Dobleve

We go out with friends for a drink and tapas often; unlike our experiences going out in groups in the US though paying the bill at the end is pretty simple. Two things make it much easier to split the bill in Spain.

First, the tax is included in the price of whatever you order and generally you don’t tip (you might round up, eg for €9.80 you could leave €10); the amount you owe is then pretty clear – 3 beers at €1.50 means I owe €4.50. Easy. No dealing with computing 9.8% tax on your $6.25 bill, no dealing with people who think the tip should be 10% (or 0%) instead of 15%. Its very rare to have to ask everyone for more money when you’re trying to pay the bill.

Second, if the group is good friends everyone will put a bit of money into a shared pool at the beginning of the night and make one person the keeper of the funds, eg 10€ per person. Everyone orders what they like when they like and then when the bill comes there is no splitting, the bill is simply paid from the shared pool – el fondo. At the end of the night any remaining money in the pool is split and returned; if the pool runs out of money everyone antes up again. You might think this would lead to “free riding”, I know I did. In practice it doesn’t seem to. Except for cocktails, every drink costs about the same – a soda, a beer, a glass of wine, etc. Culturally, people drink the same types of things at about the same pace. You don’t often find part of the group drinking cocktails while others are having a beer; you go to a pub for beer and wine, to a cocktail bar for cocktails.