I don't know about you, but for me there's no greater feeling than going out and making a contactless payment, completely confident that the payment will go through, knowing you won't be left embarrassed on your date, your night out, or your trip to the grocery store.
It's a sad fact of life that at some point, you're going to be broke as all hell. Yeah, in our own imagined futures we're riding jet skis and dining at the finest restaurants, but to get to the end of your own rags to riches story, you're going to have to lean really hard on the 'rags' bit.
I like to think of it as a rite of passage.
Just the other month, things got so dire that I was having to pay for a meal with spare coins I had lying around my bedroom, and as I paid for my medium helping of McDonald's fries (to keep the hunger pangs at bay) with 17, 18 or 19 coins, I would have been massively offended had the server made a rude remark, or otherwise made me feel terrible about my method of payment.
The thing is, I'm a grown man (well, as much as I'm totally at fault for my lack of financial liquidity). Imagine what it would be like to be a teenager in that situation? That's what played out with a 17-year-old out in Lynchburg, Virginia, who paid for his meal in quarters and coins, but found no support at the restaurant known as Beer 88.
The teenager in question, a 17-year-old known only as 'Naulty', racked up a $45 bill at Beer 88 over the weekend, and paid for that with a $20 bill, plus an assortment of coins and change. No biggie, right? Not all of us can afford to put it on the tab, or absently hand the waiter a $100 bill and mutter at them to "keep the change".
But Beer 88 didn't see it that way.
Posting on their Facebook page (though the post has since been deleted), they shamelessly shamed this teen, captioning the post:“How NOT to pay at a restaurant, cause that's the nicest thing we can think to say about this ridiculousness.”
Hashtags like #wearebeer88notcoinstar, #nohometraining (implying the teen had been raised by wolves or otherwise in the wild) and #workingwiththepublic really rammed home the point. What's more: the teenager who left the change would know more than most what working in the restaurant business is like: after all, he's a waiter himself.
“I walked there with my friends and that is all I had to take with me,” Naulty (who works for a restaurant called Country Cookin') said, speaking to Munchies about his ordeal. “As a waiter I have a lot of change at the end of the day. Without a car I can't just drive somewhere to change it all in whenever I want.”
He also revealed that the only reason he paid for his meal that way was out of little more than simple generosity. "The only way to have done it differently would have been to pay for only my meal with my $20 and not paid for my friends. I can't say I am sorry for covering them. I love to buy others meals.”
But in this never-ending battle between customers and the companies they visit, on this occasion, the internet sided with our man Naulty. Many comments on the original post slammed the restaurant for their treatment of Naulty, saying that the post was in poor taste, encouraging other customers to pay in coins when visiting Beer 88.
For their part in the incident, Beer 88 replied with snarky comments such as "welcome to social media", or: "Obviously the SARCASM and HUMOR of this post is lost on most of y'all."
After deleting the post from their page, the restaurant did 'apologise' for the remarks, saying that "it was posted as a joke, intended as a joke, and should be taken as a joke", but mitigating that with the fact that they found the coinage "annoying to people that work in the restaurant/retail industry."
So, which side do you stand on with this restaurant story? Feel free to offer your two cents, but I'm not necessarily sure they'd be appreciated at Beer 88.
I hear they're not big fans of coins.
