It’s a typical day at the Columbus restaurant where Mac Ludy works as a server.
Her regulars, the men at least, take a particular liking to her red hair.
“Gingers are better,” they will say, or various versions of that. By now, she’s come to expect it.
Between serving tables, her manager asks her to clean the baseboards. As she bends to start the task, one regular customer interrupts her with a not-so-unusual request: a hug.
Not wanting to compromise her tip or make the customer upset, she obliges.
“You’d go over there and give them a hug and feel their hand slip lower and lower to the point where you’re kind of frozen in place,” said Ludy, who was a teenager and working her first restaurant job at the time this happened.
“… There was (another) instance where a (male customer) waited for me to get off work, and that was a four-hour time span,” she said. “He just sat there and waited. I could feel him watching me every time I’d go up to my tables. And I was getting off of work and going out to my car, and there he was following me out to my car.”
Ludy worked at three restaurants over four years before she stopped waitressing in January. But she carries memories of sexual comments and advances from customers.
It’s an experience shared by virtually every current or former wait staff interviewed for this story.
The Dispatch interviewed 14 servers as they told their stories of sexual comments and harassment on the job. Eleven servers interviewed were female, while three were male.
With the exception of Ludy, all servers interviewed for this story requested anonymity due to fear of losing their jobs or other retaliation for speaking out.
‘They do what they can get away with’
All of the female servers interviewed by The Dispatch agreed they had received some kind of unwanted comment on their physical appearance while on the job. This included comments on their hair, body shape, and overall physical appeal.
Customer comments can also become overtly sexual, some waitresses said, with male customers explicitly mentioning pornography, “sexual intercourse” and starting an “OnlyFans” to their waitresses. OnlyFans is a website that allows anyone to sell subscriptions to photos or videos – often pornographic – of themselves.
A few female servers also mentioned that regular customers will often grow bolder over time, escalating from a small comment here or there to more overtly sexual comments once they feel more comfortable with their waitress.
“They do what they can to get away with,” a Columbus waitress said. “Whether it’s asking if I’ve ever had sex before or asking if I have a hard time putting my jeans on – that happens more times than I can count.”
Several female servers agreed they primarily receive sexual comments and advances from older men, though one Starkville waitress said younger men will also make advances, just in subtler ways, like leaving their phone numbers on receipts.
While some said female servers said male customers tend to make more comments when they are alone, others said they make more comments in groups, when they feel “bolder.”
The male experience tends to be less aggressive, according to three sources who spoke to The Dispatch. Two former male servers said they tended to get comments infrequently, while a third said sometimes, customers’ inappropriate comments make it hard to do his job.
”I have to sometimes go to the back and reset my mind and try to just push it away sometimes,” he said. “It will throw you off your work.”
One Columbus waitress said she was propositioned by two men that were about her “dad’s age” on the job. These situations, she believes, are fueled by the perceived power imbalance between the wait staff and the customers.
“You’re literally serving this person,” she said. “You’re accommodating them. You are purposefully being nice to them, making small talk with them, laughing at their jokes. I don’t know, I feel like there’s a power trip there, and I find that it’s often by older men.”
‘Play along’
A March 2022 data brief from the National Restaurant Association reported 54% of restaurant and foodservice employees are female, and females make up a majority of tipped positions in the restaurant industry, including 70% of waitstaff and 58% of bartenders.
Some servers react to sexual comments from customers by laughing them off or otherwise ignoring them. Protecting their tips was the most common reasoning.
According to a 2021 report from One Fair Wage, “Tipped workers who receive a subminimum wage (which occurs in 4 of 5 states) experience sexual harassment at a rate higher than their non-tipped counterparts.”
Mississippi employers follow federal tip credit rules, since the state does not have its own tip and wage laws. This means employers can pay a minimum of $2.13 an hour, as long as the employee earns enough in tips to reach the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
One former waitress/bartender in Columbus said she often used to “play along” with the comments, to protect her tips so she could pay her bills.
“I knew I wasn’t going to be able to pay my electricity bill if I did not come off as super pleasant, play along with all the flirtation,” she said. “I would never go so far as to joke back sexually, but you know you just smile and say, ‘Ha ha ha, you’re so funny’ and keep going.”
Physical safety
All but two female servers The Dispatch interviewed said a customer has made them feel physically unsafe in some form.
