Who is BU? Possible CF-ery over bill splitting

[IHaveAGreyLamp]

I’m interested in peoples opinions on how a restaurant bill should have been split as currently my family are 50/50 as to who is BU!

Last week my parents, DSis and her husband, toddler DD and I went for a family lunch.

DParents had two bottles of wine. BIL had four pints. DSis had a glass of Prosecco and then two glasses of wine from the wine on the table. I had one glass of Prosecco. DSis and my Dad had liqueur coffees also.

After a lovely meal, toddler DD got a bit fractious and tired. It was taking ages to get the bill so I asked if my parents would cover my bill so I could make a swift exit and that I’d pay them when I saw them again.

Yesterday I gave my mum £30, to cover my food and one Prosecco and also a bit towards a tip.

DM is now demanding an extra £15 because they ‘split’ the bill between the 5 of us. I don’t even mind splitting a bill evenly (even if someone people had more courses etc) but given that they all had a lot to drink and I didn’t, I don’t think I should be contributing to the booze that the rest of them had!

DSis and BIL doesn’t think it’s fair I should be made to pay for the drink, but my parents do. Usually if I’m out for a meal I will happily split it if things are fairly even, and if I’d had even just one glass of wine from the bottle I would have just split it without argument (I wouldn’t be whipping out the calculator to see how much I owed for one glass of wine from a bottle type of thing!) But I’m a bit miffed because if I’ve been drinking at dinner and others haven’t, I will always say it’s not fair for the non-drinkers to pay for alcohol and will usually insist that the drinks bill is sorted separately to the food bill.

What do you think? Should I have been funding their lunch time drinking and just sucked it up? Or are they being cheeky?

YABU- You should have accepted the splitting of the bill including the booze
YANBU- It’s unfair of them to expect you to pay for the booze when you didn’t have any

@opinionatedfreak

Nit picking over bills when out for a group meal irritates me.

I"m of the split the bill equally and it will all come out in the wash brigade.

But then I can afford to be down £15. When I'm out with friends with children we always split by adult..... got burned by that one at the weekend as my friends teens demolished a huge pizza each and then had dessert! Lucky I love them.

You have a CF friend then who would even allow this. No way would I allow somebody I was splitting the bill with to mop up adult-cost meals on the premise that 'children' were eating them.

Calling it 'Nit-picking over bills' and being sneery about it isn't very nice either. OP said at the outset that she is being careful.

Agree with PP, it is always the bill-splitters who take advantage; not ALL bill-splitters, obviously, but it is always them. Funny that.

I would just pay it on this occasion with the caveat that in future you are just splitting the food and tip and paying for drink separately when some are drinking significantly more..

Just ignore any further requests for money. I’m amazed your DParents can even remember what the bill was or who had what after that session. With cocktails afterwards they must have been truly pissed.

They are being cheeky . I hate people who do this.

It is customary to split bill evenly unless agreed in advance

This may have been an etiquette developed when eating out was something that only very comfortably off families did. When I was a child no-one except much richer families went out to eat - the chippy or a cafe or a cheese roll in the pub at the most!

Nowadays when all sorts of people on all sorts of budgets eat out, or suggest meeting for a pub lunch good manners require that everyone remain sensitive to what model is affordable. And sharing the costs of restaurant-priced bottles of wine quickly adds up. You risk causing real upset if you blithely assume an outdated model of bill splitting. It might work for your friends, it doesn't work for everyone.

I absolutely think you weren't being unreasonable but I used to get annoyed with a uni friend twenty years ago who would always say 'But you guys had wine . . . ' and overlook the fact that she'd had three cokes costing roughly the same as the half bottle each of vin ordinaire my friend and I had.

@ILoveYoga

It is customary to split bill evenly unless agreed in advance, then you could have your own bill. Suggest you do that going forward and it avoids any problems

With that said, I do think it petty for your parents to insist on the £15. That’s not a lot of money and to cause family discord over £15 seems very petty

No it isn't ! I eat out three times a week with friends and we pay our own !

If the bill is usually split when you go out with them, meaning some other time they have subsidized you, then it is bad form to suddenly only want to pay for yours because it is lower.
If you usually each pay your own, or if you split evenly but there is never more than £5 difference between everybody then YANBU.

It's funny how it's always the people who benefit from others subsidising them are the ones who kick up a fuss as if you're the tight one, when in fact it's them. My BiL is the same, drinks like a fish then makes out we're stingy when we don't want to subsidise him.

I think you all sound a bit tight!!

When I go for a meal with my family everyone wants to pay the bill!!! Sometimes we split evenly between couples / families.

@imamearcat

I think you all sound a bit tight!!

When I go for a meal with my family everyone wants to pay the bill!!! Sometimes we split evenly between couples / families.

Why don't you just pay the whole thing then, if you're that magnanimous?

But anybody can say anywhere here, can't they.

