YouTuber tips waitress $10,000: 'Good things still happen to good people'

A waitress in North Carolina got a $10,000 tip, and all she did was deliver two waters.

Alaina Custer arrived at work at 4 p.m. this past Friday when her boss, Bret Oliverio, owner of the Sup Dogs restaurant in Greenville, N.C., assigned her a table that would change her life. “The two guys at the table started sipping their waters and looking at the menu, and then kind of just walked away,” Oliverio tells Yahoo Lifestyle.

He then sent Custer over to see what had happened. “So I went over there and I wasn’t paying attention, looking down at the ground, and I’m like, ‘They’re not even here,’” Custer tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “And then I looked at the table.” That’s when she hit the jackpot. “There was a note on the table that said, ‘Thanks for the waters,’ and a stack 3 or 4 inches high of $100 bills,” Oliverio recalls.

It totaled $10,000, and it was just for the two waters — and a big tip, of course. “It was crazy,” Oliverio says. Adds Custer: “I was just mind blown. I’m just like, there’s no way this is real. I thought it was fake, like someone was playing a joke on me. So I didn’t want to get really excited about it. I was so confused. I was like, OK, no one’s gonna leave this big a tip. I did nothing besides get them waters. It was wild. I was shaking so much. And I just kept asking Bret, ‘What is this?!’”

The two guys at the next table had the answer to her question. “I saw them taking pictures of me and asked if they knew what was going on, and they said, ‘You just got tipped for the waters.’ And I was like, ‘OK, I do not need that much money for waters — you guys are crazy.’ And they told me that they were with Mr. Beast and they do YouTube videos.”

Turns out, this was the work of a very popular YouTuber, one who’s known for handing out cash. Mr. Beast (his YouTube name is MrBeast) has almost 9 million subscribers and lives in Greenville. His videos frequently revolve around spending money, whether it’s handing hundreds to strangers or buying $50,000 worth of lottery tickets.

“Mr. Beast’s camera team just kept saying, ‘Good things still happen to good people,’ which I thought was cool,” Oliverio remembers.

“And then the two guys that originally got the waters walked back in, and I gave them all hugs,” says Custer. The 22-year-old nursing student and Oliverio didn’t recognize anyone in the group. “So they said, ‘We were the ones who did the money tree a while back,’ and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I do remember that,’” Custer recalls.

This money tree is exactly what it sounds like: The Mr. Beast team stuck bills to trees in front of restaurants and in parks, and watched as people helped themselves. That video was posted in June and has more than 4 million views.

The video from the recent restaurant outing just went live and has almost 500,000 views so far. “We have a $30,000 budget for this video,” Mr. Beast says in the beginning of the video. They go to multiple restaurants, starting out with just a penny tip and increasing the amount as they go along. Custer was the lucky recipient of $10,000 — the largest tip in the video.

However, this isn’t the most money Mr. Beast has ever given one person, which he makes clear at the end of the video before highlighting some of the crazy things he’s done on his YouTube channel. He has another video in which he gives outrageous tips to restaurant staff. He also has a few videos in which he donates large sums of money or loads of supplies to homeless people and shelters.

“I enjoy the feeling of giving to others,” Mr. Beast tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “Seeing the surprised look on someone’s face after giving them a large amount of money never gets old to me. Which is why I love the position I am in. Companies pay YouTubers like me for promotion in our videos, and I just take that money and try to think of fun ways I can use it to help people.”

In a June 2017 video, he explains that he is giving 100 percent of the money he receives from sponsors away to “random people.”

Turns out, Custer is just as generous. “Immediately she was like, ‘I can’t keep this,’” Oliverio says. “Her first comment was, ‘We should split it up.’” Custer kept $800 and split the rest among the entire staff. “So cooks, bus guys, hosts, food runners, servers … we have a pretty big staff, close to 80 people. So everyone else got either $100 or $200,” Oliverio explains. “If anyone’s ever worked in the restaurant business, especially a high-volume restaurant, it’s just incredibly hard work.”

This all happened over homecoming weekend, when the restaurant was extra-busy. “We were working all day, all night, nonstop,” says Oliverio. “So it was nice that out of nowhere, everyone left with a nice chunk of money in their pocket.”

For Custer, sharing the money was the only option. “I just felt like I didn’t deserve that. I didn’t deserve that money at all; I got them waters,” she says. “I didn’t think it would be fair for everybody if I took all of that money. And I wanted to do what was the most fair for everybody, so splitting it up felt like the right thing to do.”

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

• Applebee’s waitress told ‘we don’t tip black people’ by customers

• Waitress stiffed a tip on a $735 takeout order, then fired after she complained on Facebook

• A customer grabbed this waitress’s backside, so she took him down

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