One Columbus waitress said she doesn’t speak out when sexual comments or incidents occur due to anxiety and fear of physical retribution from the customer.
“Any time something like that happens, I do just try to say thank you and try to steer the conversation away,” she said. “I’m fearful of angering men. I’ve just read too many stories and heard too many instances of women turning down men and them becoming angry or violent.”
The waitress with 16 years of experience in restaurants said she used to laugh off sexual comments, but she has learned to “get loud” over the years, making managers and customers notice when an incident is occuring.
That often costs her tips, she said, making it more difficult to pay her bills and feed her two sons. But she has learned that she can’t “play” with male customers anymore, particularly after one customer followed her home after her shift ended.
“He actually went to the point of knocking on my bathroom window,” she said. “And I went outside and nobody was there. But I knew who it was because the next day he dropped hints about where I live. And I told him that if I ever catch him around that house, I will shoot him, because I do carry. And I never saw him again. I don’t play with these men (any)more.”
Two other waitresses also told The Dispatch they had been followed after work.
A Columbus woman, who has worked in the restaurant industry for 50 years, said “of course” she has had a customer make her feel unsafe.
She still remembers an incident where a man grabbed her breasts in the restaurant when she was 19. While sexual behaviors have changed toward her over the years, they have never fully stopped.
“You would think that at my age, they wouldn’t still be doing this stuff … but I still find every once in a while somebody will say something and act inappropriately,” she said.
Report to management
All of the servers had different experiences reporting inappropriate behavior to higher management. In some cases, servers found it easy to approach their managers with a problem, while others found their managers to be as bad as the customers they were reporting.
“The problem with going to a manager is – unless it’s a woman, and even then, sometimes I’m not comfortable with it – but for a man as my manager, I’ve noticed that if you flirt with them and you stay on their good side and you’re chosen as a favorite, then they’re also just as bad,” a Columbus woman said. “Because they will let it slide (from a customer).”
The former male Starkville host said he was uncomfortable reporting situations he witnessed to management, since complaints had been ignored.
A few servers mentioned that a better relationship with management helped improve their safety at work. Several said a manager had intervened with a customer, took over a table for them, or in more extreme cases, kicked a customer out.
“Management has got to be dialed in and support their staff,” a Starkville server said. “We are in the South, and I know there’s still a lot of backwards thoughts about women. The management has to be on board and behind you.”
Dave Hood, owner of Dave’s Dark Horse Tavern, and Rick Welch, who owns Rick’s Cafe, both say they maintain a zero tolerance policy when it comes to customers being rude to a member of the crew.
“Be it physically or verbally. Those people are asked to leave and barred from returning,” Hood said in a text to The Dispatch. “It happens infrequently, say maybe three times a year, but that is still too many.”
Putting a stop to it
Among the waitresses interviewed, there were two key points in stopping customers from sexually harassing their servers: public discussion and accountability.
Two servers, both in Starkville, mentioned they have coached younger women who are entering the restaurant business to not put up with the sexual behaviors and to report what they experience.
“If you don’t talk about it, nothing’s going to change,” said the Columbus waitress with 50 years experience. “If you don’t talk about being physically assaulted, nothing’s going to change on that either. You can’t keep it a secret whenever they hurt you. You have to tell somebody.”
But the culture of silence is ending as a new generation steps into the role of servers, Ludy said.
“With millennials and Gen Z, my generation, growing up, we realize what our worth is, and we’re not going to take this kind of behavior,” Ludy said. “We don’t want to have to deal with this kind of behavior, nor should we have to.”
In January, a female server from Columbus anonymously posted about a sexual comment involving a customer on Facebook. She told The Dispatch the comments section was filled with more backlash and praise than she expected.
“It’s just not as easy as it sounds,” she said. “Everyone makes it sound like you … should let everyone know who you are, and it’s OK to speak up. But at the same time, when you do, the backlash you get is just as much as the praise you get for it.”
Ludy said one of the reasons that customers “get away” with sexual behaviors toward wait staff is because no one holds them accountable, including managers, the server who doesn’t want to lose their job, and the customer’s dining companions. She said men should hold each other accountable for their actions. Several anonymous servers agreed.
Another Starkville bartender/waitress simply called for men to stop making sexual comments to women while they’re working.
“If you’re trying to find a girlfriend, maybe don’t hit on them at work and view us as people,” she said.
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You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 36 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
