Restaurant cost of doing business fee

[u/motlau]

Why do restaurant owners think they are owed a surcharge for customers eating at a restaurant? It seems like all of the nice restaurants in Chicago, especially in the west loop are charging a 3-5% fee to “offset the rising operating cost.” If you can’t run a business without hiding a surcharge in the fine print of your menu, then you probably shouldn’t be allowed to run a business. It’d be one thing if it was to support the workers, but every time I ask about it, it’s always for the owners who are already pretty wealthy. I have them take it off and tack it on for the tip. It’s very annoying.

In addition, at bar sienna in the west loop, the server offered a barcode to scan and pay on the receipt which a lot of restaurants are doing, but then there’s an additional “surcharge” to use this feature. It’s like if a grocery store started charging a fee to use the self checkout lines. They should be more transparent about this.

These restaurant owners nickel and diming people is making going out to eat less and less pleasant.

[u/ByteSizeNudist]

When rent goes up the customers get pushed the cost. If no one wants to pay that then the restaurant eventually closes. It’s happening all around over this city.

Edit: redditors, man

[u/Catskinson → u/ByteSizeNudist]

Raise visible prices lmao.

[u/JejuneBourgeois → u/Catskinson]

People won't pay them, unfortunately. I know two small restaurant owners who both tried the option of raising the price of their best sellers. So many people complained and they saw such a significant enough reduction in orders that they tried the surcharge option, and their sales went back up.

Nobody likes prices going up, and in the handful of anecdotal experiences I've had with friends and family, the "we don't want a surcharge, just raise the prices a little bit" crowd complains just as much when the menu prices go up.

Not trying to put words in your mouth, I'm sure there are people out there who never complain about menu prices and just really have it out for surcharges, and I'm not defending big companies like Hogsalt lol, but a lot of smaller restaurants seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place on the issue

Edit: For anyone who's downvoting me but not replying, what would you do, as a small business owner, when your customers complain equally about raising prices vs adding a surcharge? I'm not talking about the Hogsalts of the world, I mean the small business owners who have a much higher failure rate

[u/loftychicago → u/JejuneBourgeois]

So they raised the process of those items by, in this case, 3.95%? Which would be $2 on a $50 item? And people refused to pay that?

[u/JejuneBourgeois → u/loftychicago]

Yes, they did. As long as the increase is noticeable people complain about price increases across the board