Billed For Birthday Party No-Show

We’ve had a vent before here at Stay At Home Mum about this ‘non-RSVP-ing thing’ becoming rife among our generation. As we let anyone who would listen know: ‘It’s an untold epidemic of poor etiquette; a dying art which is killing our social lives’.

Every day, thousands of hostesses across Australia are making frantic last minute phone calls to would-be guests to find out whether or not in fact they will be guests at Saturday’s soiree. Every three minutes, an unsuspecting hostess is crying her eyes out, thinking that her friends have all found something better to do, and that she and she alone will have to eat 200 profiteroles in the next two days. Every ten seconds that hostess takes another bite of that chocolate-topped, cream-filled pastry that tastes like nothing but bitterness and disappointment.

But what about the story of five-year-old Alex Nash? Little Alex had an invoice for £15.95 put in his school bag after he failed to turn up to a classmate’s birthday party at Plymouth’s Ski Slope and Snowboard Centre before Christmas.

The Plymouth Herald reported that his dad, Derek, originally confirmed Alex would be attending, but he’d forgotten about a prearranged day trip with Alex’s grandparents the same day.

He had no contact details for the friend’s parents and Alex didn’t turn up.

So the party hosts (the birthday child’s parents) organised to send them a bill.

On 15 January this invoice was put in Alex’s schoolbag by a teacher at the request of the birthday boy’s mum. Derek said he “thought it was a joke” at first.

Derek visited the birthday boy’s family to complain and said he wouldn’t be paying up. ‘I told her she should have spoken to me first and not put the invoice in my son’s school bag’.

‘I would have sympathised with her about the cost of Alex not showing up, but I just can’t believe the way she has gone around it’.

What do you think? Should we be sending invoices to people who RSVP, but then don’t show up? Will this practise start to extend to more expensive functions such as weddings or adult birthday parties?