It seems pretty easy. Go out to a restaurant with a friend and eat steak dinners. When the bill comes, put it in your pocket and leave the restaurant. I have heard the practice called “dine and dash”.
What I find interesting are all the rumors behind the “dine and dash” (D&D). I would like to know how many of them are true:
Some people claim that if you D&D the waiter or waitress will wind up paying for your meal. Apparently at the end of the day, the server is responsible to pay the restaurant for all meals and drinks ordered. This means if you D&D some poor server who makes less than minimum wage will have to pay for your meal.
There is also a rumor to the effect that restaurants regularly monitor for D&D activity. It is apparently not uncommon for a server or a manager to watch you as you enter your car and take down your license plate number. Then they call the police for theft and you’ll be arrested.
Even if you are honest you can still get in trouble for D&D. Let’s say your waiter takes forever and you decide to leave the money at the table rather than wait for his return. If someone grabs that cash from the table, you have no proof that you paid and could be in for trouble when you next visit the restaurant.
If a server or manager recognizes you from a D&D incident, they will ask that you leave the restaurant. Some people even claim the restaurant makes you pay for your meal when it is ordered.
Other terms for this behavior “chew and screw”, “eat it and beat it”, “skipping out on the tab”. Here are some other tips and terms: http://www.paei.com/DN/WU/WU88/cheap.html
I’m sure policies among restaurants vary widely. The activity itself is certainly illegal. Several years ago a couple of Massachusetts police officers were reprimanded for this (and fined, IIRC). They had been assigned to a funeral for an officer out of state and thought they could get away with it. The restaurant manager called the local police. (Sorry, couldn’t find a cite).
It’s part of the waiter’s job to ensure that the customer is charged, but then again, you don’t hold the teller responsible when the bank is robbed. From the SFWeekly, http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/1999-12-01/sidedish.html
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3. Even if you are honest you can still get in trouble for D&D. Let’s say your waiter takes forever and you decide to leave the money at the table rather than wait for his return. If someone grabs that cash from the table, you have no proof that you paid and could be in for trouble when you next visit the restaurant.
The last time a waitron “took forever” to bring the check, I went to the front of the restaurant and asked the manager to send out a search party. I didn’t feel badly about getting the poor fool in trouble; we hadn’t seen him in twenty minutes, and we had a ball game to go to. The manager hunted down my check, I paid, and I hope the waitron got fired. Folks who don’t understand the word “service” shouldn’t be waitrons.
At the Dinkytown Pizza Hut, near the U of M campus in Minneapolis, we called it a “hog 'n jog.”
Due to our high percentage of college students (of which I was one), we seemed to get a lot of hog-n-joggers. (This was – gulp – almost ten years ago.) The restaurant’s policy was:
No, the wait staff did not have to pay for h+js. But if you got one, the manager would give you a little lecture on keeping a better eye on your tables and your customers. If we saw people we thought might be possible h+js (usually kids, usually males), we were expected to start paying more attention at about the time they finished up.
Yes, we kept an eye out for h+js. Yes, we would report it as a theft if possible. But most of our offenders were kids on foot who would just take off. Not much to be done there, except remember their faces.
We never made h+jers pay when ordering because if we recognized them, they were not served under any circumstances and not allowed to come back.
Our manager once caught a couple of h+jers in the parking lot and dragged them back in. They didn’t have any money, so he told them they could either wash dishes until closing (which was like ten hours later) or be arrested. They washed dishes. As a former waitress, I have zero sympathy or respect for people who hog 'n jog; they are thieves just like any other variety of thief. If you can’t afford to eat out, then don’t.
This seems to be a common thought. Not only of D&D’ers but also people who can’t pay their tab for one reason or another. For example, ooops my credit card was refused, I guess I’ll have to wash dishes.
While washing dishes is seldom an activity that anyone would enjoy, how many restaurants would require non-paying patrons to wash dishes???
When I was in college I washed dishes at a Ponderosa. The water was extremely hot, and there were also plenty of knives. If a patron (or any non-employee) actually washed dishes and got injured the restaurant could be up for serious lawsuits.
I believe the legal name for dine-and-dash is “obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception”. I read that in a book once and have never forgotten it, it’s such a poetic phrase for such a petty crime.
I am the Risk Mager for 261 restaurants. We would never allow a customer to go in the “back of the house” as we say in the biz. We might take down the person’s name and address if they couldn’t pay. THe cost of a meal is not a big deal and “walkouts” as we call them, are budgeted for.
I will add that when my wife worked for a juvenile detention facility, there were a couple of girls that were encarcerated for this charge. I know, it is petty, but the laws are strict here.
Toward the end of my senior year in high school we were all feeling that peculiar sense of invulnerability and impunity young stupid males oft do. One the way to school one day my friend said ‘watch this’. We pulled into a McDonalds, he ordered about $20 worth of McBreakfast food and when the chick came to the window he said he wanted to inspect the order, she handed him the bags and he floored it. We laughed till we burst. And then gorged ourselves on McSwine Sandwiches. Stupid but true.
I worked in a hotel restaurant in college and the servers were responsible for the money due. The manager had the option of writing it off, but since a lot of the waitstaff was part-time students who just did it for pocket money, there were some who weren’t above scamming the place by claiming a walkout and pocketing cash. And, he was a dick who wasn’t going to care about a server getting screwed. Other scams were dropping the same check to more than one table when the buffet was ordered and the number of people matched.
I only had one walkout, for like $15, and the next day when I walk into the hotel for work, the two jackasses are sitting by the indoor pool. I tell them they owe me money for the check; they say they thought it was going to be a room charge (they obviously were staying in the hotel). Well, you would have had to stuck around to give me your room number, I say. One guy gives me a twenty and stands there waiting for the change.
Thanks for the tip, buddy, I say as I go to clock in.