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Shockingly Expensive Bill
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A character gets the service bill and is shocked by the price on it. This may be caused by the following:
And will result in the following:
- Work Off The Debt
- Fainting
- Spit Take or Wild Take
- Getting angry
- Ask if got the wrong check
- Finding out it's even more expensive
- Or getting your check, but finding out it's the same
- Someone points out it isn't a service bill
- Escape without paying
- Getting stuck with the bill as Pretty Freeloaders do the previous step
- Actually paying
- Debating on how much each person pays.
- Questioning whether you have the bill or the establishment's telephone number.
The bill is often related with room service, restaurants, and, recently, cell phones.
This may overlap with Undisclosed Funds if the exact amount of the bill is never shown. This trope also includes reactions to looking at the price tag.
Examples:
Advertising
Anime and Manga
- In only the fifth episode of Pokémon titled 'Showdown in Pewter City', Ash and Misty discuss the upcoming gym battle with Brock over a meal. After Ash refuses help from Misty, she angrily leaves the restaurant and Ash is left to stare at the bill and subsequently yell for Misty to come back. The bill originally read ¥1150, which just barely qualifies
 for this trope, but the 4Kids Entertainment dub changed it to a dollar sign without bothering with exchange rates (or even just adding a decimal point to make it $11.50), which makes it a rather more potent example.
- Fullmetal Alchemist: Ed becomes enraged when he gets the bill from Ling about the food he and Lan Fan ate in the hotel.
Comic Books
Film
- Late For Dinner: one of the main characters tries to order food after spending a few decades in cryogenic stasis. When the girl at the counter tells him how much it is, he exclaims "That's highway robbery!... Ma'am."
- Fletch: while Fletch is at the country club he orders lots of food and liquor and tells the waiter to put it on another guest's bill. When the other guest gets the bill he's shocked by the amount and tries to find out who did it.
- The final scene of Home Alone 2 has Buzz being delivered his little brother Kevin's room service bill. Dad is Not Happy.
Buzz: Merry Christmas indeed. Yo, Dad...
[the scene cuts to Kevin outside]
Dad: [offscreen] KEVIN! YOU SPENT $967 ON ROOM SERVICE?!?
- The bill Conrad van Orton gets hit with by Consumer Recreation Services in The Game turns out to be a lot more than he anticipated; fortunately, Nicholas agrees to split it with him.
- In White Christmas, Bing Crosby's character's reaction to the estimate on how much the Christmas show is going to cost is "Wow!", which is apparently "Right up there between 'ouch' and 'boing'."
Live-Action TV
Opera
- In the second act of La Bohème, the Bohemians find they've run up an enormous bill at Café Momus (and, inexplicably, Schaunard's fortune has already been spent). Musetta steps in and passes the bill off on her Meal Ticket, Alcindoro, who takes one look at the bill and faints.
Video Games
- The premise of Recettear is Recett being left with such a debt after her father disappears, and having to open an item shop to earn enough money to pay it off. When Recett asks Tear (her fairy debt collector-turned-assistant) how much the total figure is, she refuses to say, for fear of provoking the fainting response*
It's 820,000 pix .
- Persona 4: Yosuke reacts with shock when he finds out Teddie has eaten 10 bowls of ramen on the receipt.
- And before that, Yosuke says he almost pissed in his pants when he found out the price on receipt on the clothes bought for Teddie.
- In Law's ending in Tekken 5, after using up the prize money to pay his son's hospital bill, Paul comes to him in a rickety bike carrying loads of wreckage with him. As he collapses in front of his friend, he hands him the bill for the wreckage, having pegged it on Law, who does a Wild Take. When Paul asks him to pay, Law simply knocks him out and runs away.
Webcomics
- Fooker got his very first mobile phone and started using it for all sorts of things. Unfortunately, he used pay as you go... thud.
Western Animation
Real Life
- The FCC has noted that, due to the complexity of mobile phone plans, 17% of customers have experienced a "Bill Shock" at some point. The highest value complaint to the FCC in the first half of 2010 was in the amount of $68505.
- In Finland, traffic tickets can sometimes be tied to the offender's income, in order to ensure that the ultra-rich don't ignore traffic laws because they know they can afford it. One Nokia executive was hit with a $100,000 ticket for driving 15kph over the limit. Given the above example, this is kind of hilarious.
- In Finland most fines are in fact tied to the income of the offender to ensure both that they can be expected to afford it, and that it will hurt appropriately.
- More than a few people traveling to other countries might experience sticker shock if they forget to take their exchange rates into account. For instance, 5 (HK) bucks for a soda isn't so unreasonable a price when you remember that that is about 63 cents US.
- After the parents of a 8-year old girl let her play the game Smurfs' Village on their iPhone, she bought $1,400 worth of Smurfberries in the game. The girl did not realize that the in-game purchases were in real money and the parents did not know that the game would let her make the purchases for 15 minutes after they last used their account password without prompting for the password again. The publisher Capcom Games and Apple received many similar complaints about this issue from parents seeing $100+ bills on their accounts.
- A pretty common scam in a lot of countries. Cute girls find a foreigner (as all foreigners are rich!), invite him to a tea ceremony, and the final bill ends up being relatively expensive. The scammers pay as well (although they get their money refunded after the sucker leaves).
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