A NEWPORT café has appealed to customers after being left out of pocket on multiple occasions as a result of people leaving without paying their bills.

Horton’s Lounge is a café on the riverfront opposite Friars Walk and recently posted on Facebook asking people to be mindful of accidentally not paying.

Gavin Horton, who has owned the café for four years, said the majority of cases had been genuine mistakes by customers used to paying up front at the counter instead faced with a table service system set up by the café to observe social distancing rules.

“Like any other place we get genuine ‘dine and dash’ occurrences, but that isn’t the norm," he said.

“We’ve probably lost a couple of hundred quid over this over the past few months.

“It's okay to make the mistake then to come back and rectify it, but it's not okay not to do that.”

While the amount of money lost may not seem like a huge amount, Mr Horton explained that fine margins can make or break a small, independent business.

“The larger the organisation, the easier it is for them to keep an eye on this,” said Mr Horton.

“We might have two or three staff watching the front, while a bigger company working in the same size area might afford to have four people watching.

“So there's the economy of scale makes it easier for the big boys to be more fine-tuned.

“It does make the situation a little bit more difficult for us as a small business, because the margins are so important to us.”

Mr Horton was keen to point out that if anybody makes a genuine error, then the café staff would make a concerted effort not to embarrass them.

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The café has CCTV so could identify and publicly out the people who deliberately leave without paying - also known as 'dining and dashing' - but are vehemently opposed to enacting such a policy.

“Everybody that enters and leaves my premises is recorded,” said Mr Horton.

“We see everything and could ‘picture and shame’ people so, so easily, but that’s not what we are about.

“We're very community focused and we try to look after the people that look after us, which are our customers.

“You don't know if it's a genuine mistake, so it is very difficult to use a process to identify the individuals without causing harm.

“However, everybody that does it, we have clear images of them.

“It's 100 per cent acceptable to come back and say ‘I'm sorry I made a mistake’.

“If anything, that kind of thing enforces our belief that people are nice.”