If you've scoffed at paying extra restaurant fees that turn up at the bottom of your dinner check, it might help to understand why these charges are being added, so...
Restaurant industry expert Jonathan Horowitz says the business is having rough times, largely because it never really recovered from the Covid pandemic.
"You have to back up just a little bit when you think about the economics of what's going on with restaurants right now, because the effects of the Covid years continue, with constant significant increases in the cost of doing business. So everything from labor to rent to food to materials, you name it, everything has gone up dramatically.
"And even though menu prices have gone up a lot over the past few years, they're just not keeping up in an industry with notoriously thin margins to begin with. These constant price increases are also shrinking the margins even more, Horowitz says.
"You can only raise menu prices just so much. You can't get much past the going prices at other restaurants, you can lose business. So you have to find new ways to bear some of these costs, and what some restaurants in some parts of the country are doing is adding fees to pass along costs to the customer.
An example? "Some restaurants are offering discounts for cash payments because the cost of credit card transaction fees add up -- a lot," Horowitz emphasizes.
"And we're seeing a bit of a consumer pullback on discretionary spending, cutting into daily income, and then there's the incredible inflation."
The British newspaper Daily Mail noted that some restaurants in England are handing out dinner checks with a "living wage fee" as part of the total. "The diner," the newspaper noted, "ordered a burger meal earlier this month, posted a photo of the receipt on Instagram with the caption: 'WTF is a living wage fee?' The charge — an extra $5.94 — was listed at the bottom of the receipt, with the restaurant noting: 'This fee goes directly to staff payroll and provides a living wage to our team,'" according to the Daily Mail.