Restaurant Payment Question

Factual Questions
1

Don’t need answer fast. This is really a legal question, and if the answer varies by state let’s assume it happened in California.

You go to a restaurant for a meal one evening. There are signs in the restaurant saying that credit cards are accepted, but no checks are allowed. You order your meal, eat your meal, and the bill comes. You suddenly realize that your wallet has been stolen with all of your cash and credit cards, and there’s nobody you can call to bring you some money. But you happen to have your checkbook in your coat pocket.

You offer to pay by check, but the waiter points to the ‘no checks allowed’ sign. You ask for the manager, but he says the same thing. Since your wallet is gone, you’re stuck and since it’s nighttime the banks are closed so there is no place to cash a check. And besides you don’t have ID to prove you are who you say you are.

You write a check for the full amount plus tip, leave it on the table and walk out of the restaurant.

You’ve technically paid for your meal with the check, even though the manager wouldn’t accept your payment. Once you leave can the manager call the police and say you refused to pay in a manner acceptable to the establishment? Would the police be obligated to track you down and arrest you for theft?

2

Because you left without paying the agreed method of payment the manager could call the police. And yes you could be arrested.

If that happened to me I would explain the problem to the manager. What happens next would be up to him. If he descided to call the police and they showed up, I would imagine they would run the name that you have given them and information on the check. If nothing bad came up they would probably suggest the manager take the check. If it did not clear the bank then file a police report and use small claims court.

3

technically you are violating the law; the most obvious problem would be leaving before the manager agreed (assuming he’s not a total dick about the whole thing). You are saying “here is my information, plus a promise to pay”. Really, what more can the manager expect for someone who claims to have inadvertantly been unable to pay?

In most situations (at least in Canada) such a call is not an emergency, and the odds are the police would show up 8 hours later - assuming it’s a busy night. Nobody expects anyone to wait 5 hours for the police to put in an appearance, only to be told “take down his details and chase him if he bounces the cheque.”

The police are not going to arrest you for food theft if you claim your wallet was stolen and you honestly want to pay but can’t. They have better things to do.

(What’s the technical detail - for them to arrest you, they have to have evidence of a crime - a felony? Simply being unable to pay a bill is not a felony, unless it appears that you did something deliberate - like ordering the most expensive meal and champagne and appear to be homeless… Running away might be evidence, but leaving proper information and a payment might not.)

4

I agree. If you said to the manager, “My wallet was stolen, can you please accept this check? If not, hold my check as collateral and I will return tomorrow with cash.”
If you are making every attempt to pay, I don’t see how you could be arrested.

Defrauding an Innkeeper (California)

(a) Any person who obtains any food, fuel, services, or
accommodations at a hotel, inn, restaurant, boardinghouse,
lodginghouse, apartment house, bungalow court, motel, marina, marine
facility, autocamp, ski area, or public or private campground,
without paying therefor, **with intent to defraud **the proprietor or
manager thereof, or who obtains credit at an hotel, inn, restaurant,
boardinghouse, lodginghouse, apartment house, bungalow court, motel,
marina, marine facility, autocamp, or public or private campground by
the use of any false pretense, or who, after obtaining credit, food,
fuel, services, or accommodations, at an hotel, inn, restaurant,
boardinghouse, lodginghouse, apartment house, bungalow court, motel,
marina, marine facility, autocamp, or public or private campground,
absconds, or surreptitiously, or by force, menace, or threats,
removes any part of his or her baggage therefrom with the intent not
to pay for his or her food or accommodations is guilty of a public
offense punishable as follows…

Bolding Mine

And of course, I am not a/your lawyer

5

As an aside, note that not only does a business not have to take your check, they don’t even have to accept cash as payment if they don’t want to either (a subject that comes up regularly on this board, here is one example thread).

6

ime working in restaurants, the common theory is that is someone is offering a form of legal tender then you can’t say that they’re not paying.
Since they are actually paying, I doubt that there’re any legal penalties which could be applied.
I suspect that the law doesn’t enforce restaurants’ payment preferences.

7

Yes and no… to reiterate the thread - you can set the terms of a transaction however you want - “payment in chickens and goats only”.

Once a debt exists, you cannot refuse to accept legal tender (except in extreme situations, like all in pennies - there’s a set of limits of how much small change ou are obliged to accept.)

I suppose if you sit down an finish the meal, then the debt is created. Regardless of what the signs say, here is now a debt. Technically, a refusal to accept legal tender reasonably proferred as payment for a debt cancels the debt. The exceptions in the old thread relate to the fact that if the cash (or cheque) is refused up front, no debt is created, the transaction never happens. Once the meal is eaten, this is too late.

Of course, this goes back to the OP point - only cash is legal tender. A cheque is a promise to pay, the proprietor does not have to accept it. However, he has a dilemma. He won’t accept a certain method of payment, he cannot refuse to let you go (kidnapping, forcible confinement); and as long as there is no “intent to defraud” (see law in another post) there is no reason for the police to get involved. Obviously, someone who identifies themselves, writes a “promise to pay” that could be cashed, and in only temporarily inconvenienced but generally ahs teh wherewithall to pay - is not defrauding.

Essentially, he’s in the same situation as anyone else who is owed money and wants to collect. Accept what he can get, or talke the fellow to small claims court. By the time it gets that far, hopefully the customer already paid.

===
(The “legal tender” thing goes back to the good old days of money; when for example the federal government had trouble arranging funding around the revolutionary war, they would issue script. As they continued to “print money” it became worthless, and merchants began insisting on payment is other currencies with some value. Every government has eventually found with printed money, or even coins - if you can’t force the population to accept the currency as payment for debts, why have a currency?

8

Simply not true.

9

Assuming you have the means to pay the bill you wouldn’t be arrested.

What you should have done was call the police yourself. They would have come and talked to the restaurant owner and told him that he could take the check or not, and tell you that you would have to pay cash the next day. There’s no intent to commit any kind of crime so they would call it a civil matter.

Now if you didn’t do that and left, the only difference would be that the police would come find you, and tell you to pay the restaurant cash the next day.

And if you don’t pay cash, the restaurant will have to sue you. When the judge gets through telling the restaurant owner that he’s an idiot, he’ll tell him to cash the check you gave him. In the end you won’t have to do any more than pay the bill.

10

You should have called them anyway, to report your stolen wallet.

11

In the real world, the manager would probably just comp your meal and make a note of it somewhere just in case your wallet got “stolen” again on your next visit.

12

Wow, “if you say so” (and no, I’m not trying to be snarky, or thinking to myself “hmmm, maybe I try this trick sometime”). I guess I could see that if you were a “Regular”, but otherwise I’d think that the manager’s first and only option would be to accept the check (with a wink-wink “ok, don’t let this happen again”), and then hope for the best.

In any event, fascinating thread, and I chuckled at the “Don’t need answer fast”. :slight_smile:

And not to hijack, but I’d be interested to read anecdotes of “I tried paying my $30 dinner tab with 3,000 pennies, and the server wouldn’t accept it”. Seems like there has to be a “what if” thread around here somewhere, describing the outcome of that scenario.

13

I went to a restaurant once with out realizing I left my wallet at home.

I ate my meal and damn near shit my pants when I reached my hand around to my back pocket only to find there was no wallet back there.

I asked for a manager. The best I could offer him was to let him hold on to my crappy little flip phone while I go back to the house and grab my wallet.

He told me don’t worry about it. Just go and come back. When I came back, the manager had this surprised look on his face: “Wow, you actually came back.”
“Umm… yes, I did.”