Geylang restaurant seeks customers overcharged with S$840 instead of S$84 due to typo error

SINGAPORE: On Wednesday (Sep 20), a Geylang restaurant, Fok Lok Kee Private Kitchen, mistakenly overcharged two female customers and is now on a mission to locate them for a refund.

The restaurant, known for its Sichuan cuisine, took to social media, specifically the Hawkers United – Dabao 2020 Facebook group, to reach out to the customers.

The restaurant took to Facebook to look for help in searching previous overcharged customers. (Photo: Fok Lok Kee Private Kitchen/ Facebook)

Instead of a bill amounting to S$84 for their meal, a staff member accidentally added an extra zero, resulting in a charge of S$840.

Bill receipt and error in final transaction from the incident. (Photo: Fok Lok Kee Private Kitchen/ Facebook)

Surprisingly, neither the staff nor the customers noticed the error at the time of payment, and it was only discovered about half an hour after the patrons had left the establishment.

Restaurant hopes to refund previous customer of overcharged fee

Despite being given a receipt, the customers have yet to return for a refund even after two days.

Fortunately, the customers appear to be locals, reducing the possibility of them having left the country.

With no contact information for the first-time customers, the restaurant turned to social media to rectify the situation.

Suggestions from concerned netizens included contacting the bank to void the transaction.

However, the restaurant explained that their point-of-sale provider could only identify that the transaction was made using a Visa or Mastercard.

If necessary, they plan to reach out to the relevant card company for a partial refund, they had said.

The restaurant is hoping that the customers would notice the error in their bank statement or see the social media post and come forward to resolve the issue.

Restaurant explained delay in Facebook post after overcharging incident

Additionally, the restaurant have also clarified that they have promptly shared the post on their Facebook page on Wednesday (Sep 20) when the incident occurred.

However, there was a delay in its publication, and it was only approved and made public recently.

They emphasized that this delay was not intentional.

“P.S. Just to clarify, we immediately posted this on Wed night on our FB page and shared on this group when we realized the error but the post was only approved to be published today, so we do not purposely hold back the info,” it said.

They explained this because some commenters had raised questions about the apparent discrepancy in the dates and times between the Facebook post’s date of posting and the transaction date indicated on the bill.

One commenter had questioned, “Based on the transaction, this was two days ago in the evening?”

This query arose because in the post’s caption, it was mentioned that the incident had occurred “just now.”

Matters resolved 

In the same post, the author, Fok Lok Kee Private Kitchen, provided an update stating that they successfully reached out to the previous customers, and the issues have been resolved.

They “decided to skip the tedious refund/repay bank process,” and instead opted to utilize PayNow to promptly refund the overcharged fee.