Australian push to scrap splitting the bill

Unlike other parts of the world, where groups of friends going out always end up pulling out the calculator and divvy up the bill with each paying their share, Australian restaurants tend to have a “no split bill” policy.

The problem, they say, is the amount of time staff waste calculating who pays what. Then there’s the prevalence of card payments which are far more time-consuming to process than cash. The other problem is it’s led to a lack of tipping and service culture.

They feel so strongly about it that one Sydney entrepreneur last year launched an app to get around the problem.

Steve Kirkpatrick, venue manager at Sydney’s NOLA Smokehouse & Bar says splitting the bill is just too much hard work.

“Unless you’ve invested in the point-of-sale software it’s quite hard and time-consuming to split the actual bill,” Kirkpatrick told news.com.au.

“We’ll happily accept split payments — if it’s a table of 10, say $300 from this card, $100 from that card — but we don’t see the need to split the actual bill.

“Once you get to bigger tables it becomes very messy. It’s usually work colleagues, you want to pay for what you had, that does become very difficult because then you have to spend a lot of time marking everything off.”

James Coward, spokesman for the Restaurant and Catering Industry Association, said that most restaurants felt that splitting the bill was just too complicated.

“The choice not to offer the option of split-billing is due to the amount of time it takes to separately calculate the individual totals of each paying customer particularly when there are large groups involved,” Coward told news.com.au.

“It is also worth pointing out that given banks charge the merchant fees in relation to card payments, there is a need to provide more technology that actually makes the process of splitting bills available.”