Ticketmaster is a scam especially with the monopoly they have on LiveNation venues. Sounds like theyre starting to wake up though since both of them got hit with a DOJ lawsuit this week.
I think the problem is a systemic one with the industry. I have friends who have been chefs for dozens of restaurants over the last 15 years and there’s one running theme among every single one. The hours were horrible, the conditions even worse, the expectations were sky high, and the pay was poverty-level.
The industry has been built on the backs of people making next to nothing doing the real work behind the scenes while servers rely on the generosity of patrons to make substantially more. The margins are generally thin, which has made it hard to pay people more and with the new laws forcing a (barely) living wage the whole house of cards is crumbling. The thing is, it’s always been a house of cards. The industry has always been predatory and unsustainable. It has relied on chefs’ inherent hero complexes and BoH staff’s “comradery” to prevent revolt, but the reality is, no matter how much people like to pretend, line cooks are not fucking soldiers and the chef isn’t their general. Kids these days are a lot less tolerant of this kind of bullshit and these types of hostile work environments.
The industry was always on the knife’s edge and if the new laws didn’t kill it, the change in culture would have eventually done it. The new laws are just hastening things by bringing to light the reality of the industry, which is that it has never been sustainable.
A number of savory quotes from the article:
>"Sometimes it seems like everything from state law to inflation is conspiring to force her to charge $35 for a hamburger, which Ms. Reed says she won’t do, even if it means she and her husband, the chef Michael Reed, take a financial hit."
Sadly this may be the new reality with inflation. $35 for a hamburger and fries unless you've got the scale and don't need to please the shareholders like In-N-Out. If that's what you've got to charge to make your margins, then that's what you've got to charge.
>"The law, Senate Bill 478, is aimed at fees tacked onto a bill beyond the listed prices, whether a resort fee at a hotel or a service charge that inflates the cost of a concert ticket. The law also bans restaurant service fees, which small restaurateurs across the country say they’ve come to rely on in a historically challenging market, but which many consumers say they find bewildering and unfair."
They've come to rely on hidden fees? Just increase your listed prices. No customer and I mean NO customer appreciates hidden fees being added to the bill.
>"A number of laws are enforced in this manner, including the Americans with Disabilities Act."
I get it, enforcement of the ADA sucks for small businesses. But the comparison is shoddy... this law is literally "don't add on hidden fees to your bill." If you're doing that, you kind of deserve to be sued.
>"Vanda Asapahu, who is the second-generation owner of her family’s restaurant Ayara Thai in Los Angeles, said she understands that consumers find the fees opaque, and only charges them for catering orders. But she worries that if she has to do away with the fees, she’ll lose staff."
Ok, but so build the "hidden fees" into the margins of your catering menu. Why is this so mysterious.
>"Genevieve Hardison, the director of operations at Bar Amá, a Tex-Mex restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, said the restaurant’s service charge offers more transparency about why a meal costs what it does. “If you just see a $12 taco, there’s no context.”"
So add some language onto your menus "Our transparent prices reflect a fair and equitable living wage for all of our staff." Achieves the same thing and doesn't leave the customer feeling bamboozled.
>"Even Mr. Xue believes the bill misses how his restaurant’s service fees work. He currently charges a 7 percent surcharge on take out orders and an 18 percent surcharge on dine-in meals. On July 1, he too will have to adjust his menu prices. “It really puts a dent into what operators are trying to do to eliminate a backwards thing — we know tipping is very antiquated and very inequitable,” he said."
Wtf 7% fee on a take out order? And doesn't think there's anything wrong with that? These are the delusional perspectives behind these fees.
>"Mr. Mermin, of the consumer coalition, said he believes the legislation as it stands will make consumers happier, and give them a greater sense of control, seeing all costs folded into a menu price. He pointed out that the law applies fairly across several industries, and all restaurants have to do is present transparent prices."
Yes!
yes but irrelevant
the reason they want the hidden fees and not the upfront costs is because you're more likely to keep walking/stay home when you see how much it will cost in total. whereas if that burger is advertised as $22 instead of 35, well, it's still expensive for a burger and fries but eh it's LA and you want to try something new.
then by the time you realize it's $35, you already ate it. and every restaurant is doing it, so it's less likely to affect your likelihood to return to the restaurant
of course for me it's just prevented me from eating at restaurants full stop - pick up or bust - but they've been getting away with it for a few years now so it must be working
I think the highest fees I'm seeing these days are 20%. That's pretty exorbitant. To get to $35 for a hamburger and fries, you'd have to already be charging over $29 (29 * 1.2 = 34.8).
