Restaurant deadbeats

People who eat in restaurants and walk out without paying come in all varieties, though it would seem they are more likely to be men than women. They fit into a number of categories that I have begun to think of as the scammers, the larkers, the dissatisfied, the accidental, and some whose motives are unclear. If you search on Google you will find that a study that claimed overall about 5% of contemporary restaurant patrons leave without paying, most often because they are dissatisfied in some way, including how long they wait to get the check. If that is the most frequent motive now, then it differs from what seemed to be the reason in earlier decades. Then, judging from newspaper notices, it was more likely that the patron had no intention of paying from the moment they walked in. Restaurants that experience true deadbeats also span high and low, but more often have been places with medium or low prices than those with high prices. Past midnight hours have historically been the most…