For some people, having a short meeting before an actual, "official" date accomplishes a couple of things:

It lets you know that the person you're meeting is the same person as the picture on the profile. eH users may not have had the experience of meeting someone they've been communicating with online for days or weeks only to find that they are older, younger, or altogether different from the picture on the profile. It's happened to me a few times.

It lets you have a casual, relaxed conversation with someone so you can get over the initial butterflies and see if they (and you) can actually have a casual, relaxed conversation. Basically, it gives you a peek into their personality. If you meet someone at a coffe shop or over a cup of tea or a quick sandwich, you can have a great conversation and find out you enjoy talking with each other. Hooray if this is the case!! Or you can find out the person you're meeting incessantly talks about themselves, their cat, their mother, saving the whales, or not at all. Do you really want to sit across a dinner table from this person? Noooo.

And last, yes, dating is expensive. Being an Lady of the Millenium like I am, I'm all for giving the fellows a break on their tab. There will be opportunties for spending wheelbarrows of money on me soon enough. So let the first meeting be financially beneficial to everyone - inexpensive and non-committal: I offer to pay for my own coffee/tea/scone/plain, unsugared donut and absolutely will if he doesn't mind. No strings attached, no major investment either way.

After this informal, no-pressure, casual, come-as-you-are, icebreaking meeting, if we like each other, then we have an actual "date." While not everyone likes it, it does work for some people, and there is some logic, at least that I see, behind it. It's not all the time just a matter of people being lazy or cheap. And it's not always a case of someone being snotty or dismissive. I actually tend to look at it as being careful and prudent.

But if it doesn't work for you, by all means, do what does!