I think "splitting the BBQ" as in someone is buying and cooking a bunch of food and their friends are helping with the cost.

But anyway, some restaurants don't split checks and most don't like to because it's extra work for their staff.

How does PayPal fail this use case? Or cash (the horror)?

My friends and I largely don't carry cash, and even though I typically carry a single 20 and a 100 dollar bill for emergencies, it's hard to split cash unless someone else can give you change, which requires them to carry a bunch of 5s 10s 1s (coins?).

Paypal fails like I said because of network effects. More people in my friend group have venmo than paypal (even though paypal owns both), so when it's time to pay, venmo is the default.

Nothing is inherently wrong with paypal, it's just that nobody in my group uses it. So, just plain old network effects.

People don't carry cash as much as they used to, because they don't need to, because apps can do it.

We used to do that, but splitting with an app is easier so we've gradually stopped. Especially because many restaurants don't like doing separate checks, or have a limit to how much they will split, or it just feels mean and inordinately complicated to ask the waiter to do it when we have a way to sort it out ourselves.

Works well unless:

- the restaurant doesn't do separate checks for large groups - friends ordered meals with significant variance in case, and the server wasn't initially told to keep items separated - you want to split communal items in an arbitrary fashion

Me too. This is not a problem I've ever encountered.