Buying Lunch

YOU ARE HONORED AND EXCITED to receive an invitation to dinner at the home of a close friend. You arrive early, enjoy cocktails and appetizers, then sit down to a delicious, home cooked, full course meal, including salad, entree, side dishes, desert, and wine.The table settings are complee, with folded napkins, silver ware properly positioned, even, curiously, finger bowls. After enjoying your surpassingly delicious meal, you compliment the chef, your best friend, rise from the dinner table, and repair to the living room for post dinner conversation and decaffeinated coffee. You even suspect that a professional cook has been brought in for the occasion, and remains sequestered in the kitchen. Your offer to help with the dishes has been brushed aside;the dish washer will due. When at length you remark that you should be heading home to feed the cat and complete some online work in preparation for tomorrow's visit to the office, your host smiles pleasantly, and hands you a piece of paper as you walk sleepily towards the foyer. On it is printed the host's name and address, and beneath that, an itemized list of the items you had for dinner, and, below that, a dollar amount, which, to your relief, does not include any taxes. It is a bill for the dinner, payable immediately in cash, or later that evening by electronic transfer. A gratuity is presumed. Late payment, it is written, will result in an extra late fee. Failure to pay, it is implied, will result in legal action. The amouont is substantial, akin to what you might expect from a fashionable five star restaurant, upwards of a hundred dollars. Your first reaction is to asume that your friend is joking, and you laugh approvingly, but with a slight apprehension. You make eye contact with the host; she is not laughing. Astonished, you hastily bid farewell, offer your sincere thanks, and indicate that you will be in touch, soon. As you walk out the front door, you quickly glance around, looking for a possible hidden camera. You do the same outside, but see nothing unusual. This is not some stale sitcom, nor a furtively filmed episode of some "Candid Camera"-like reality television show, but rather, stark, hard, unassailable reality. You are being charged for dinner at the home of your best friend. Neither is this a purely ficticious senario, taken fronm some dystopian novel of social criticism or Kurt Vonnegut book. It is, as folks like to say, "trending", trending in real space, real time, real dining out. All across America's excessively fruited plain, in the land of plenty and generous abundance, the trend is insinuating itself into the warped fabric of 'murican culture; that of inviting people to dinner, then charging them for the privilege, without even the courtesy of an advance notice. A private home become restaurant for profit, without the courtesy of prior notification of capitalistic intent. One might wonder whether the scheme is entirely legal; there is, evidenly, no provision for the payment of sales taxes by the home-restaurant owners to the government. It may never be known precisely where and how this ostensibly, arguably heinous behavior got started, who exactly was the first opportunist to conceive and implement this "pay to eat" at a friend's house operation. Undeniably, it has taken hold. Whoever did it first has either taken no action to keep their profiteering a secret, and sees no reason to, or, more likely, its first vicitms have "spilled the beans", so to speak,spread the word, word has gotten out, and the inevitable imitations have commenced. The early consensus seems to be negative, that this is entirely innapropriate, a form of behavior which should be nipped in the bud. Only, the bud has already bloomed. The cow, as it were, has lef the barn. You almost wish you had not left a bit or two of uneaten food on your plate as a compliment to the host; now you feel that you have failed to ingest full value... We can now expect more of this behavior which, only a short time ago, would have been thought unthinkable, condemned as ruthless profiteering. For explanation, we are left with the only reaonable conclusion at our garbage disposal; that, after all, we live in a society in which all things are and always have been considered possible, no stone is ever left unturned in the passionate pursuit of money making ideas, and that, at rock bottom, lies the reality that we are deepy ensconced within the United States of Avarice.