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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

> But when 6 people simultaneously tried to pay their share of the bill, chaos ensued.

Hasn't that been a fact of life ?

If anything, apps made it barely made easier through splitting either the whole bill equally or offer a bit by bit checking interface.

Otherwise on the role of QR codes and online menu, it actually helps a lot for allergies as everyone can check their for each individual item and adjust accordingly.

Of course one can ask the waiters, but many aren't just competent (ask for wallnut allergy, and they'll come back explaining there's no peanuts). And doing the back and forth on which menu has what allergy is also a PITA, with all the other guests just waiting for it to end.

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Right. Many restaurants won't do a split check beyond 3 or 5 people.

This place in Dubai doesn't sound that bad. It can get much worse. Two of us went to a restaurant in Cupertino, near Apple HQ, where the table had a QR code. But it didn't just bring up the menu in a browser. It wanted the customer to install their app. Then the customer could order through the app. That's going too far.

The restaurant was mostly cooking for pickup and delivery. Delivery people were going in and out constantly, but few people were eating on site. So on-site eating was made a special case of remote ordering, with a really short delivery trip.

Never went back there. The food was mediocre.

All this apparently works better in China, where WeChat took over and standardized customer interaction and payment. Of course, the Third Department knows where you ate dinner, and with whom.

In my experience, waiters tend to be quite good at splitting bills. I feel like many of them remember what people had, maybe they get good mental maps of seating or person <-> meal type just like taxi drivers used to get good mental maps of London before GPS.

(And printed menus tend to have allergy info too, just like online menus sometimes don't.)

They have systems where at order time, they can enter the items each seat bought, and then print out separate checks at the end.

The only times I've had splitting bills become a problem are with unreasonably large tables (10+), and at that point, you should be upfront about it before you place any orders, since that fixes the problem.

I assume it's a hard problem to solve if you don't have POS system keeping track though. If all you've got is pen and paper, it's probably better to just split the bill equally, assuming nobody had 6 40 USD cocktails. Or just have someone pay for the whole thing and settle it all in post.

> > But when 6 people simultaneously tried to pay their share of the bill, chaos ensued.

> Hasn't that been a fact of life ?

I remember having to split bar tabs at the end of the night before phones. No calculators. Drunk people trying to do math is a spectacle to behold. Everyone throwing random cash amounts in the centre of the table, taking their own change, and one person attempting to reconcile the total then asking for more contributions if we were short.

Electronic bill-splitting is superior in just about every way.

A good waiter by the time it comes to payment will know the dynamic of the group and help them organize quickly.

I was a bit surprised by the way the payment is being made here.

Do people pay it separately like this? In general, if it isn't a prepaid restaurant, then just one of us makes the whole payment, and we pay our share to that person.

Don't people follow that generally?

It varies, culturally and based on what the group is. In the UK if I'm out for a meal with family or close friends then one of us will probably pay the bill and then people will offer to transfer their share to the person who did (which may or may not be refused depending on circumstances), if I'm out with colleagues or a group of looser acquaintances then its more likely we'll each pay our share separately, which the server is generally happy to accommodate.

In college I used to go out to eat from time to time with a group of friends to a midnight pancake house.

This was a very nerdy group! In our "culture," everyone wrote down on their paper placemat the exact cost of each item ordered, and at the end of the meal calculated the exact amount of tax plus the canonical 15% tip, and put the correct amount on the table, making change as necessary.

It was pretty fast and frictionless!

That’s not universally the case, no.

For example in Germany, splitting the bill is pretty normal, to the point where restaurants are adapted to it. Since this process adds some friction it is, however, also the case that someone will pay for everything and split afterwards (or variations on that theme).

Newer payment systems seem to have made that easier (e.g. mobile devices that allow waiters to initiate the payment for a subset of what a table had and allow for contactless payment). The older variant of that is the waiter going with you to the cash register that basically allows them to do the same bill splitting. The even older variant is the waiter breaking out paper and pencil and doing some addition (though I seem to remember waiters actually being annoyed if they had to do that, not so with the new solutions).

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