Splitting the bill - ended up paying 3x my consumption

[Jyas]

Not an AIBU but more a WWYD…I’m in a hobby group and about every 2-3 months we treat ourselves to a nice dinner. There’s usually 8-10 of us and we always split the bill. It’s normally around £50 per person. This week we went to a restaurant which was more on the upper end of what we usually go for. Mains were £25 - £45. We all chose our food, but when ordering, the waiter managed to talk 3 of us into trying ‘the chefs special’. This was a rather elaborate and unusual dish, he didn’t mention the price but I would have thought it would be between £55-£60 at least from the description. When the bill came, they realised that it was over £90. The 3 offered to take one bottle of wine out of the total and share it between them to make up for their expensive dish.
In the end we paid £110 each and they paid £125 each. However, my main was £25 and plus drinks (i only had one water and one glass of wine from the shared bottle, others had much more to drink, and most had a starter but i didn’t). I would have paid around £40. So I ended up paying 3x as much.

We all really don’t mind if we pay a bit more than we consumed and we regularly go out eating together so things balance itself out. I was aware that the bill would be split and I was happy to do as usual (before knowing what their dish costed) so I couldn’t really say anything and I just paid, but I feel that £40 compared to £110 was just too big a difference on that occasion.
Would you have said anything, even tough everyone knew in advance that the bill would be split?

I saw an app being advertised for this purpose - each person puts in what they had and it works it all out .
I can’t remember what it was called though.

Splitwise ?
But it gets messy when bottles of wine are involved. Once you've had one glass from a shared bottle you might as well match yourself to the heaviest drinker, as you will be paying for it as if you have.

Yes that's the main issue when things are shared. Which can include say olives and a pudding or bottles of wine.

It wouldn't work at say a tapas restaurant.

So you have to be super strict to be able to say I only had xyz and avoid any communal eating. I think I'd just opt out of it now in advance and say at start of next one that you are only going to have one course and driving so will pay for your own. Start a trend.

(Caught on the hop as suddenly having 90 mains over £25-45 I can see how it's hard to suddenly work out what extra you owe -is is £55 or £75 extra? But then they may not have had wine or a starter or pudding so need to adjust down again. At that point you either have to do 12 or so separate bills - trying to split alcohol fairly too- or just make up a figure of how much extra to pay.

I think trying to split that bill fairly ON THE NIGHT would have been very hard.

If one person was rich enough they could have paid and agreed to send everyone a split the next day (I would need a spreadsheet to do it plus good memory of who had what which few have in a group over say 6)

Someone upthread explained how to sort the bill easily and fairly but you need someone willing and able to put the whole amount on a credit card and everyone to act like grown ups and pay up promptly.

All they need to do is send a copy of the receipt and ask them to transfer the money for what they had and the appropriate share of the tip/service charge paid. The poster who suggested this said that all but one person paid within a day, and the amounts owed varied by a factor of 3 between the smallest and the largest, hence illustrating the unfairness of the even split.

Yeah but the person putting the bill on their account runs a very high risk of being out of pocket. And - just a wild surmise here- but I'm OPs situation suspect it wouldn't be the special dish people who would be prepared to do that.

Besides total bill sounds like it would be about £800 I wouldn't be keen to have that to get back.

I would normally offer to pay and do a split

Which works with say work colleagues

It doesn't work if it's a group who don't all know each other - say x's birthday. Most people would not ask x to pay and re-charge everyone (Ie not much fun for birthday girl!) but other people may not know everyone else and may never see them again anyway and have no way of enforcing everyone denying a few dishes and drinks.

There’s always one (or in this case three) who take advantage of this arrangement. They knew full well that the special would be a lot more expensive and should have in this case offered to adjust their share of payments. The trouble is the next time you go out together it will be on your mind that you’re going to get stung again and maybe others in the group will be thinking this as well. The only solution is to agree as a group that splitting the bill will be the norm but not when it’s openly abused. The three should be ashamed of themselves for potentially spoiling this friendship.

It’s such a nightmare , this splitting bill equally thing because in a largish group there will always be some who are naturally careful with costs because of a lifetime of habit and those who are greedy and cash in on the system. I don’t know the answer and the bigger the group the worse it gets. My mum when she was old with small appetite used to regularly get invited by relatives to big restaurant meals (12 of them roughly) at first she was flattered to be included but soon found herself woefully out of pocket and she declined future invites in time. She said it was very awkward and embarrassing for her. She had a very low income.
I don’t believe that people are that insensitive, that they don’t know what they are doing. So you can secretly dislike them or they might publicly dislike you. It’s a problem. Of course my mother never challenged them but she didn’t leave anything in her will to them either.

I think I’ve been misunderstood regarding this subject. @LyingWitchInTheWardrobe of course I don’t pay for everyone! What I’m saying is we split the bill without nit-picking over who had what. Yesterday seven of us went to a bar in Docklands then to the restaurant upstairs. Six of us drank alcohol. My husband doesn’t drink. When the bill came he didn’t say “I didn’t have alcohol and you all did”. We split the bill between us regardless of who had what. We are not crass. Hope that clears things up for you

You talking about tapas reminded me of a couple of "incidents" from my past.