I would pay up this time to avoid bad feeling and an argument but next time say at the beginning that you will pay for your own rather than split the bill.

We do pay the whole thing sometimes. Kind of depends who we are out with / where we are.

With my parents we go out for meals quitet a bit so we tend to pay one time and then my mum and dad will pay the next. But my dad always really really wants to pay for some reason so have to watch him for sneakily paying the bill!!

DHs family is much bigger so would be pretty pricy to pay it all! With them either his parents would pay (quite wealthy) or would be split between the 4 siblings / families and parents not pay anything.

Would never get to this itemised billing people talk about.

I think if you're going to leave before the bill is paid, you should expect the bill to be split evenly unless you specifically throw down some cash to cover your portion before making an exit. They've already calculated your share of the bill and correcting it now means getting more money off various other people - it's a hassle.

If your family have form for this, and you can't afford to subsidise them, walking off without putting down the share you wanted to calculate was a mistake.

I personally wouldn't quibble, but if you're a SAHM and the others are better off than you, in a family situation I'd have expected them to just pay for you anyway. And if a family member owed me £15, I wouldn't be chasing it up either.

It's just very messy. I don't think anyone has covered themselves in glory - DSis and BIL piping up now is pointless, if they thought your share was unfair, they should have spoken up when they were calculating/sorting the bill the other night.

Personally, I'd pay up but refuse all further family meals by saying it was too expensive to eat out with them last time and you can only afford to eat out with your friends who prefer to just pay for what they eat/drink. I can't see your family changing their ways.

This isn't about £15.
This is about one of your parents having the 'after all I do for people this is how they treat me!' syndrome.
Maybe Parent A tends to offload on the other behind the scenes. Parent A complains to Parent B about the kids being Ungrateful and treating 'us' like dirt.
Then this pressurises Parent B to go off and do the dirty work.

It's funny how it's always the people who benefit from others subsidising them are the ones who kick up a fuss as if you're the tight one, when in fact it's them. My BiL is the same, drinks like a fish then makes out we're stingy when we don't want to subsidise him.

Agreed. It's very easy to brag about always splitting the bill evenly when you aren't the person who consistently spends far less.

YANBU OP. I can understand suggesting splitting the bill evenly to the group at the time without sparing a thought for who spent most, but to actually seek you out afterwards to demand you make up the difference, knowing that you'd already given enough to cover what you spent, is ridiculous.

Hate bill splitting anyway. Pay for what you've had. If everyone eksecthere wants to split they can split between the remaining people. Otherwise all the CF's come out and you end up paying for some greedy guts to scoff oysters, steak, caviar, dessert and booze and coffee liqueur while someone else only has a salad and bread.

IM never paying for what others had if my meal only cost a tenner. I went for an indian with work what i had came to £12 when they split it they wanted £25. I specifically only spent £12 as that is all I had. Luckily for me someone else paid mine. I don't drink so no way would I pay for someones alcohol.

Say you'll pay the £15 when they pay half of what they owe to your sister and BIL for the drinks, you know, since they're all about sharing the bill and not taking advantage of people etc etc.

Always have the discussion in advance and if you're not drinking or you're having fewer courses than everyone else then say so and be upfront that you'll pay your share.

Urgh, I hate this. Nobody should assume that one of their party is going to buy them drinks all through dinner. I could never go out with that assumption. I choose what I want to eat and drink and what I can afford. If we're all going out and eating and drinking roughly the same of course we split it but to go out with the assumption that one can order what they wish because somebody else will pay for it is exceptionally bad manners. What these people don't realise is that they are the tight ones who are not paying their way.
If I've got it right it's actually your sister and her husband who owe them £7.50 as presumably they were happy to buy the rounds later on and that was a separate transaction from the shared meal.

@opinionatedfreak

Nit picking over bills when out for a group meal irritates me.

I"m of the split the bill equally and it will all come out in the wash brigade.

But then I can afford to be down £15. When I'm out with friends with children we always split by adult..... got burned by that one at the weekend as my friends teens demolished a huge pizza each and then had dessert! Lucky I love them.

This is why when I go out with a group of friends we each have a rough idea of how much we've spent and just round our share up to the next £5 and bung a few notes in to cover our share. The rounding up usually more than covers the tip.

Some of us come from further away and therefore don't normally drink alcohol as we're usually driving. Others routinely stay locally and usually drink. One of the drivers is a veggie so it would never balance out if we just split.

There's another post on here right now dealing with the exact same subject.

Have a look OP: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4070708-Who-is-really-unreasonable-here-I-ve-been-made-out-to-be-awful

I may be generalising here but I have known more than one couple who have been heavy drinkers and also been quite tight with not just bill sharing but lots of things where they will benefit financially from a shared event.

Maybe the two go hand in hand 🤷‍♀️

Ooh I hate this! Tell them that you’re happy to pay your way, but you aren’t a charity for their party!