To think you don’t get out of paying the bill because you don’t drink?

Tipping exists in certain industries for a reason.

Minimum wage means minimum effort. Fine if you're just stacking shelves at Asda. But people don't go to restaurants because they are hungry, they go there for the experience. Having a shelf stacker speak to you in a rude, sullen manner when you asked where the Beans are is understandable. But when you're paying £100 or more for meal in a restaurant, you expect more than minimum effort from the staff. A rude server can ruin the atmosphere. So tipping is an incentive for the restaurant staff to provide a level of service over and above what minimum wage would imply.

Who are all these mad people, who think that, if you have soft drinks, all the people at the table drinking alcohol, should pay for their own drinks and also club together to pay for your drinks? I'm sensing some animus towards drinkers here, but this is ridiculous.

Unless you're in the US, you don't need to tip in the UK as we actually pay workers properly.

This
I've been known to like a drink or three and wouldn't dream of someone else sucking up the cost of my wine or whatever!
Not fair when you're only on a few cokes/lemonades.
YABU

In the scenario you give it doesn't sound like splitting the bill would have made much difference. However in MOST circumstances a person having soft drinks would be at a huge disadvantage to those drinking alcohol. A bottle of wine shared or a round of cocktails and the person drinking coke is going to be hugely out of pocket.

YABU to suggest its not ok to ask to pay for what you have eaten/drank.

Thanks for your note about tipping. To be honest I had never thought about it that way before. You’re going to save me a lot of money! I always give my hair dresser an extra tenner but I’m going to stop doing this if it’s actually causing harm so it will be win win if it makes her life better too and I save a tenner a month.

I don’t want to pay for everyone else’s bottles of wine, thank you. If I’m not drinking. And I also don’t tip. Anywhere ever!

Becuase she asked to split out the alcohol but didn't split out her own drinks. Nobody wanted her to subsidise their drinks and they wouldn't have minded if she'd paid for her own instead of expecting everyone to split them.

Just "coke" could mean either diet or normal coke, really. It's possibly relevant that it was classic Coke as opposed to diet, because classic is subject to the sugar tax and supposedly more expensive (although in restuarants this doesn't seem to be the case very often)

I still don't understand why you think she's cheeky when you were happy for her to subside your booze. That makes no sense. Fwiw, ita very rare for someone's non-alcoholic drinks to almost cost the same as alcoholic ones

I've never heard "fat coke", I've heard "full fat coke" many, many times.

No - the friend paid less than her share because they all split the cost of her drinks, and she didnt split the cost of theirs.

And she didn't realise until later so I doubt anything showed at the table.

Everybody did not pay their share. The CF paid £2.50 for £10 worth of drinks. The OP (and each of two other people) paid £15 for £12.50 worth of drinks.

If everything that happened had been the normal things that always happen, there wouldn't be a thread. But if the OP is at all accurate in her reporting, it makes very little sense that someone would say, I quote

‘’Can we please calculate it all with the alcohol you’ve had separately paid for? Because I only had classical cokes’’

and mean "Can we split the bill."

I have, recently, and I was surprised.
There were 3 of us and they said they could only split the bill in two, not any further.
That's normal, usually one person pays and we transfer or bring cash to pay the person.

What is the issue?
It worked out, everyone paid their share.
I bet it was obvious that you were irritated about it at the table. Yabu.

FWIW when i go out with friends i often don’t drink even if not driving and they will usually offer to pay for my drinks, as its assumed soft drinks are cheaper than alcohol. I will either have a (proper) Coke or soda water, so its Russian roulette who gets to pay £5 and who gets to pay £0 for my drink!

I’m sure she just didn’t realise how expensive her classical cokes were going to be compared to alcohol and thought she didn’t want to end up paying loads for drinks she didn’t have.

As it turned out there wasn’t much in it, but whoever calculated the bill is obviously a very literal person and did exactly what she said - “took the alcohol off” rather than what was most likely implied - “we all pay for our own drinks”.

I think its more commonly known as Fat Coke (as opposed to Diet Coke) rather than Full Fat Coke

i never split bills, only pay for what i have, and i also never tip! I'm your nightmare it seems

Does sound like you all split the bill incorrectly though

I have, recently, and I was surprised.
There were 3 of us and they said they could only split the bill in two, not any further.

It was a bit complicated as we all had cards rather than cash, so we ended up trekking to a bank machine afterwards to settle things up between us (don’t have Revolut).

It put me off the place tbh, and I’ll be choosing somewhere else next time, especially as the food wasn’t amazing or anything.

Because that makes less sense.

I think you resented this friend of a friend coming. The split was clearly done wrongly, assuming the rest of you didn't have 3 soft drinks as well as the alcohol. However, between 4 of you, that's only around £2.50 extra each so I wouldn't be making a fuss over it.

I happened to go for a meal with three friends recently too. One didn't have any alcohol (only tap water) or a dessert so we worked out the cost for each of us without those, then split the rest between three.

You should have spoken up if you thought the split was unfair but personally I wouldn't quibble over a few quid. With this group we usually split four equal ways unless the difference in what we have is very obvious. Obviously your 4th was a stranger so it seems like you feel she was taking advantage.

I call ‘classical coke’ full fat coke.

I think she was cheeky. She could have just paid separately and let the rest of you split if you wanted to.

Yes and that’s why I said it’s nice to tip for people working evenings / unsociable hours

Why not? I think it sounds funny.