Hidden fees

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

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

I might say this could be a temporary way around having to pay to get all your menus reprinted, but these doofuses appear to have printed it directly on the menu. So yeah, they can get fucked with an egg beater.
- So yeah, they can get fucked with an egg beater.
  🤣
- Is there an upcharge for said fucking.
It means you don't have to tip.
- If you're not going to tip, then don't eat there. You giving the tip to the owner isn't going to change anything.

Just. Tell. Me. The. Price.

Stop with this...

Great way to lose customers.

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

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?

"Legal tender for all debts public and private" is a guarantee backed by the treasury. if you owe the restaurant a debt, they are legally obligated to accept cash tender. Note that you have to actually owe them, you can't demand they accept cash tender up front, they have the right to refuse the terms of sale. if you can successfully argue their card only policy was not successfully communicated, then you have a case. I ANAL.
- I've Karened out with cash on the table a few times and got away with it.
That is illegal in my state. I wrote a strongly worded email to a former landlord informing them of this when they tried to pull thos shit and they immediately backed down, presumably because a bunch of other people did the same thing. It is insane how often companies do just blatantly illegal shit in hopes that nobody will notice because the penalty for getting caught is basically just pay back the people who noticed they got scammed and maybe like a $50 fine that was set when $50 was a huge amount of money.

Illegal in Germany for a good reason.

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

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

I bet they also have suggested tip amounts of 25, 30 and 50 percent at the bottom of the bill.

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

Voting (or not) has consequences.

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

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.

I actually kind of appreciate this.

This is like separating out the tax from the total in the US. If the price is the price, you just get used to it.

If you see the increased prices as a surcharge, broken out, the suppliers don't get away with their price increases. You have to see it looking you in the face every time. Maybe it'll motivate people to action.

Inflation isn't something that just started happening last Thursday.

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.

Not everything is a conspiracy. The presliced lunch meat trays are labeled with what is in them, they're meant to be shown product forward, not scale label first.
- Very smart guy. I wonder why they used to display them other side up, and only changed it when they raised the prices? Hmm 🤦‍♀️

Who pays with cheques?

"Check."
As in, "check, please." Germans and French both ask for "the total", but if þe States, at least, you ask for þe check. Your spelling of cheque makes me believe you're not from þe US; how do you ask "l'addition, s'il vous plaît" colloquially?

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.

You don't have to recalulate the prices per week and there is no indication that they are doing that with the fees which they appear to have changed once with a nice round number.
You are making excuses for what is obviously a deceptive tactic. Blow smoke elsewhere
- That's actually a thing I addressed. You don't have to agree with me but reading the thing before whining about it would have been cool.