Internet commenters were stirred into a frenzy after one man recounted how a night out with coworkers left one woman reeling for rent money.
In a viral Reddit post published on r/MaliciousCompliance, Redditor u/babybopp (otherwise referred to as the original poster, or OP) said the group agreed to split the cost of dinner and drinks evenly, until one coworker became irate, demanding that everyone pay for the items they ordered and nothing more.
Titled, “Refuse to split the bill equally…ok…” the since-removed post received more than 14,000 upvotes and 1,500 comments in the last nine hours.
“About 8 of us…ordered drinks and food,” OP began. “Bosses were in town and bonuses [are] around the corner.”
Continuing to explain that the entire dinner party ended up drunk, the original poster said that when the final bill arrived, a majority of their coworkers agreed to pay the same amount of money across the board.
But one coworker, called “Shelly,” had other ideas.
“We all agree on splitting the bill equally down the line,” OP wrote. “Drunk Shelly absolutely refuses.
“She says that everyone pays for what they ordered. Despite trying to tell her to chill and just split evenly, she refuses,” OP continued. “So we say okay…[and] everyone gets their bill and pays.
“Turns out Shelly is greedy and had been ordering top shelf whiskey and her bill was 6 times the next person’s bill,” OP added. “We left Shelly whining about how the bill has eaten into her rent money. Lol.”
Grabbing dinner and drinks with a group of friends or coworkers can be a wonderful experience and perfect opportunity to let loose outside of the office.
It can also be extremely stressful, specifically because of money.
While many seasoned groups have developed systems to determine who will be footing the bill at the end of a meal, modern trends have strayed away from paying on a rotating basis.
Three years ago, a survey conducted by Intuit Mint revealed that nearly half of millennials request separate checks when dining or drinking out with friends.
The same survey also revealed that two-thirds of diners have little interest in splitting the final bill evenly, opting instead to pay exactly for their own food, beverages and nothing more.
Where millennials are more likely to request separate checks, however, younger groups lean towards online platforms like Venmo and CashApp to square up after the meal has finished, rather than haggle over bill divisions and tip percentages at the dinner table, according to The New York Times.
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Throughout the comment section of the viral Reddit post, many Redditors offered their idea of the ideal dinner split and called out the original poster’s “greedy” coworker for inadvertently sticking herself with a much larger bill than the rest of her contemporaries.
“So I actually agree you shouldn’t split equally,” Redditor u/instinctz4 wrote in the post’s top comment. “Specifically because of people like Shelly.”
“I usually want to split the bill, even if I ordered more than the average person,” Redditor u/Rolling_on_the_river echoed. “Why should someone else pay for my s**t?”
Redditor u/FrankieMint, whose comment sparked a series of similar replies, detailed their experience with a coworker who always attempted to pay as little as possible, no matter what they ordered.
“I had a coworker who would consistently ask before ordering, ‘Are we splitting even, or will we each pay for our orders?'” they wrote. “If we said even, he ordered the most expensive items, and if we said pay for what you ordered, he got the cheapest. Every time.”
Newsweek reached out to u/babybopp for comment.
