As Mrs. Chastain and I were walking out of Ye Olde TGI Fridaye’s the other day, I noticed that we’d grabbed the wrong credit card slip on the way out. An honest mistake, and one I’m certain gets made on a fairly frequent basis.
However, as we were talking about it, the thought occurred…
You give the server your credit card. She returns, gives you back your card, and gives you both register slips – one that’s yours, one that’s the restaurant’s. Let’s say you grab your card, AND both slips, shove them into your pocket and waltz out the door. Does the restaurant actually NEED one of the slips to charge you?
My assumption is, no, you’re still charged, but you could probably contest the charge with your credit card company if there was no proof of transaction. However, I’m not even sure about that.
No restaurant experience here, but I have worked retail.
You’ve got it spot on. The charge goes through with or without the signature, but the sig serves as a record of the transaction should the charge ever be disputed.
Now a days, with electronic draft capture, you don’t really need the charge slips. Many POS systems image in the check, so even if you took both check copies and both credit card copies, and you disputed it, the establishment has a better that 50% chance of winning the dispute.
Having worked in customer services back office for Amex a few years ago I can confirm what has been said. The charge will go through fine, unless you dispute it. If you do dispute it, however, it can make a difference. If the restaurant can show you signed for the amount they charged you for, Amex would make you pay that charge and there’s no real way for you to get out of it unless you can present a credit note or proof you paid by other means (in those cases where you signed and then the establishment says that terminal doesn’t seem to work, so you use other means and afterwards it transpires it did work). If they don’t have a signed slip, they must provide you with an itemised bill. If they do this, Amex would again ask you to pay that charge, but they would look at it again if you still disputed it. It’s get a bit murky after that, with the letters going back and forth between various departments and causing some amount of grumpiness. If it was a cheapish meal, it would probably end up being written off as a one-off gesture of goodwill to you. If it was a very expensive fancy dinner, Amex would probably do a fraud investigation into the restaurant if you kept disputing the charge. What that would entail I thankfully never found out, so I can’t tell you. But this is probably much info than you ever wanted in in the first place anyway.
Many of the fast food restaurants around here don’t even ask for a signature. I just hand them my card, they run it through the machine, and they hand it back with a receipt.
My day to day habit is to travel light: no purse, just my id & one credit card tucked into a tiny pouch along with a small amount of cash.
What would happen if the credit card system at a restaurant failed when it came time for me to pay? It’s not a problem at a store, they can always just keep their merchandise, but I can hardly ‘return’ the meal I just consumed. Well, not in reusable condition. <yuck>
The exception to this would be in places that don’t have “online” card readers and do it manually. There are still a few of them about - you know, the machines where the sales clerk puts the card in face down and pulls the lever across it, forming an impression on a slip of paper. I’ve eaten in restaurants that still use this system, and as far as I can tell they have to physically send the slip off to tha bank to process the payment. These charges sometimes appeared on my statement weeks after the event.
I had this happen to me a nice restaurant, where I was treating my sister & husband on their anniversary.
The manager discretely asked me to step away from the table and took me to his office, apologized to me, and asked me to sign an IOU and then gave me an addressed, stamped envelope to mail the payment to them. I actually had a check (from my bank in a far away town), and he was glad to accept that check in payment.
Then I went back to the table, where my sister & brother in law were just dying to know what all that had been about.
Some places don’t even ask for a sig as stnadard practice. Airport parking lots, where charges are frequently high and they need to move cars along, you often don’t sign the slip.
It’s not only credit card charges that don’t need a signature. Checks also will be cashed even if you don’t sign them but someone signs them for you. So don’t lose you checkbook but if you do report it immediately so that the check numbers in it can be voided. As long as the check has those magnetic numbers, an amount, a date, and some kind of signature it will be cashed.
A couple of years ago I sent my son a check and forgot to sign it. So I told him to sign my name and I’d tell the bank to let it pass. I was told that it would be cashed even though the signature didn’t look anything like mine. Nobody checks the signature as long as there is one. If it has the machine readable numbers it will clear.
It is up to me to monitor and police my own account for suspicious activity just like with credit cards.
When I used to wait tables, the IRS assumes a 15% tip on all of your credit card receipts - unless there’s a higher tip posted on the receipt. If there’s less, the IRS assumes a 15% tip. In the long run, servers get screwed by it (if they correctly report the rest of their cash tips). But by giving your >15% tip in cash, you can help the server make up the difference for all the <15% tips the IRS is screwing you on.
Wait, are you serious? Writing the tip on the credit card doesn’t give the server money? So, in essence, for years, I’ve been stiffing pizza boys and servers? Holy Christ, is this always the case? Can any other servers testify that this happens in their restaurant? Do they just never charge my credit card, or does the restaurant get it, or what? I always thought servers saved the charge slips and got reimbursed at the end of their shift!
I think we may be talking about different slips of paper. The initial reciept you get that you sign, write in your tip, and total the bill is what servers need to receive their compensation.
I don’t like my whole CC # being on the receipt. This seems needless to me.
In protest, for a while, I used to scratch out all credit cards #s on the receipt except for the final 4 digits.
I did, of course, pen in a proper tip and a proper signature.
No restaurant operator ever called me on this behavior, but I stopped doing it when I noticed that several of my waiters had apparently not gotten paid their tips, as the non-tip part of the bill was never charged to my account.
To wit, they’d charge my card for the meal, but nothing for the tip.
I felt bad for this, almost to the extent that I was inclined to dispute the charges so I could contact the restaurant and arrange to tip my server, but in the end decided I’d probably annoy more people by doing that than it had been worth. Plus with wait staff turnover, half of those waiters would be working at a different restaurant by the time I got my CC bill.
