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Comment by boilerupnc | Hacker News Reader

Funny enough. Whenever possible, I round all my tips to cause the total to generate a particular two digit cents amount - so that I can easily detect fraud when I scan my statements. It’s my low tech error code check.

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I get a notification on my phone when any money is deposited or withdrawn from my account. If its not something I've just done or an unexpected amount, then its probably fraud and I can tell my bank.

In the US, restaurants immediately charge the price of the meal (without tip). Then the next day the restaurant updates the amount of the original charge to add on the amount you added as a tip.

That means shady restaurant could change your tip the next day if they wanted to pull a fast one on you.

In other words, it’s not possible to get an immediate notification of the total amount charged including tip until 1-2 days after the meal.

(Don’t ask me why the system works this way, makes no sense to me)

It works that way because in the 1980s that was the only way to make it work at all, and it still works that way because being able to do the equivalent of an HTTP OPTIONS preflight for money is actually quite useful.

A restaurant could ask for the tip before charging the card.

Okay. Now:

- every restaurant PoS has to be updated to handle this use case;

- you have to wait for your server to make a second visit to your table before you can sign your tab and leave;

- every server has to spend extra time dealing with every table's tab upfront, rather than settling after close when no customers are inconvenienced by the time that takes;

- and all this cost and friction to reduce the incidence of a kind of low-value card-present fraud which is trivial for the customer to have reversed, and quite rare in all respects save the purely anecdotal.

If you're going to worry about any kind of payment card chicanery at a restaurant, the thing worth looking out for is skimming, not this.

That's how it works in Europe.

In fact, the card terminals themselved ask how much you want to tip when you pay and then the card payment is taken on the total. I don't think it would be possible to proceed another way with all the safety procedures in place nowadays.

Otherwise, people used to leave cash on the table when they left even if they had paid by card (meal only) and they wanted to tip.

In the US, it'd be considered déclassé in most sit-down restaurants for the customer to run their own card. You see it at fast food and "fast casual" places, but not really anywhere fancier; to a good first approximation you can quickly understand in which market segment a restaurant would like you to perceive it by how easy or difficult it is to see any point-of-sale equipment from anywhere in the dining area.

I have the sense that tipping is much more customary in the US than in Europe, which may also make a difference. Certainly there is a significant semiosis around the concept here, which would also have to change in response to a change in the shape of the practice; I don't know exactly how much that contributes to things staying as they are, but I doubt it's of no import.

> In the US, it'd be considered déclassé in most sit-down restaurants for the customer to run their own card.

Oh, I see. The US are so 1980s ;)

In Europe all card payments are chip-and-pin so they have to hand the card machine to you for you to type your pin.

Yeah, there's a lot of tech debt here owing to us having invented payment cards and all ;)

EMV is pretty common here these days, but evidently optional for restaurants; I suspect there's a carveout in the relevant association rules.

> In the US, it'd be considered déclassé in most sit-down restaurants for the customer to run their own card.

Interesting; I rarely carry a card and just pay with my phone. I've never been to the US, but it certainly wasn't an issue when I visited Canada. I should probably remember to take my card if I visit a restaurant in the US.

I'm old-fashioned enough to prefer carrying a discrete wallet, not least since my barbershop is cash-only, but also because to forgo it would promote a lost or broken phone from headache to catastrophe.

That said, I assume even restaurants whose POS equipment is well hidden would be generally able to handle folks who prefer the single point of failure.

I use palindromes. Easy to check and will catch extra dollars added.

Has this ever turned up anything suspicious?

I track almost all of my expenditures. At a restaurant I used to visit fairly regularly I noticed that my costs were often off by approximately ±25 cents. This was inconsistent and not always in one party's favour. Upon reporting and investigation it turned out that (a) I routinely wrote 'math' along with a total instead of a tip and (b) one of the waiters only approximated the math required.

Nothing nefarious and I'm not even sure if I won or lost out of this - but it was interesting to catch.

> I routinely wrote 'math'

Why would you do this?

1+ bottle wine?

I had to reread this because it didn't make sense to me the first time because it's so insane.

Not surprising, right? I don't know what you expected implicitly asking them to do the arithmetic for you, but I would've assumed not much care would be taken.

Catch what? Why would you do something so silly

> I routinely wrote 'math' along with a total instead of a tip

I, too, am dying to know why you do this. I assume that you didn't intend it to be punitive, but that's what it looks like to me.

I've heard that half the time a restarant's POS is configured to ask the waiter to enter the number written on the tip line, but the other half of the time, it's configured for the them to enter what's written on the total line. Meaning, in the first case, writing "math" means more work for the waiter, and in the latter case, you better be careful the amount you wrote on the total line is accurate.

Writing both the tip and total adds redundancy which helps to avoid data entry mistakes.

It actually did. At a wings place I noticed a total that wasn’t my usual last two digits. I called up the place and they confirmed they had an employee who had been altering tip amounts and also skimming cards. They advised me to call my credit card company and ask for a new card. It is now a well defined muscle memory for me. Therefore for very little effort I get a desirable side effect of easy detection. My teen son currently rolls his eyes when I fill out the receipt but I suspect he’ll adopt the habit in some form over time.

What about routine credit card transactions that you don’t tip on? Isn’t that the bulk of purchases ?

He's the guy that tips at grocery stores.

Transactions that don't involve latency in knowing the final amount also don't offer the same opportunity for chicanery.

Is it 69?

It's 69.

My guess is 42.

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