Seven-way split

By Bernardino Luini, public domain

More terrifying than E. coli-tainted spinach. More nauseating than a hair in the salad dressing. It’s settling the check for a group dinner… OR how to ruin a friendship in 15 minutes or less.

A great evening can go sour when a friend shorts the bill or a co-worker who picked the expensive wine wants to split the check down the middle. And if you’re dining out with passive-aggressive graduate students? Well… you’ll be paying one way or another.

Here are a few things to keep in mind if you’d rather not have a table for one:

Don’t disreguard the tax. Or, render unto Mayor Daley what is Mayor Daley’s. In Chicago, sales tax is about 10 percent of the tab. If a few people skimp, it starts whittling away at what others have put toward the tip. This is where you may need to give out-of-townees a gentle nudge. Tell them to enjoy some complimentary pot-holes and political corruption on us.

Don’t punish the cardholder. When a friend offers to put the bill on his charge  in exchange for piles of wrinkled $1 and $5 bills, it’s not (necessarily) because he’s planning on hitting the gentleman’s club later. It’s really doing everybody a favor when you simplify the transaction and don’t force the waitstaff to do voodoo calculus. Still, it’s usually the last person or the plastic-payer who is stuck trying to make the ends meet.

If you can afford to eat out, you can afford to tip. Compulsory tipping is like flossing. You have to do it, but nobody really likes it except my grandma. Still, if someone is offering to grind fresh pepper onto your salad, you are obligated to cough up an extra 15-20 percent. Most waiters and waitresses are getting paid south of the $5 mark and in Chicago, the median hourly rate is closer to $4.61, according to PayScale.com. If you don’t plan to tip, best get in line at Burger King.

Do the math: Mental math has never been a strength of mine, so I love whipping out my cell phone calculator to crunch the numbers. In these lean times, you don’t necessarily want to over-tip either, so give exactly the right percentage and plug some of your own spending leaks. For a quicker ball-park figure, try a method suggested by my friend Diane over at The Take Three movie-blog. She has a “take three” for tax and tip too. It’s easy to figure out 10 percent by just moving the decimal, so do that three times– twice for tip and once for tax. Works every time.

Finally, Don’t think you got away with it. Just because your friends are too polite to call you out on your swindling ways doesn’t mean they’re not keeping track of how much you owe them. Now if you catch a cold shoulder at happy hour or see them digging under your couch cushions for loose change, at least you can say you know better.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Commoncents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.