Excuse me, you are paying for these martinis together, aren't you?
Nothing makes me feel less welcome when dining out than the arbitrary ‘NO SPLIT BILLS’ statement so often found on the bottom of menus, and on walls and cash registers in cafes and restaurants everywhere.
Any establishment that has this notice may as well have a sign that says, “NO DINING WITH OTHERS WITHOUT HAVING TO ENDURE A DEGRADING AND AWKWARD PROCESS OF NEGOTIATING WITH THE OTHER MEMBERS OF YOUR PARTY”.
What exactly do the owners of these establishments think happens when a group of friends goes out for a meal together? Do they think that one person pays for everyone? That we all leap out of our chairs, waving around our credit cards, fighting each other back for the right to pay double, triple or maybe even ten times more than the cost of our meal, just so we don’t force the staff to endure the increased intellectual burden of keeping more than one account per table?
I don’t know in what circles restaurateurs themselves are dining, but that’s not how it works here in Normalsville, Australia. In this town, unless you’re dining with a flamboyant drug dealer and you have tits you could crack a walnut on, everyone pays for themselves.
For a group of diners who have unknowingly sat down for a meal at one of these non-bill splitting restaurants, assuming no one has recently come into any significant money, there are two options.
The first is the equal split. Divide the total of the bill by the number of diners, and everyone pays the same. The benefit is that this is the lesser of two awkwards. Of course, if you’re a vegetarian or don’t drink alcohol, you’re screwed. This also means that anyone in your group who is on a budget and deliberately ate light is also screwed, and won’t be able to feed their children for the rest of the week.
The second option is the ‘pay for what you ate’ system. While this ends up fairer and accommodates the vegetarians, teetotalers, low income earners and tight arses, it reaches ‘earth-shattering’ on the awkward scale. Not only must everyone give a full and honest account of what they ate and drank, then calculate the exact value, but issues arise when it comes to garlic bread, bottles of wine and other shared items.
But refusing to split the bill doesn’t just benefit the establishment by saving the staff from having to make a few extra calculations. The less obvious, but far more lucrative reason that a restaurant will only offer one account per table is that diners are more likely to take the path of least awkwardness and simply split the total evenly. Every clever restaurant owner knows that the total on a collective bill is likely to be higher than the sum of a number of individual bills.
This is because when a bill is shared evenly across a group, the other people pay the majority of the cost of any item you order. So if there are 10 people dining and you order a $30 steak, you will only have to pay for $3 of it, the remaining $27 is paid by the rest of the party. Since it’s fun to get something for nothing, it doesn’t take long for people to figure out that they should order up big, especially if everybody else is.
So splitting the bill not only costs a restaurant time, but it also costs revenue. That means that a dining venue that cheerfully agrees to help you out by making the split should be celebrated as a bastion of genuine dedication to customer service, and is safe to attend with a party consisting of vegetarians and non-drinkers. Why you would want to put yourself through dinner with people like that, is a different issue altogether.
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Scotty
If you haven’t had the pleasure of dining at Vapiano somewhere around the world (and now in downtown Brisvegas), every patron, regardless of whether in a couple, group or alone, is given a swipe card. The idea is very funky in that you order your fresh pasta at the counter and your card is swiped at the time. Same deal at the bar. Sure, it’s not a fine dining experience, but it’s fantastic fresh food and chunky Italian vino, PLUS you all get to pay separately! Perhaps more restaurants should take a leaf…..
I am assuming that the writer of this blog has never owned nor run a restaurant and therefore cannot begin to fathom the time and added pressure it puts on the staff who have to forfeit their time and service better served to other patrons cause Joe Blow and his 15 guests want to split the bill 15 different ways. Do you know how long it takes to process multiple EFTPOS cards? I personally did a favour for a friend who had booked for 40 people for dinner and each person wanted to pay separately. It took 45 mins for me to stand there and single out what each person had and then run it through the til and process payment. And after all that, do you think one person tipped? NO! Not one person thought, “hey this is great customer service”.
If a cafe/restaurant stipulates that there is “no bill splitting” it is for a logical reason, not because “Every clever restaurant owner knows that the total on a collective bill is likely to be higher than the sum of a number of individual bills”- this is simply not the case and if you honestly believe this applies to all restaurants that do not split bills then you are extremely sinical and I pity you.
As a restauranteur that doesn’t split bills, I will say this, we tell you when you order off the menu of our bill splitting policy and signage is displayed. So if you have a real problem bringing money along to a group dinner and stress at the thought of not getting your 10c change, then maybe you should reconsider dining out at all. Because alot of restaurants hold this policy and we stand by it.
First, it has to be questioned wether the refusal to “spit the bill” is actually legal, as this presumes a binding contract between the restaurant and one person, or organisation, at the table.
Such conduct presumes that, where a booking may have been made by someone booking on behalf of friends, that person was told “YOU are our customer and are PERSONALLY responsible for paying for everything consumed – everyone else is your guest”.
Obviously, this is absurd. Restaurants really ought to understand that no such agreement exists, except where an event or function has taken place. Rather, they are actually serving multiple customers at one table. Each customer consumes goods of differing taste, value, qualtity.
The situation becomes even more absurd when we consider the growing number of people who don’t carry cash and consequently rely on credit cards.
As a restauranteur of many years myself, I would suggest to others (like L.V.W.) that reconsider their purpose. Any business that cannot institute a simple table accounting system should not be in the business.
And then when it comes to staff, one must respect the business they are in. It’s called HOSPITALITY, and it’s a SERVICE business. Management & staff must surely understand that.
In short, it is the restaurant that has the billing facilities, cash register & change. They should reconsider the business they are in when they are so intent on subjecting their customers to such humiliation.
Wake up & realise that a table of 8 people is not one customer – it’s 8 customers.