How do restaurants charge your card for the tip if they already ran your card and gave it back to you before giving you the receipt you wrote the tip on?
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Transactions are either “open” or “closed” for exactly this purpose. So when you run your card at Target, where no tip line appears on your receipt, it’s a “closed” transaction. What you spend is the limit of what you’re charged. In restaurants and other businesses where tips are customary the card is run on an “open” transaction, allowing for a tip to be added. Now, I know some people are thinking, “I can just ask them to run my transaction as ‘closed,'” but it actually doesn’t work that way. The person at the register isn’t deciding how to run the transaction, they’re just “open” or “closed” by default. And in the case of a pizza place or sit-down restaurant it’s always going to be “open.”
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