Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

A reddit thread made the front page with a similar example of surprise "Economic Recovery Fee" added onto the restaurant bill:

https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/10gowkx/...

If a government watchdog like FTC doesn't stop this or a new explicit law that only allows "total final price" clearly displayed before purchase, it means every type of business will want to play the "Ticketmaster-convenience-fees" game by creatively coming up with new fees.

If businesses are trying to get more money, they should do it by transparently raising prices instead of tricking people into paying hidden fees.

View on HN

> If businesses are trying to get more money, they should do it by transparently raising prices instead of tricking people into paying hidden fees.

Yup. This seems like a terrible long term strategy. If I'd eaten expecting $X, and the total is now $X + $Y, and they have the nerve to remind me it's not a tip, I'm probably not leaving a tip, and I'm -definitely- not coming back.

Most cities are rather static in populace. This is a great way to see yourself out of business for a tiny short term profit.

Some restaurants get the vast majority of their business from tourists who would never be repeat customers regardless. Those restaurants might think they can get away with such fees.

But those restaurants are highly dependent on Yelp reviews et al; such fees are a great way to get bad reviews.

One small township near us does this. They passed a law that states restaurants must put an additional 2% charge on every bill that is used to pay "kitchen staff." When we asked our server about this surprise charge they said "the law requires that we charge it now."

We decided to simply reduce our normal 20% tip by 2% and pay that. We don't like the fact that the city has stepped in to mandate additional fees like this and think this practice should stop.

Outstanding, just outstanding. Way to stick it to your server to throw a fit about a duly-enacted law you don’t like.

I would have thought the price of surrendering one’s decency and regard for fellow humans would be somewhat more than two cents per dollar, but I suppose I was wrong.

It's a mandatory tip so we view it just like the restaurant that adds a mandatory 20% on a party of 6 or more. We'll pay it but we're not going to pay an additional tip. 20% (or 18% if you think it's not going to the wait/kitchen staff) is rather generous so please...

In the U.S., servers are commonly expected to tip the kitchen staff. If a locality mandated a 2% fee to pay the kitchen staff, that's 2% the server doesn't have to pay out, so this seems entirely reasonable to me.

What is unreasonable to me is the locality thinking by mandating a 2% tip the problem they claim to be solving will somehow magically disappear.

Does the link have some issues? I see a hair in the upper right part of the screen and it scrolls too.

I thought it was my hair strand and tried to remove it. I realized it was not my hair and then suspect my monitor has damaged. Opened a new tab and finally realized it was the page haha.

This is the mildlyinfuriating subreddit. It's intentional

That’s just mean.

Were you (at least) mildly infuriated?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com