Imagine this: You live in a city and do not have a car. You are in need of a particular item that would require the use of a car to deliver back to your apartment. Your friends have that item, never used and now unneeded, and they offer to give it to you for free and deliver it to your apartment. You think you should reimburse them for the item anyway and prepare to write them a check.
Question: Do you write the check for the price of the item (found on the price sticker on the box), or do you write the check for the price + tax?
Consider: Money is no object to either party. What is the principle of the thing?
If money is no object and they delivered it, you write the check for the purchase price plus tax, rounded up to the closest nice round amount. If it totals $38, the check is for $40.
Then they refuse the check, and so you take them out for dinner instead.
Since they made the offer, and money isn’t an issue, I’d skip the check* and invite them out to dinner. It probably makes your friends feel good to do this for you, and reimbursement takes something away from that.
*If you absolutely feel you must, give them cash, not a check.
Another vote for the dinner option. Or something else which isn’t cash or readily convertible back to cash. (Like assistance in painting/wallpapering a bedroom or something).
I’d try to give them the money for it (sticker price plus tax, rounded up to the next dollar) but if they really, really refused, then I’d say I absolutely insisted on taking them for lunch/dinner/movies/whatever, not as payment but as a thank-you for doing me a big favor that would have cost a lot more time & money if I’d just bought the item and hired a taxi to transport it home.
Agree on buying them dinner or drinks instead. With friends that helped me move I’d usually take them out for something afterwards. I’d never accept cash or checks from a friend if I offered first to give them the item.
I’d refuse payment for a thing I offered to give you in the first place. Of course, since you’re my friend, I’d hardly refuse a dinner invitation.
If your friend lives too far away from you to conveniently invite to dinner, you might “happen” to acquire a gift card for a restaurant that you’d never find the time to patronize yourself, but which you thought they might enjoy…
I think it also depends on how close the friends are. If they’re sort of friendly aquaintances then take them out to dinner or send them a gift, something they would very much enjoy, such as tickets to a sporting event, a concert, or a special museum gallery presentation.
If they’re really tight friends you can do the above or just return the favor. With my very close friends, favors are flying back and forth all the time. If I do a favor for a close friend and they offer something in return I just tell them it’ll come out in the wash because I know I’ll need help wth something and they’ll be the first to be there and vice versa.
For instance, a friend of mine lives out of town and is an electrician. I needed work done and could not afford the cost of one. He came up for the night, I put he and his kid up, fed them, kept my buddy in beer and we had a little party* that night. That’s all the payment he needed. I got my work done and he had a grand time at no charge. It all comes out in the wash.
ETA: Not that kind of party, you perverts.
When I do vet stuff for my friends I always turn down $, they then buy me dinner/drinks/whatever on some future occasion. The books always seem
to balance nicely.
It wouldn’t occur to me to include tax, so if I were insistent upon writing a check, it would be for the purchase price.
Of course, I wouldn’t be writing a check, I’d be taking them out to dinner or something.