I remember a group of us going to a nice Indian restaurant behind Waterloo station. I cant remember the numbers, but we actually agreed to pay our own way at the start for alcohol and equally split the food. At the end, one couple turned round and refused to pay their share because they felt the food hadn't been very good and was overpriced.....

And then another one that sticks in my head was an ex-girlfriend and I met up with two of my friends who were a couple. We decided that we would share the food on the table and split the bill equally. I was slightly embarrassed by the amount of food my friends consumed and when I was walking home my girlfriend said to me - "they're healthy eaters, aren't they?" - that exact phrase has stuck in my head for over 25years!!

Fundamentally, everything we have been posting on here about people comes back to manners, morals and ethics. Sadly they are things that I find missing in many people, even some of my friends.

I think we all have people we know who do this. My relatives used to do this. Order appetisers ans get to bar before people arrived. Then have starters, mains, extras, dessert, coffee, Irish coffee, cheese, scotch for the road, bottle of wine, bottle of water etc. their hill would for example have come to nearly 4x every ones else’s but they always used to say … let’s split the costs equally

Bit late now. I would've said something straight away

Given the disparity in consumption I think you would have had every right to raise this at the time. However, I do think, unfortunately, that this is a very difficult thing to deal with retrospectively.

So everyone else are crass?

I ate out with 4 friends yesterday. We all paid for what we had. It took me about 30 seconds to add up in my head.

I don’t think your behaviour should change. You sound extremely respectful. There are suggestions that you should have spoken up but you shouldn’t have been put in that situation to begin with.

I would, however, be questioning my circle of friends. I personally could not even dream of having the audacity to make a friend pay 3 times what they should pay, just to cover my meal. They should have asked the price before ordering. That was ridiculous on their part. You don’t just pick clothing off of a rail and walk directly to the til without checking the price. How irresponsible.
The fact that they thought one bottle of wine between 3 of them would make up the difference in price utterly takes the piss. The behaviour shown is so disrespectful and it would make me not want to go to dinner with them again.

Sorry that you lost out big time here. That’s horrible. My advice: Go to dinner with friends who don’t expect you to pay for their mistakes xx

No. It’s just not something we do.

Speak up!!! However good friends would t allow that to happen! Like you say… happy to pay a little more but when it’s more than £10 more I think it’s them taking to peddle! Lol.

I have a tight budget and wouldnt not be able to swallow that…. There is nothing wrong with you paying what you owe and rounding up for a tip for example.

Thanks for the link, MyMiniMetro but, how can deciding to pay your own way AFTER be any different and why would anybody but the cheekiest of fuckers object? I have no problem with greedy-nonpayers-of-their-own-food/drink feeling upset. I want them to be upset. I want them to stop taking so much advantage of friends and fellow diners that there needs to be this crazy addendum to eating out.

Where is the consideration for people who might be having a tough month, unexpected bills coming in? Vegetarians and non-drinkers who consistently get stuck with guzzlers and are expected to subsidise them? We all know that guzzlers exist. I use the term only for those who expect others to pay for their consumption, not for people who love their food and drink and happily pay for it.

Debrett's isn't what it was if they're following vacuous trends now for which there clearly is no etiquette.

I was about to say I’d hate to go for dinner with you, but on second thoughts I think I’d really enjoy watching you squirm as I browse a menu after sitting down and say “hmm actually I don’t like anything, let’s go somewhere else” and get up to leave, add up what I’ve had on a phone calculator and pay only that amount, and tell you all about my internal haemorrhoids over the starter and flick a bogie at you for good measure.

I'm not sure here because it's your husband who doesn't drink so he has agency to 'not mind'. Put yourself in the position of one of your friends who might be having a tough month and orders accordingly. In normal circumstances they are happy to pay but, with your 'agreed normal' they are forced to either say something (and pay for their own) or they are required to stump up the split.

I imagine that as you're all friends, they would speak up and it would be fine, you'd all sort out the bill accordingly.

Not all eating out is with a group of friends or with a group that orders approximately the same amount in terms of cost. I mentioned vegetarians/non-drinkers in my post just now. They frequently bear the brunt and it can be difficult to speak up for some people. They shouldn't be penalised for that and anybody who wants to pay for what they had is neither crass nor cheap. It is the ones who expect others to subsidise them who deserve scorn on both counts.

I'm not talking about established group practices where all parties agree to whatever is the norm.

Posters are using their own experiences for reference without other people being party to them. It's difficult to understand the nuances in a group but what isn't difficult to understand is that it's never ok to make anybody in your party feel less then because they want to cover what they've had and not feel obliged to financially prop up the greedy.

Well @Tidsleytiddy some people may not have as much money as you. I wouldn't expect single friend to subsidise me if I fancied the expensive mixed grill and she just had a lot cheaper vegetarian dish

@LyingWitchInTheWardrobe did you mean to quote me?

That is disgraceful; your poor mum on the realisation that she was being used.

Did nobody ever step in for her? None of the people she was eating with?

I wouldn't have said anything (in fear of sounding petty) - but it's annoying. The three people with the more expensive meals should have offered to pay separately altogether. I would have, for sure - otherwise it would be sitting on my conscience like an albatross. Also, my first question to the waiter offering the specials would have been - how much does it cost?!