Paying extra for a homemade friend dinner ruins the tradition.
By @willayk · Friends
My roommate spent six hours making artisanal birria for our casual college taco night, and now half our friends want to pay triple the normal split to cover her effort. The other half thinks bumping the price ruins our low-stress tradition.
The full story
My friend group has had this rotating taco night tradition since sophomore year where the host buys all the ground beef, tortillas, and toppings, and everyone just Venmos like seven bucks. It has always been super casual. Last night was my roommate’s turn to host, and she literally spent all afternoon making homemade tortillas from scratch and slow-cooking birria beef for like six hours. When everyone walked in, you could tell how proud she was because the whole place smelled incredible and she even set up a little salsa bar. they asked her to do all that, but she clearly loved putting in the work. When dinner wrapped up, someone sent her the usual seven dollars, but two of the guys in the group chat said they wanted to send twenty each to cover how expensive the meat was and how much effort she put in. The rest of the table thought that set a weird, awkward precedent for taco night, saying once people start tipping or scaling the price based on effort, it turns a cheap college hangout into an unspoken competition where people feel guilty if they just do basic boxed shells next week. My roommate said she genuinely didn't care about the extra cash and just wanted everyone to eat good food, but now half the group thinks paying extra is polite and the other half thinks it ruins the vibe of a broke student tradition.
How people voted
- OP Is Right — 33% (23 votes)
- Both Messy — 44% (31 votes)
- OP Is Wrong — 23% (16 votes)
Readers say “Both Messy” (44%) — 70 votes and 5 comments so far.
What people are saying
@zanesorta — God forbid someone eats good food in college without a debate team getting involved.
@tatekk — I would buy the cheapest Ortega taco kit on earth next week and demand the full twenty bucks out of pure spite.
@sasha — serve unseasoned ground beef and charge thirty next time
@idkman — The other side is just projecting their own insecurity about being bad cooks onto a nice gesture.
@blake — My old roommate tried doing this with homemade pasta once and we literally stopped doing family dinner because people got so weird about grocery splits.
Keep reading
- I cut off my friend from using my truck after he stiffed me on gas.
- My friend turned our weekend cabin trip into a corporate retreat.
- People romanticize vintage split-screen multiplayer way more than the games actually deserve.
- I had to leave my best friend's bachelorette party early to take my son to the ER.
- I thought hosting a 'Bad Movie Marathon' was a good idea, but now there's a formal spreadsheet.