When dining out with a group and the bill arrives how do you go about paying? Do you shovel money into the center of the table knowing that you’ve covered your portion? Or are you eyeing the size of your wine glass and covertly calculating on your cell phone the percentage of the bottle you had?
Mind Your Decisions comments on dividing a restaurant bill and essentially gives three common sense approaches and then an “ideal outcome” which I think seems a bit heavy handed.
Common Sense Approaches:
- Splitting evenly with the caveats that you have to pay for the people who order expensive items and drinks.
- Pay for what you ordered. This can lead to some gray areas with regards to a shared bottle of wine or appetizers and it can tend toward the splitting evenly approach.
- Separate checks. Financially the most favorable (from a customer’s perspective) but a few practical problems in that some restaurants can’t/won’t split checks or problems with splitting shared items across the checks.
Proposed Ideal Approach:
- Choose a few comparatively priced items on the menu and inform everyone (preferably beforehand) that there will essentially be a fixed menu for the group with a pre-assigned cost. This way, people will still have a choice however the amount owed has all been calculated beforehand.
This just doesn’t jive with my idea of going out to a restaurant. I’d like to be able to choose anything from the menu and not rely on the organizer to pick out a few options for me. If three options will be chosen for the whole group I think we can assume they will be safer options - something I try to stay away from when going to a restaurant!
To be honest, I haven’t run into the problem of people short changing on how much they owe very often. Our strategy is generally to pay what you ordered with this usually entailing looking at the bill and estimating on the high end what is owed. Some will overpay by $5 and some will underpay by $5 but in the end it evens out. And if we are a bit short the money counter will let the table know and usually a guilty party will cough up $5 more. I’d much rather this ad-hoc calculation at the end of the meal than all this planning beforehand.
The thought of preparing a plan to dine out with a group just seems like too much work for too little (if any) reward.
