Money Moral Dilemma: Should I have paid for alcohol-free drinks at a bring-your-own restaurant?

chockydavid1983

No dilemma here.
The owner has the right to set this as their policy.
The poster can choose if they wish to go back.
They haven't been asked to pay for the 'just this once' so no issue there either.
IMO the owner would be stupid to implement this policy though.

gocurlygirl

I agree that a driver should certainly be able to drink their non alcoholic drinks ,also anyone who is tee-total, has medical problems,medication affected by alcohol or does not drink alcohol for many reasons,including dietary.
I  have been charged a stupid amount for a glass of  unpleasant warm water,and that was in a supposedly nice restuarant.
Total food bill for the family was £95 -cost to the restuarant was a family that will be voting with their feet for the sake of a glass of water.
I want to support local business but don't want to be ripped off!

Jwd1980

BYO is only meant for alcohol. It is not meant for soft drinks. Any customer should expect to pay for soft drinks at a BYO, it is standard. To all those saying the restaurant should be grateful for the custom, that's entirely unfair. 
To anyone saying the restaurant should make it clear, that's also unfair, BYO has been a thing for years. 
Soft drinks or non alcoholic beers will always have a mark up, any bar or restaurant has to make profit. There is a lot that goes into running a place so please, cut them some slack. 

Redwey

Jwd1980 said:

To anyone saying the restaurant should make it clear, that's also unfair, BYO has been a thing for years. 

Yes, it has, but there’s been such a growth in the low/zero market, I would suggest it’s more likely now that someone will bring their own l/z beer. Maybe non-licensed restaurants need to have a clear policy on bringing them.
I get the soft drinks thing, but l/z falls somewhere between, say, Cola and beer because it can have a small amount of alcohol. It’s not necessarily a soft drink. 

I’m just glad there’s more to choose from these days, and we’ve moved on from Kaliber and Barbican!

Gresp

Officially, this could be easily answered by checking the restaurant's policy: what do they mean by BYOB? What do their T&Cs say? 

Morally, however, is a different story. If the restaurant tries to impose such an illogical policy, especially when their own drinks are 5x overpriced, they can hardly complain when customers don't respect it.  It's like cinemas that charge £3 for a bag of Maltesers, then wonder why customers smuggle their own sweets in.

gloriouslyhappy

Bring your own bottle, we always took BYOB as meaning, which meant anything except hot drinks. At our local restaurant, I remember being charged a 'table charge' of £1 per head, and being told it was for washing the glasses, which we all thought was fair enough. We would come as a group, always have two or three courses with coffee afterwards, and spend a fair amount on food. A lovely family ran the restaurant but after about twenty years they told us they were retiring and had sold the place. All their loyal customers including us were treated to a free set meal before the handover, we wished them well and waited to meet the new people.

They carried on with BYOB of wine but charged silly prices for everything else - £4.50 for an orange juice or mineral water. We, like many others, went once and didn't return.They lost a lot of business because of their needless markup. Yes they need to make a profit, but people can and do vote with their feet when ridiculous over-charging occurs.

keithyno.1

Gresp said:

Officially, this could be easily answered by checking the restaurant's policy: what do they mean by BYOB? What do their T&Cs say? 

Morally, however, is a different story. If the restaurant tries to impose such an illogical policy, especially when their own drinks are 5x overpriced, they can hardly complain when customers don't respect it.  It's like cinemas that charge £3 for a bag of Maltesers, then wonder why customers smuggle their own sweets in.

Hi! I AM the poster of this week’s MMD. This really happened to me just very recently..so it does go to prove that the weekly MMD’s aren’t made up by the MSE staffers just to fill out the weekly email!

I get what you’re saying about checking the restaurant’s policy, and what their T&C’s say. But who would ever think of going to that extent before going out for a nice meal somewhere? The booking wasn’t made by me, it was made by another member of our party. I’d never been before, all I was told was you take your own drinks as it’s not licensed. So being an ex-drinker who loves the taste of beer I just assumed it would be fine to take along a few bottles of my favourite tipple, Becks Blue alcohol free beer (it’s really nice in case you’ve never tried it, and you’d struggle to tell the difference with the ‘normal’ Becks).

The restaurant owner was all very nice and friendly and welcoming as she handed the menus out to our party of seven, and then left us to choose from it as my friends cracked open the god-knows-how-many bottles of wine they’d bought and started glugging it down. Her tone changed immediately when she came to take our order and spotted my bottle of Becks Blue on the table, to one of, “Err, we do actually sell that here, you know!” It was extremely embarrassing, as our table went quiet and all eyes were on me and I was tempted to get up and walk away from the place there and then, but that would have ruined the evening for us all. Hence the uneasy compromise with her, quite terse, bossy “Well, we’ll allow it just this once” remark. Which left a bit of an atmosphere to say the least, as she walked away. 

And some posters on here are trying to defend this person’s attitude on ‘economic’ grounds? They’re completely missing my point when they go on about Bring Your Own Bottle is only meant for alcohol, not soft drinks. Who says it is? It’s not as if it’s enshrined in legislation or anything. HOW is it fair in any way that alcohol drinkers can take as much as they want, at whatever price they’ve paid for it, when non-alcohol drinkers can’t take their own and are expected to pay ridiculously marked up prices for ‘soft’ drinks? It’s alcohol apartheid at work, and restaurant owners who have this policy should be downright ashamed of themselves. And as others have suggested, yes you’re right - I’ll never go near the place again. So well done, that restaurant owner..you’ve lost a good customer. And then owners like this moan and wail when the business goes bust - it’s always somebody else’s fault and never theirs, isn’t it?

[Deleted User]

I get the 'it's for booze only' because we don't have a license but I absolutely wouldn't pay.  I'd rather put it in a booze bottle and sneak it in.

Caz166

The restaurant should have made their policy clearer. I would have been really embarrassed to be singled out like that and definitely wouldn't be going back!

anotheruser

Builder_Dave said:

BYOB also means 'bring your own booze/bottle", it's purely for alcoholic drinks.

Who says?
In the part of the country I come from, it means "bring your own bottle" — absolutely no stipulation on what. It's commonly accepted that BYOB simply means bring your own drinks because when putting on a party, the cost of alcohol could be very expensive and the party organiser may not get enough / right quantities to cover everyone's tastes.

Unless the restaurant specifically had terms and conditions along with the offer, I wouldn't worry about it and call them out on their meaning of BYOB.
It would be interesting to hear a courts description of what that actually means...