Pay Before You Try

Online commerce, de facto, has to operate on a system of mutual trust with a financial locking mechanism to gently enforce the otherwise ad hoc nature of the transaction in question. Fine; and in the current world of eBay, Uber, Amazon, AirBnB et al, this system is largely structurally sound, even given the sometimes labyrinthine procedures it is necessary to endure if something goes wrong in the process. Having said that, close to all transactions processed online essentially work fine. The online payment paradigm of pay, lock, supply, unlock has logical merit given the usually remote nature of transactions thus made, and follows basic database methodology in the process [something the Post Office and their software goons most certainly did not respect, but I digress], ensuring the best continuity of flow of cash and goods to complete the distant transaction.

All well and good, and now that the dust of the Wild West of the early days of the likes of eBay - a Dodge City of minor crime and misdemeanours with the odd major con thrown in for good measure - has settled, things largely work as well as can be expected. The thing is, though, that bricks and mortar businesses are picking up on the practice: especially in the hospitality industry, and largely by pub-cos, those cherry-picking corporates who buy up failing or failed pubs and pub/restaurants and apply the pay-now, product later ethos of the online world to the bar. It's fine when just ordering beer or wine at the bar; they serve and you pay on receipt of the goods. But when it comes to coffee or bar snacks, or even the beer or wine itself if ordered with them, you pay before they supply: the total inversion of a normal, bricks and mortar, retail transaction. They bank the money before they give you anything: it leaves whatever account, or your wallet or purse, before you've even tried the goods supplied.

This is just plain wrong, as it reverses the legal, contractual position between restaurateur and the client, who has always had the option to exercise their retail right to refuse to pay the full amount of the bill if the fare is not up to snuff: a bill of fare in a restaurant has always been merely an indicator of the proprietor's own evaluation of the worth of the goods on offer: it has always been within the customer's rights to refuse to pay the full amount of the bill if they feel that the price of the food and/or service/ambience, etc., represents poor value on the day/evening. A right that is seldom exercised by most customers admittedly, and one which a decent establishment usually offers in the form of a discount on receipt of a customer complaint. Again, this is a mutual trust system backed up by gentle enforcement, and seldom causes problems.

The current accepted methodology of taking money upfront and leaving your customers hanging is, however, open to obvious abuse by the unscrupulous owner, and leaves an aggrieved punter in the invidious position of trying to extract their money, or at least a fair portion of it from the proprietor, if anything is amiss. All of this and more has simply been sleep-walked into by us, in much the same way that the general tendency of beer drinkers is to accept being served short measures - an illegal practice - rather than insist on the legal quantity being delivered into their glasses, a situation that would never obtain with wine or spirits at least. This process of normalisation of trans-legal anomalies is endemic; in fact, normalisation of the illogical is the psychological defence mechanism that socialised beings unconsciously employ routinely, to deal with the daily absurdities thrown at us by our over-complicated and under-monitored systems, most of which now operate quasi-independently of any real human input or control. This is what agreed-upon rules, regulations and laws are supposed to protect us from, but without general acceptance and enforcement of them, we're back to Dodge City and the survival of the nastiest...