Influencer branded ‘entitled’ after exposing ‘extremely rude’ restaurant

A TikToker and aspiring influencer was branded “entitled” after documenting her experiences of reaching out to a restaurant to set up a collaboration.

Jamieson May, who goes by @jamiesonmayyy on TikTok, is a Melbourne-based content creator who shares food and travel videos.

May has more than 17,000 followers and regularly reaches out to different venues – however, she was met with a response she wasn’t expecting from a vegetarian restaurant in Melbourne called Patsy’s.

After she reached out, the restaurant said that her follower count wasn’t high enough.

She reacted by posting a video called “exposing a restaurant for being extremely unprofessional and rude”, which quickly became the subject of a backlash online, with people accusing May of being "entitled" in the comments section.

In the video, she says: “I had no words, I am disgusted someone could say that to another person.

“Your follower count does not define you! You might have 10x better content than someone with 1 million followers!!

“I wanted to create this video to let all other content creators know that this is extremely unprofessional.”

The video also showed her post screenshots of the message exchange she had with the owners of the restaurant.

“You don’t seem to have any followers, maybe you should approach us when you have over 100k,” the message from the restaurant read.

After she called the original message “extremely rude”, they replied saying: “Perhaps… but you are pretending to be influential on social media and that’s just not true.”

Speaking to news.com.au, May said: "When I first outed the restaurant on TikTok, it reached the wrong audience of non-creators and influencers who didn’t understand what was happening.

“People sent extremely rude comments that I am just an ‘entitled influencer’ who just wants ‘free’ stuff and I am complaining about it all.

“I have worked with many restaurants other business over the last four years and I had never experienced such rudeness. I was in shock.”

Now, the owners of Patsy’s Mathew Guthrie and Clinton Trevisi, have defended the messages.

Speaking to news.com.au, Guthrie said: “I think judging from her reaction to me being blunt about her unsolicited marketing reach out, she was surprised that we were not interested working with her…”

Guthrie added: “Obviously the reason we did not want to collaborate with her is quite easy to understand when you glance through her profiles on various sites.

“Her followers are not really people that we have in the venue often and probably not the market that we are looking to engage with.”

They also said that they didn’t want to “add to the pile on” of negative comments, but added: “I think she was just hoping to increase her visibility with these outrage posts. It sort of has worked already but I am not sure how it will be able to be monetized as marketing.”

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