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15 
Doctor models new hat for short people. Still has to stand up to be noticed.
Few moments in New Zealand life are more uncomfortable, than the arrival of the bill at the end of a group meal.
Kiwis are inherently programmed to try to make everything in life as ‘fair’ as possible. So the thought of simply dividing the tab, evenly, by the number of people present, fills the average Kiwi with the sort of confusion and terror normally reserved for an All Blacks v France Rugby World Cup match.
Which makes squaring up the tab in New Zealand, one of the most difficult, most convoluted group agreements to reach, since the David Bain jury. Both of them.
History
The common practise, in most western countries, is to treat group dining out as a sort of competitive sport. The winner being the person, or couple, who achieves the highest return on investment. The best way to do this, is by greedily scoffing more food and drink than anyone else, then, when the bill arrives, suggest loudly, “Shall we just split this evenly between us then?”, knowing full well that anyone who so much as raises an eyebrow will appear, to everyone else, a tight fisted bastard.
Scientists believe that, possibly due to low selenium levels in the soil, Kiwis have by comparison evolved with an underdeveloped Non Stingyus gland, which is, in layman’s terms, the part of the brain responsible for ‘getting the rounds in‘.
Evidence of this medical condition can be seen in the great many New Zealanders, living in Britain, who choose to co-habit, 5 to a room, in squalid 2-up houses in the Zone 5 (and beyond) suburban wastelands of outer London.
The alternative (known among academics as ‘Mixing with the Locals‘) can be simply too confusing, too upsetting, to bother with – never quite knowing whose turn it is to get the next expensive round of drinks. Especially when the whole point of living in conditions not seen since the Irish slums of Victorian London, is to scrimp together enough pounds for a deposit on an overpriced house back home.
And it is this withered Non Stingyus gland which is the root cause of Kiwi behavior when dining in groups of more than 4, of dividing up, and paying for, a restaurant bill meticulously, based on ‘who ordered what’.
So precise, is this custom, that it often requires a calculator. It is also both physically, and mathematically, impossible to perform without a protracted length of passive-aggressive negotiation, along the lines of ‘well Sue is driving, so she shouldn’t really pay for drinks’ or ‘I’m a gluten intolerant vegan, and the meat dishes are always more expensive’.
Quite why anybody would go to dinner with a gluten intolerant vegan remains a global mystery. The New Zealand method of ’splitting the bill’, however, is a firmly local quirk.
Advice
Visiting foreigners, or recent immigrants, who find themselves in this awkward situation, are advised to simply relax, let someone else stress over the sums, and join the queue of 12 other people at the till, insisting on paying their share of the tab with that other very-Kiwi phenomenon, Eftpos.
And on the plus side, it’s also a clever way of glossing over the equally uncomfortable issue of whether to leave a tip or not. Which is no bad thing, as it is universally established that most waiters are c**ts.
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I LIKE splitting the bill by what I actually ate, it keeps the gluttons in check. Otherwise you have to judge the group you’re with, and have several menu selections at the ready in case someone starts taking the p*ss with lobster (or venison, or cocktails…) which completely takes the fun out of it.
And it ain’t bill-checkers who are the stingy c*nts, it’s the people who eat their dinner and then expect the rest of the table to pay for it! BLUDGERS!
Meticulous bill splitting is also extremely Swedish. Of course the restaurants don’t like it, and many have signs indicating “one bill per table please”.
If you go out with a Swede but for whatever reason don’t actually split the bill “correctly”, a debt of thanks (“tacksamhetsskuld”) arises, never to be forgotten. It will be repaid, possibly many years later, with the comment “you paid last time”.
Even offering something as simple as “my shout” in a small group will cause some consternation as everyone tries to figure out whether they’ll manage to drink enough to even out the bill by the end of the evening.
I apprecieate this posting because only last night I got super screwed at a group dinner. It was a birthday gathering. My entire meal and drinks came to $30 but ended up having to put over $70 when they just wanted to split it evenly. If I complained I would have been dampening the birthday girls spirits so I just shut up and put money in.
[...] true, us Kiwis are ridiculously polite (or just ridiculous) when it comes to paying for meals at a restaurant, particularly when you’re in a party larger than five. We’re hyper [...]
Oh, I forgot:
If we (Germans) actually decide to split the bill evenly, we usually have one person around the table take the lead, collect everybodies share and pay the waiter in one sum … makes live so much easier (for the waiter)
Splitting the bill (evenly) seems to be a very British / Kiwi thing.
My experience in most countries (not only the US) actually is to have the waiter go round the table and collect seperately from everybody (unless the meals were really shared like you’d sometimes do in a Chinese restaurant). And I don’t think most waiters actually mind. Rather than having to wait until a group has sorted out how to split the bill, they would usually also get a higher (collective) tip out of it.
The worst experience a waiter could have is what I have seen recently (in the UK):
A group of about 12 business people, some from the UK, some from Germany (including myself), some from the US, shared dinner in an Indian restaurant.
We decided to follow the suggestion from the British to split the bill evenly (which was ok as we shared most of the side orders and the main courses were all roughly the same price). So far so good, the waiter got the same amount from everyone. However, this being a dinner of traveling business people, everyone payed by credit card and the waiter had to actually write 12 bills because the UK and US guys needed them to get reimbursed by their companies (it is different for business travelers from Germany (we do not get reimbursed based on what we spent) but that’s another story).
To summarize: Wait until the group has decided on splitting the bill, agreed on the tip, write 12 seperate bills, collect each bill seperately via credit card …
What’s even funnier is when the restaurant is really happy to accommodate it. At dinner last night we were told they could spilt however we wanted. It ended up going 12 ways… The line as everyone used EFTPOS took up most of the main room
I love it! Never again do I have worry about who has eaten what – or people trying to make feel guilty if I had a side dish of boiled turnips
I have had friends back in the UK where we took turns to pay and it all worked our swimmingly till a new girfriend came on the scene who insisted on us splitting the bills by what we ate (she was as it happens a vegitarian amongst blatant carnivores!). We stopped going as we couldnt be bothered with the fuss.
I find the effort of accommodating vegetarians far outweighs any reward.
Indeed veges are often instigators of the ‘fair’ bill split, as are non-drinkers. And then there’s the vege-non-drinkers… oh that’s right, my partner’s one of em.
Kiwis do take bill-splitting to a remarkable new level. In the US, there is an equally horrible practice called “separate checks”. However, in this case, the duress is placed upon the waiter (rather than the patron).
NZ restaurants that bring a bill to the table? Nearly every one I’ve been to you head over to the register and pay (via EFTPOS of course) yourself (although maybe this says something about where I eat…)
seems as if your culinary experiences have not extended past your name-sake… or to at least give you some credit, the lonestar. though i am guessing you only paid for the steak and chips that YOU ate, therefore putting you, along with the two other comments on this page neatly under the very undesirable category of stingy c*nt
Years ago when dining in Croatia with an ex-girlfriend and her kiwi friends, the friends insisted on “just splitting the bill evenly” despite the fact I had had a small garden salad and, I shit you not, she had had inhaled an entire lobster (she was somewhat portly). While the ex thought this was perfectly acceptable, my response was less glowing, leaving me with the label of stingy c*nt. I’m not one for calculating bills but that was taking the piss. True story.
On a total random basis we do the same here, I am quite sure that paying for what you ordered is actually common everywhere