Dine and Dash - Legal Aspects

Legal Aspects

Simply failing to pay a bill when due is generally not a crime in most circumstances or jurisdictions. It is a contract debt, and the act is civil rather than criminal in nature. However, there are often laws that apply specifically to restaurants, hotels, and other circumstances, where the presumption is that the customer never intended to pay their bill and therefore obtained the valuable services under false pretenses, a form of criminal fraud.

It is often the case that the establishment makes their employees pay the cost of customer theft to give them an incentive to police their customers. They may do so explicitly by deducting unpaid meals from wages or tips, or implicitly through an end-of-shift reconciliation system whereby the server is expected to provide enough cash and credit card receipts to cover the cost of their customers' meals, and keeps any surplus as tips. Though theoretically illegal in some cases, the server is often held responsible for tabs that are not paid. It may be illegal, for example, for an establishment to require an employee to pay for an unpaid tab, but it is often a serious offense to have someone walk out on their check. The server must decide whether to pay the tab and keep his or her job, or not pay and risk losing it.