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Restaurant operators say the fees keep their menu prices lower

lmao, they just want to use deceptive pricing in their menu.

Fuck that, increase the price of your stuff instead of being dishonest.

All listed prices should be the final maximum cost for any specific product. "Additional fees may apply" should not be allowed, as they exist to deceive the user about the final cost.

Upcharges for additional things is fine, as long as the customer knows what the additional cost is.

Also, tipping needs to fuck off and all employees need to be paid a living wage. If businesses can't pay a living wage they don't need to exist.

• get rid of ridiculous fees
• get rid of tips
• pay your staff a living wage with proper benefits
• set real prices on the menu to account for the above

Which is what restaurants in a number of places that are not the US actually do.

I won’t return to a place that has a “cost of living charge.” Don’t make my dining experience about your protest. If you need to raise prices… just raise them.

The weirdest one has been watching the "15%+ service fee" go from groups of 8 to 5 in only 2 years.

Also an easier way to alleviate junk fees would be to remove credit card transaction fees.

You know the thing that banks have been exploiting for decades to make profit out of virtually nothing.

It's like paying for gamepass but for every time you open the game.

And don't come in here saying that it covers PCI DSS requirement. This technology is cheaper to run than a rassberrypi mining dodgecoin.

They should have started cracking down years ago when restaurants started charging "delivery fees" that the delivery drivers didn't get.

Add a service fee or an inflation fee if you'd like. I'll circle it and leave a big fat 0 for the tip. Without it, I'll leave 20% minimum. Problem solved.

THIS is why we need Government OUT OF OUR LIVES (except in the Bedroom and Doctors Office)! If these Regulations go away then OBVIOUSLY Prices will DROP!

Give me the real price or I will go elsewhere.

I've started doing Google reviews of these "fee" places, giving an honest opinion of food/services received and adding a simple statement of any fees added to menu prices. At least it makes it a little more visible.

"Restaurant operators say the fees keep their menu prices lower, improve employee compensation and are better for customers."

HA!!! *but we want it this way so people don't realize how expensive their meal will actually be until they've already eaten and it's too late. We want to hide our profit grab in innocuous fees that visually feel like non-negotiable taxes they are just used to paying without objection!!!"

The credit card fee is the only one I don't mind. CC fees siphon a lot more money out of what we pay than people think. It's unfair that restaurants/stores have to take that hit because the CC industry has been successful in making credit cards ubiquitous.

All those rewards we get as consumers for using CCs come straight from the vendors pockets, and the banks get a much larger cut of the fees than they "give" back via rewards.

There is no reason why credit card fees need to be so steep in the digital age. And most vendor agreements require that vendors aren't allowed to charge a separate CC fee to cover the cost to them, so they instead have to raise prices on all (cash) customers through a menu price hike.

It's the same kind of bullshit as Apple requiring that app owners are not allowed to sell their app on other platforms for less than their Apple Store price.

Get rid of banks processing and merchant fees to start. Banks can make it by just fine without those.

So those restaurants don't want visitors anymore? What kind of shortsighted idiots run those places?

Note that by "stay out of the fight" the article means "stay out of the Biden administration’s crosshairs" which actually means something different.

How enforceable are these fees? Like if I sat down, ordered from the menu with whatever set prices they had in the menu, get back a bill with fees added on that I never agreed to, what would happen if I just refused to pay those fees? Like I'm not coming back either way, so don't care if they ban me, but can a restaurant tack on whatever they want and the police would treat it as a non-payment of what's due or is the legal obligation only for the food ordered plus reasonable expectations added on (such as taxes, though personally I also believe they should be included in the advertised price)?

I've never been to a restaurant with fees and if I ever found one, I wouldn't be going there. I rarely eat out anymore at all though. High prices for mediocre food and mediocre service keep me away.

Am I the only one? The whole thing of charging 4% if someone’s paying by credit card, because that’s what it costs to run their credit card, makes perfect sense to me.

Maybe it is because I used to be involved with a business that paid credit card fees. What we eventually wound up doing was publishing prices that were nice round numbers that roughly included the CC fees, giving a discount below the published prices for cash payments, and including a separate 3% CC fee onto custom quotes that were itemized, if people were paying with a card. That seemed like a pretty solid system. But yeah I definitely get it if a restaurant wants to say that there’s a certain percent fee if you’re paying with a card.

“Cost of living adjustment” can fuck off though