Went to a restaurant in LA today and when I got the check I noticed that it was a bit higher than it should be. Then I noticed this 18% service charge. So… We, as customers, need to help pay for their servers instead of the owners paying their servers a living wage. And on top of that they have suggested tip. I called bs on this. I will bet you that the servers do not see a dime of this 18% service charge. [deleted a word so it wasn’t a grammatical horror to read]
A list of L.A. restaurants doing this shit from a Reddit sub:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EEPzeytrva770H2xPFFPDUUNdpnL_VQL4vbzFph-jus/edit#gid=0
Of course it’s in L.A.
They definitely have it in other California cities too. And not just in restaurants.
A chain resale/consignment hipster shop in NorCal started adding a percentage service charge years ago with the same excuse, and you’d only find out about it if you looked at your receipt. The fucked up part is that they also raised their prices so high that I couldn’t shop there anymore. It’s one of those buy/sell/trade clothing stores, so the whole point was to pay less for decent clothes. But if they’re already raising prices significantly, why the fuck do they need yet another charge to pay their workers.
I also think they really must believe it makes them seem “progressive” somehow. Like “oh look, we’re on the workers’ side!” and they hope no one eating/shopping there will think about it any more deeply than that.
That doesn’t say “on the worker’s side” though. It says anti-consumer and selfish. They’re not willing to pay any more if it means they make a little less, they’re just comfortable taking more money from other people.
You realize 100% of the money they’d use to pay their workers more would come from consumers right?
Of course it would. It doesn’t have to (Dan Price is an example of a different model), but it would. At least by wrapping it into the prices consumers can clearly see that increase, instead of this shoddily hidden tactic.
Buffalo Exchange?
The alternative is that they just jack up the menu prices to accomplish the same thing. This is just the equivalent of pricing things at $19.99 because people don’t understand that really means $20 which sounds like a lot more money.
So let’s say you checkout at the grocery store tomorrow and your $100 of groceries has a $20 “employee wellness” fee tacked on. You see that and pricing an item 1 penny below a round number as the same thing. Really?
No, because the difference of seeing a $19.99 price versus a $20.00 price is that I see it up front. That’s more honest than tacking on a $21.50 hidden fee after the fact.
Yeah, please if you’re going to charge me 40 bucks for a salad just put 40 bucks on the menu. Or 39.99 If you must. I greatly prefer that over listing the salad as $30 on the menu, only get blindsided by a separate $10 service charge on the bill. Matter of fact can we just go to putting the entire cost of the item on the menu?
Everything should be on the wheel and out the door pricing. Doing any other way is absolute bullshit.