You know, rather than pay for the car behind you, who clearly has the $$ to pay for what they ordered, why not over tip by that amount? The clerk/barista/etc needs the $$ more than that guy behind you, trust me.
Now, paying for the car behind you on a toll bridge can be a nice gesture since some forget change.
Not at fast food joints but at other stores, I often swipe my card while the cashier is scanning my purchases before the amount is totalled. So they presumably they could finish one transaction start the next with the customers credit card and then add in the total when it comes.
But what if somemone decides to pay cash?
(Anybody here remember those weird green pieces of paper everyone collected way back when? It was a bigger deal than Pokemon cards.)
That’s exactly what I figured and did about 3 weeks ago. I was in line at my local drive up coffee house and the guy in front bought my coffe. I figured I was planning on spending the money any how so I tipped the original amount plus the pay it forward amount. The batista ended up getting a $16 dollar tip and they were extatic about it. Any of those workers would have loved getting an hours wage as a tip where 899 of those people didn’t do anything but get the same good feeling I did from the large tip.
Man, it’s a good thing I don’t buy drive through.
“Congratulations, sir, the driver before you paid for your order!”
“Wait, what? My order?”
“Yes sir! Wasn’t that nice of them?”
“But they don’t know how much I ordered! How could they have known how much to pay?”
“It’s a credit card, you idi-sir. I’m going to charge their card for your order total now.”
“Wait, does that mean that I could just order as much stuff as I wanted now, and they’d get charged for the whole amount?”
“Yeeees?”
“Well, that hardly seems fair! And even what I planned to order, maybe it was more than they were expecting me to!”
“Sir, you’re holding up the line.”
“Maybe I should just have you charge them for the smallest item on the menu, and charge me the rest? What’s the cheapest item you have?”
“Sir, I think you’re overthinking this. They’re just trying to be generous.”
“Overthinking! I could be taking advantage of them! Ripping them off!”
“Sir…”
“Forget this - just charge me for my own order, and let me get out of here!”
“Um, yes sir. Er, did you want to pay it forward?”
“What?”
“Pay it forward? Pay for the order that follows yours? (I mean, you’ve been making him wait this whole-)”
“And put him through all this?? Are you out of your mind? Forget it! Let me out of here! Keep the order, I just want out!!” (Screetches off in a panic.)
That’s not what happens, as explained above. Nobody is going to leave their credit card to be charged whatever.
Well, sure, they won’t pay “whatever”, but there still is poor communication about how much they will pay, or how much they want to pay or intend to pay.
No. If there’s people waiting in line, their order is already made at the speaker but not picked up yet. So the driver at the window just pays that bill if he wants. No mystery. When there’s no one in line behind it looks like the workaround was leaving some cash to cover the next guy.
Okay, I think I already conceded my inexperience here. Pondering…I think I still wouldn’t want them paying for me, even if I’m certain that they knew exactly how much I owe and that they freely chose to pay that with full knowledge of the cost.
I’m not poor and don’t need charity. What could be a generous deed to them might mean nothing to me. That’s not fair to them. Their generous deed should help someone who would benefit from it more than I would. Therefore, let it go to the next guy. Maybe he’s on the skids. Better him than I.
I’ve never been in one, but I would have assumed you’d find out how big the order was for the car behind you before you decided whether to pay their bill. So if it was more than you wanted to pay, you could back out.
It would thus seem good if you could choose to pay part of the bill for the person behind you, in case they had a huge order and you only had a small one. But I don’t know how easy that would be with how the point-of-sale devices are set up.
Personally, the whole thing is novel enough for me that I’d probably pay unless the price was significantly higher. And, if I can tip (not something I’ve actually encountered as a possibility in a drive-thru situation), I’d cover the difference if the cost for the order behind me is significantly less than mine.
But if it’s a common thing, I get just wanting out of it. And I don’t think anyone should feel obligated to pay significantly more than they purchased. If companies like these chains so much, it would be good to be able to pay partial bills.
Having worked with point of sale devices, I’d be surprised if there was any widely used device or system that wasn’t set up to split a bill.
Cool. Then that’s what I would try to do. I thought maybe it wouldn’t be so easy on drive-thrus, since splitting the bill seems so uncommon. In every situation I’ve ever been in, one person pays the whole bill, or we each pay our own. Never do we just split the bill. And I definitely find it hard to split a bill online between more than one credit card.
Well, I was specifically talking about point-of-sale systems, of they type you’d find at a business. They’re typically built to be able to handle a wider set of cases. I suppose it’s possible (likely?) that some businesses or franchises use custom POS systems that might be more limited - though being so limited that you can’t, for example, pay partially with cash and partially with card seems vanishingly unlikely.
Ok, well you guys are kind of creating a logistical and security nightmare out of this. Lol.
It did cross my mind that this process tells the person exactly how many sundaes I’m buying, but then I figured maybe he’ll just think I have six kids in the backseat or something.
I doubt they’ll list the order for the guy behind you. If they did, I’d say “I’ll pay for everything but the pumpkin spice latte. That jerk can pay for that himself.”
See, the trick is to get your coffee and start the pay it forward chain. Then loop back around, get back in the drive through and order $20 worth of other stuff. Thank the cashier and be on your way.
But, in all seriousness, you could have just not paid for their stuff. They won’t know think twice about having to pay unless the cashier tells them.
I’ve only had it happen once. The cashier told me the person in front of me paid. I just said something like ‘I can afford a couple tacos, I’ll just pay for mine and you can use that (she was holding the money in her hand) for the next person’. I never though about them telling the car in front of me how much my stuff was. That’s probably why she looked so confused. I must have screwed up the chain.
There’s a joke/meme floating around somewhere that I can’t find. Something along the lines of: I was in line at the drive through the other day and the person behind me is honking and yelling at me for some reason. As a nice gesture, I paid for her food as well. She seemed pretty embarrassed when she waved ‘thank you’ at me. When I got up to the next window, I showed them both receipts, took both my meal and her meal and drove away.