Facepalm

If I read this on a menu in a situation where I could go elsewhere, I would.

we have raised prices by 5%. this allows us to avoid raising prices by 5%

Illegal in Germany for a good reason.

I once went to a restaurant that charged a 5% fee for paying by credit card. They only accepted credit cards.

I think it's illegal, but how could I enforce this?

We have raised prices by 5% to avoid having to update all the menus we will just add it to the bottom line.

Ah damn, they said the quiet part loud.

Sounds like i need to open a *Everything's $1 ** store and just make sure I get the fine print squared away...

Not to make excuses for this, because it's not fair to customer, and it's bait and switch pricing IMO... but I understand how you could get there. Sorry this is long winded.

Based on the "thank you for your support", and their clearly not having a legal department, my guess is this is a small business. Prices have swung so wildly in the US in 2025 it's basically unmanageable without a dedicated team.

For example in August of 2024 the price for a lb of coffee according the US Bureau of Labor Statistics was $6.31. In August of 2025 it was $8.87. That's a 40% increase in one calendar year. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000717311

Eggs were $3.20 a dozen in Aug. of '24, but by March of '25 they were $6.22 that's a 94% increase in 7 months. Then they crashed back down to 3.58 (a 42.44% decrease) by August. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111

Now for the sake of a practical example, here's a pretty typical menu for a family diner in New Jersey. It's 11 pages. Maybe 20 items per page. Each item may have 5 to 10 ingredients.
https://www.pomptonqueendiner.com/menu_main/

• You can either try to recalculate all of that every week or two based on tariffs, inflation, bird flu, etc... then reprint and spiral bind 50 to 100, 11-page menus (technically 6 laminated front and back).
• You can overhaul your business model to be leaner, but maybe lose some customers.
• Or you can try to guestimate a number you think you and your customers can live with and distribute your gains and losses across the whole menu and reprint one page with a fee (hopefully) once.

It's a shit sandwich. I don't think this was a good solution, but I don't think a lot of small businesses (or consumers) have good solutions these days. McDonalds has a procurement team, and can lock in terms with their vendors a year in advance. They can update prices on digital menu boards on the fly. They can handle these things pretty easily. Your local greasy spoon may not.

I'd personally weigh whether I think this place and the people who run it are maliciously trying to exploit me or just find a way to get by selling cheese burgers and eggs in this economy.

Note to our restaurant: Due to unnecessary 5% surcharges, we will no longer be eating here.

Great way to lose customers.

You gotta raise prices? Raise prices. But nobody likes getting random extras at the end of their bills.

my favorite kind of hidden fees is when a client pushes a revision clause into a contract for research projects (read: fudge the numbers to their vision of the world) but during legal back and forth the per hour rate for revisions emerges and the client totally misses it and then benign 5k small-scale project gets an extra 10k price tag because those "can we present data with slightly different dimensions?" add up real fast and tough shit.

Who pays with cheques?

Welcome to New America. Expect to start seeing fees like this literally everywhere you go.

Voting (or not) has consequences.

Just. Tell. Me. The. Price.

Stop with this...

The deli at my local grocery store sets out pre-sliced meats so we can avoid waiting. They started flipping the packages over to hide the price recently due to the price increase.

This has become all too common strong here, so now every time one of the restaurants I used to frequent does this I follow a 4 step process. 1 tell the manager what the next steps will be and they can avoid them by removing the fee, permanently, not just this one time. 2 a detailed 1-star review on any app I can, at least Google Maps and Yelp. 3 me and my family of 4 never returning. 4 a ban from the non-profit I’m involved in that does monthly “family dine out nights” with local business in exchange for a cut of their profits, this represents dozens to more than a hundred families of lost business.

I’m one person, and alone these steps probably mean very little to this business. But if even a quarter of their customers do the same, that policy will change. I’m sure I sound like the male version of a Karen to them, but I don’t make a scene, just vote with my dollar and encourage as many people as I can to do the same, while making sure the business knows exactly why.

So far one of the dozen or so places that did this dropped the policy, so they get my business again, at least they’re a possibility on the rare nights we can afford to eat out anymore.

I'm assuming they mean "on all bills" because who pays by check anymore?

I'm just now realizing that I have only ever heard someone refer to a restaurant bill as a "check" when saying "check, please" or "can we get the check"?

In most states this is explicitly illegal in food service.

They were just too lazy to update the prices for each item on the menu. A note at the bottom and called it a day

Wok is dead