One waiter’s rough shift turned into a life-changing moment after pop singer Jason Derulo left a $5,000 tip — enough to pay for an entire semester of college.
“I couldn’t believe it. Like, seeing $5,000 written out on the check was just — it was, like, heart-stopping, you know,” Jordan Schaffer, a waiter at Charleston’s in West Omaha, said.
Shaffer found out that he would be serving a party of 18 people on his March 7 shift, which he greeted with an upbeat attitude, saying that he found those kinds of groups “fun to have.”
But the group turned out to be Derulo and his entourage, which stunned Shaffer.
“I was, like, ‘Seriously?’ What the heck is Jason Derulo doing in Omaha?” Shaffer told KETV.
The group included Derulo’s family and business partner who had invested with him in a new Omaha women’s volleyball team.
Shaffer praised his team for helping make things run smoothly, saying he believed they had provided Derulo with a “perfect” experience.
And Derulo must have agreed, because he left an outrageous tip — so outrageous that Shaffer posted about it on TikTok. He told Derulo that his heart was “beating really fast” after seeing the number on the check.
In the TikTok video, Shaffer said that it would pay for one semester at his college. Tuition was due last week, and he had come up short, so the tip has taken “a lot of stress out of my life.”
“Serving @jasonderulo and his family is something I’ll never forget I cannot say thank you enough,” Shaffer wrote on the post.
Derulo told Shaffer that the staff had been “really awesome.”
He followed up his initial comment with one on the video itself, saying that Shaffer seemed “like a great person.”
