This has never happened to me, but I am curious as to what would happen. Suppose I buy something for $5 and pay with a credit card. They bring my receipt back, and I add in a dollar tip. However, for the total accidentally add $5 + $1 and put $7 for the total. I walk out of the restaurant before anyone notices.
Will I be called later to verify what I wanted?
Will they assume no tip because of the conflicting amounts?
Will they assume I only wanted to leave $1 since that’s what I officially put?
Will they just use the total since I also had that there?
Are there laws or rules about this or is it up to the discretion of the manager/waiter/waitress?
I actually did this once. The next day I received a phone call from the bank that issued my credit card, asking what amount I had intended to charge.
I also once messed up a check that I wrote, and put different amounts in the numerical and written portions of the check. The bank called and asked me which was the correct amount.
In the restaurant where I used to work, it’s legally required to use the bottom total, for better or for worse. However, if the discrepancy was substantial, we’d contact the customer and give them a chance to fix it. Also, if the customer contacted us later on we’d correct it to the customer’s intent.
How does the bank know? Do they treat restaurant transactions differently than regular transactions? I’d always just imagined they ran the complete total through, as is done at any store.
I do this fairly often :o as I try to round off amounts. They always use the total I wrote, no matter whether the error is on the plus or the minus side. Then again, the error is always just cents
Once I added wrong and the charge came through with the correct sum for the charge plus the tip I had written in, rather than using my incorrect sum. With electronic auths the bank never sees the tip amount AFAIK, just the total, so it’s at the restuarant’s discretion.
Must have been quite a while back. Not sure how the bank would even know, unless it was one of those charge slips where they take an impression of the card and send the slip to the bank.
When I worked as a bank teller, we were instructed that bank policy was to always to defer to the “written” amount. So if you write “$200.00” in the box, but write out “Two thousand and 0/100 dollars” then we would have cashed the check for $2,000.00. For large amounts they may call to verify, but I never ran into that problem.
As more to the OP, I wrote in a tip once of $3.00, and then calculated the total accordingly. When I got my bank statement I realized that I was charged for $10 more than the total. I called the bank and they said my first step should be to deal with the restaurant, and that if I got nowhere with them to contact them again and they would see what they could do. When I called the restaurant, the manager requested the restaurant copies of the receipts and had to find mine to see what the problem was. Turns out, the scummy waiter put a 1 in front of my 3, changing his tip to thirteen dollars instead of three. All in all, it took forever to get fixed, and I wouldn’t have cared so much if it had just been an error, but I figured if the waiter does that to every customer, he’s scamming a lot of people out of a lot of money. I never heard, but I presumed he was fired.
A little off topic but on a side note you should never use that part to tip. Always leave cash. When you use the credit card to tip its taxable for the waiter/ess If you leave cash its “off the books” as you say. All the waiters, and waitresses i know prefer cash to be left.
The Uniform Commercial Code, which every state has passed in one form or another, says that if there’s a discrepancy in terms on a financial instrument such as a check, words control over numbers. So, they had you do it that way because it’s in the law books.
I ran into a very different problem once: I got my monthly statement, and saw that I’d been charged over $80 for a $40 dinner. I went to the restaurant and figured it out with the manager: the server had entered the “total” amount I’d written on the receipt on the “tip” line in the computer, effectively giving himself a tip for over 100% of the cost of the meal. The manager refunded the difference in cash.
As far as I can recall, every time I’ve screwed up the math it has been to the detriment of the server. That is, when Adding While Intoxicated, I tend to do things like 45.00 + 9.00 = 53.00. Fortunately, they’ve always been gracious enough to key-in “54.00” in my stead w/o calling me to say, “Why can’t you do math, jerk?”. I don’t know if it is legal or not, but I can’t really object as it was my mistake.
I’m not so sure what would happen if I accidentally put “55.00” there. Like I said, I don’t think I’ve done that… :dubious:
Yeah, I wish my employer would help me in committing income tax fraud, too. If you leave a decent, customary tip, the waitpersons won’t have to cause to spit in your beer next time you see them. That, plus, you know, the inconvenience of having to have actual cash on hand ;).
I believe this is even more than policy. When this happened to me once, was told the same thing. The bank manager referred to the written amount as the “legal line.”
I had something similar, but more sinister, happen to me once.
Went to Pizza Hut for lunch. Hot wings, salad bar, drink, total was about $12, if I remember correctly. I added a tip to make it an even $15 and left.
Next day, I’m looking at my bank balance and find that I’ve been charged $150 by Pizza Hut. What the flippin’ hell?!?
Turns out the waitress (who was the manager – slow day for them, I guess) had added a zero on to the end of my total amount and run it through the system, pocketing the excess as her ‘tip’.
If she hadn’t been so greedy, or if I’d been paying less attention, she might have gotten away with it. Who knows how many others she’d pulled it on.
(She was fired after I got corporate involved, by the way. )
So, to bring this back around to your point: whatever appears on the total line is what you pay, even if you do your ‘tip math’ wrong.
(ETA: whoops, Jelymag beat me to the ‘bad server’ story – heh.)
I have a similar attitude, but I have been known to leave cash as a tip for a bill paid with a credit card, regardless. When I was a bartender, we didn’t get credit card tips until a week or more later, so I’ve always got that in the back of my mind. Of course, I don’t know if the establishment I’m at necessarily has that policy, but it’s possible.
There are advantages to living in a place like Japan, where only the foreigners expect to be tipped.
They do have the claim their cash tips. Its not your fault if they neglect to. And isn’t there some kind of equation that is used on servers so they claim their tips.
Servers usually make about 1/3 minimum wage and are assumed to make the difference in tips, plus or minus. Servers that cheat (intelligently) will declare a small amount of tips which puts them slightly over minimum wage after taxes. They’re taxed on that amount, and pocket the rest tax-free, while still maintaining a tax profile for Social Security. Yes, it’s tax fraud. In a restaurant with dozens of servers, however, I only knew two servers who didn’t do things that way.
What I have a problem with are managers who instruct servers – especially clueless 14-year-old servers who don’t really know how taxes or social security work – that “you should declare $40 every night no matter what; the computer just wants a number that isn’t zero” is the right answer. I’m pretty sure that’s conspiracy to commit fraud and possibly corruption of a minor.
When I did this in the early 1970s, things weren’t nearly as automated as they now are. I suspect that someone from the restaurant noticed the discrepancy and attached a note which was read by the person at the bank who processed the credit card transactions.
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