Daily Dose of English 138
Splitting the Bill
Daily Dose of English 138
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you can make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about splitting the bill. Splitting the bill. So the bill is what you pay when you go to a restaurant or some sort of place where you pay afterwards. that's generally what it means but you can also use it to refer to things where you pay before but it's usually for things like restaurants or like if you go to some sort of party event or venue or whatever it is but the bill is is what you owe after doing the thing right because some things you pay before right if you go shopping you to buy the thing to be able to use it and take it home you have to just pay right up front or to go I don't know, but you know what I mean. When you pay afterwards, we call that the bill. And so if you split the bill, that means you and other people are all going to pay different parts of the bill, different amounts, or maybe half, maybe a third, whatever the agreement is. And we call that splitting the bill. And there's a lot of different ways to split the bill and it can often be a bit of a challenge to pay like that because a lot of people don't pay with cash anymore. And so you kind of have to be like, okay, so how are we gonna pay this? What's gonna happen with splitting the bill? And it can be a bit of a, not a headache necessarily, but it can cause some arguing or figuring things out because most people don't really know how to split the bill, which is fair enough, right? It's sort of a hard thing to do because there's all these different potential things that can get in the way. And so why don't we talk about that a little bit? Splitting the bill is quite common in the US and some places actually have started offering you can just split the bill. You can each pay half or they'll ring up separate bills. You can also do, but the it's it's definitely not a solved issue when when i was so i don't use i don't split the bill that often anymore i i mostly will I'm not usually dining with people where we split the bill, basically, is what I say. It's either one person pays or the other person, if it's like two people, or it's with people where the expectation is that somebody's going to pay, yada, yada, yada. There's various reasons why. It's a lot more common with maybe younger people or groups of friends that don't really want to share money or whatever it is. And so when I was hanging out with friends like that more often, when I was in New York, we would fairly often go out to eat together or whatever and split the bill. And I actually came up with what I think is a fairly good system, is that I had an account on Venmo, which is a service that is very popular in the US, I think still, for quickly and easily sending money between people. So you can add your friend on Venmo and you can send them 5 from your account and puts it in their account. It's very quick, very easy. It's not like sending money between banks. And it's gotten quite popular because of... how easy it is and you don't have to have cash because cash is actually quite rare in the US overall nowadays, in certain places, certain states. Some parts of it definitely still have a lot of cash, but there are places that don't accept card and they definitely see less business. It's pretty common to be, if somebody sees no cash available, Cash only rather is what it says on the outside. So cash only a lot of people be like, I don't have cash I can't go in there and so Yeah, like this I'm getting distracted and so my system was to essentially just put it all onto my card and then have people then know me the amounts and I would just do the math because it is It can be a bit of a tricky situation when trying to get people to pay you or to be like, whose card is it going on? How are we doing this? And you don't really want to make the waiter or waitress do all the work because that's not very nice and they're probably going to mess things up and then it's going to be a whole issue. And so I found that just taking the receipt myself, the bill, is what it's called, doing the math, adding the tip, and then doing the math for who owes what, and then just telling them, say, hey, send me this amount, send me this amount, send me this amount, send me this amount, was so much easier. It was a lot more efficient than everybody trying to be like, looking at the bill at the same time, going, oh, I owe this much, and paying it right then, and be like, everybody else is like, no, wait, wait, wait, there's also tip, there's also this, there's so many different things, and I'd be like, I'll do it, I'll tell you how much you owe me. But there's still plenty of problems with it, like it's not a perfect system, and that sort of thing. And that also brings me to the other side of this, of splitting the bill has become... a, not like a cultural thing, but there's a lot more tension in it, I would say. Because of the economic state of the U.S. right now, a lot of people are feeling the tension of prices. Prices are going up and wages are not. So the cost of living in the U.S. is going up and the amount that people make is not really changing very much. And so things are just feeling more expensive. I think I've talked about this in a past episode, but a meal for one person, if you go out and you have a drink and a meal, it can easily cost $30 or more for one person. And so if you go out with five friends, five of you times about 30 is, yeah, 150, right? 3, 6, 9, 12, yeah, 150. Okay, I was right. It sounded wrong for some reason, but it is right. So that's $150 for five people in total. And everybody orders different things. If somebody is feeling more tension in their budget, they're going to order something cheaper. And so they might end up spending only 20 or whatever. But if somebody is feeling a little bit looser and they get two drinks that night, they might end up spending $40. And so there's a lot of different variation in how much somebody can spend. And so a lot of people don't want to split just five ways and everybody pays exactly one-fifth because the person that bought more stuff would end up spending an unproportioned amount. They would end up spending less and the person that bought less would spend more. So people end up wanting to split it more exactly. but this is also bled out into a lot of other things and so some people will actually ask their friends for uh like to pay them for the few bites that they had of their food or for whatever like a dollar worth of gas and so it's getting to the point where some people can call it petty petty is somebody who uh the little things they get really focused on, they are upset a lot about small things. So in the case of like if somebody has like two fries, two French fries from your plate or something like that and you go, oh, you owe me 17 cents, that's super petty is what we'd say. So it's somebody who is being very focused on little things and kind of annoying about it usually. An accountant usually isn't considered to be petty, like it's their job to know about every single dollar or whatever, but somebody who is being annoying about small little details is usually being petty, right? Oh, you looked at me funny. I don't like that. That's pretty petty, that sort of thing. Oh, and so there's like a rise of pettiness, but not necessarily out of wanting to be more annoying or anything like that. It's more just like there is a squeeze on people's wallets. And so this has also brought a rise in splitting the bill and trying to be more conscious about how much you're spending on anybody that's not yourself, which makes sense, but it's also a little bit too bad. It would be nice if people didn't have to worry as much, right? And if we had an, um, especially in the richest country in the history of the world that people felt a little bit safer inviting their friends out for a drink or two every so often and being like, oh no, it's fine, I'll pick up the bill this time, don't worry about it, you pay next time, or whatever it is, and not having to worry about getting every single dollar of value out of somebody else. I'm almost out of time, but the last thing I wanna say about splitting the bill, wait, I forgot, what was I gonna say? Splitting the bill, the last thing about splitting the bill, Oh, the taboo of splitting the bill on a date. So when you go on a date with somebody, so you're maybe potentially romantically involved or want to be or something like that, especially on the first date, there is a sort of taboo against splitting the bill. A taboo is something that is usually not done or said for cultural reasons. And so the expectation is usually that somebody pays for dinner or whatever the date is. And it's typically and socially in the past, it's been the man paying for the bill. That is changing. Sometimes it's the woman, sometimes it's nobody. But there's still the expectation that somebody will pay for the entire bill. But like I said, that can be expensive nowadays and is actually one of the leading reasons that there is less dating going on because it is expensive to go out on a date and see somebody at a restaurant or whatever. Because like I said, if you're going to pay for 60, $70 for a regular dinner, that can be a lot for somebody. And if you're expected to pay that, it's kind of too bad. Yeah, anyways, I'm done with this episode. I'm out of time. I'm also out of ideas, but I really hope that you enjoyed this episode. Maybe learned a little something and I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode of a daily dose of English. We're going to be doing another accent episode. I'll see you then. Have a good one. Bye.
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