Bar staff reveal what they do with your card if you don't close your tab the end of the night

A bartender has lifted the lid on what can happen to your card if you don't close your tab at the end of the night.

Look, I'm pretty sure we've all been there before - deciding to be generous and offering to put your credit card behind the bar, only to sink way too many pints and completely forget about the tab until you're tucked up in bed with a greasy takeaway.

It can happen to the best of us, but what happens behind the scenes when whichever unfortunate establishment is left with an open tab?

Well, a bartender across the pond in the US has explained exactly what she does when this happens in the bar she works in.

Michelle Kimball, who frequents TikTok to document her life as a bartender in North Carolina, recently showed off how many tabs - each along with a saved card - were left open at 02.30am following a busy Saturday night.

Holding up a seemingly never-ending list of receipts, Michelle says: "These are the open tabs, the tabs nobody closed out for, y'all are not going to believe this."

To prove the point even further, her co-worker then dragged the line of receipts around the large bar area.

In total, there were 372 tabs that hadn't been closed.

For extra context, Michelle explained that these people had paid their tabs, but hadn't closed them when they left the bar - meaning she would have to manually close each and every one.

She revealed what she was going to do to all of those cards left behind that hadn't been closed - and that was to add a 20 percent tip to each one, which her TikTok video then showed her doing.

"Thank God I can do math really quickly," she joked.

Tipping is a huge part of US culture and it's common practice to tip bartenders every time, as well as servers and other hospitality workers.

Michelle later made a separate video to answer a viewer's question about whether bartenders dislike when tabs aren't closed before a customer leaves.

"First of all no. we appreciate that you started a tab," she said. "It takes so much longer if you just get one beer each time and close out each time instead of starting a tab.

"Second, if you walk up to the bar and it is so busy and you can't get a bartender's attention right away that means we are making drinks for other people, aka we're making money."

"So if you just leave without tabbing out and you were already going to tip 20 percent, we love you. It takes so much less time to close you out at the very end of the night and then just add the 20 percent."

Here in the UK, leaving a card behind the bar to open a tab is the norm, and many establishments operate in this way.

However, as per The Independent, many major banks such as Barclaycard and Halifax have strongly advised customers against this practice in order to lower risk and prevent theft.