[slickpoppa]

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Dinners with a lot of people are always problematic. If you split the bill, then the cheapos go wild and free ride on everyone else, but if you don't split the bill, there are always some people who will try to short their share. I just assume that if I go to dinner in a large group I'm gonna end up paying more than I should somehow.

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This only happens when you eat out with jerkoffs. In college, people were always shorting the bill in these situations but when I got cooler friends later in life (not necessarily richer compared to the restaurant prices either) I found the opposite effect. Everybody would overpay so much we'd be leaving like an 80% tip and you'd have to force people to take money back.

Lately, I've hung out with a completely different set of people that have a better way of doing things. If we go out to eat or for drinks or whatever, somebody will just pay the whole bill, then somebody else will pick it up the next time. It's never discussed or made an issue of; people just have the consideration to volunteer to pick it up in such a way that it all evens out in the end. Obviously, this is exploitable but if anybody in the group was that petty, they probably wouldn't last long.


To the OP, the dinner thing sucks but the room thing seems fairly reasonable. In both instances, if paying was going to be an issue, you should've brought it up in advance.

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You don't always have control over who you go to dinner with, especially when you have people from different social groups coming together like at a bachelor party or birthday. None of my good friends are douchebags, but it's impossible not to be associated with douchebags by 1 or 2 degrees of separation.