination, sometimes in the unlikeliest venues. A friend of mine was standing in line at a tiny midtown Chinese restaurant recently, waiting to pay her bill, when she overheard a conversation between a customer and the restaurant’s owner that surprised her.

“The customer was a male student from India, and he was looking at his check and asking the person behind the counter why it was higher than he thought it should be,” she told me. “He was told that because he was Indian, his gratuity was automatically added to the check.”