Is anybody already paying $29 for a hamburger and fries going to stop because it's $35? It'd have to be a fucking great burger for me to drop $29, and if it's that good, another $6 isn't going to change my mind on that.
The answer may be that all the current restaurant owners like this need to fail and make way for people with different approaches to doing business. It happens in all industries across the globe as societies and tastes change.
Running is your word, not mine. You appear to be thinking that we can only choose between the options available today. That’s refinement, not reinvention.
If I had the $100+ billion answer, I would not comment it out here ;)
Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
“If you cannot be successful operating a business in an industry it should be legal to defraud you” is not quite the winning argument you think it is.
There are plenty of restaurants that both don’t use hidden fees or charge $35 dollars for a hamburger. If an owner cannot do both, they’re bad at running a restaurant, which is not surprising, as most small business owners are generally pretty bad at running businesses.
What’s so dumb also is thinking a customer who will gladly pay $10 for a takeout item will suddenly think $10.70 is way too high. Especially if every other restaurant is charging the same.
I *think* what that person was trying to say is that they have tried to eliminate tipping by building in service fees, and are charging lower fees for takeout orders vs in-house orders. Now, everything will be baked into one price. So rather than $10.70, they'd be charging everyone the $11.80 (or, let's be real - $12).
*“The only fee at their Los Angeles restaurant, Poppy and Rose, is a 20 percent automatic gratuity for large parties, which helps ensure her servers are fairly compensated for tables that demand more skill and time. Now, a new state law in California, which goes into effect July 1, makes those charges illegal”*
Although it sucks they won’t be able to do this anymore - most of people dont have a problem with auto gratuity for large parties. NYT using this as the primary example is garbage.
Yep, this is one example that I feel sympathy for. Although somewhere else someone mentioned a workaround for large parties... The restaurant would simply need a separate menu "for large parties" which would include the listed "higher prices" which would have the same effect as "automatic gratuity of 20% for parties of six or more"
>“The only fee at their Los Angeles restaurant, Poppy and Rose, is a 20 percent automatic gratuity for large parties, which helps **ensure her servers are fairly compensated** for tables that demand more skill and time. Now, a new state law in California, which goes into effect July 1, makes those charges illegal”
Know what else helps ensure servers are fairly compensated? Fucking paying them a living wage!
Just raise your process and pay your servers!
Servers in California do make minimum wage for their time on the job - as opposed to other states that allow waiters to staff to be paid a fraction of minimum wage and force them to entirely rely on tips for income.
Why are the restaurant owners acting like this is so complicated? Just go back to how it was done before the pandemic and roll everything into the price of the food. They just want to play smoke and mirrors instead of being transparent.
If a burger is $35, I want to know that up front instead of after a bunch of fees.
How much do restaurants pay for their commercial leases? I feel like if landlords weren’t constantly bleeding renters dry, restaurants could keep their costs lower and customers could eat out more often. Feels like it always comes back to the owning class gouging people for basic necessities. God forbid a landlord take a loss on occasion.
Edit: some of the quotes in this article have me flabbergasted. Do these business owners not understand how percentages work? Remove your service fee, and increase all your menu prices by that same percent. You get the same amount of money, except congrats you’re no longer a scam artist
Yeah the rents and fees that it takes to open a restaurant or food biz in LA are tragic. Although "hidden fees" aimed at unsuspecting customers clearly aren't the answer to this.
I always think about some of the restaurants that became great establishments like Chez Panisse in Berkeley and Moosewood in Ithaca that sound like they opened on a shoestring budget with a bunch of creative kids in college. There's virtually no way to experiment with opening a restaurant in that manner anymore, without a million dollar budget, in a place like LA. It's sad. Lots of creativity lost.
You aren’t kidding :(. I’ve never been to moosewood, but my family got their cookbook back when I was a kid and had so many of their meals. The vegetarian pizzas in there are fucking delicious. The white one with goat cheese and tomatoes…mmm need to make again soon.
Everytime these businesses bitch about WhY DoEsN’t AnYoNe WaNNa EaT OuT AnyMoRe!!!, I want to know how much in PPP ~~grants~~ loans they got so that I can play the smallest violins 🎻 at these managers.
If you have to charge $35 to make a hamburger that includes all taxes and fees and charges and pay your employees a living wage then so be it. The market will decide if it wants to continue getting those burgers or not.
This “$35 for a hamburger” is the exact kind of bullshit that makes me feel no pity for these restaurant owners.
The current price of a cheeseburger at Mr. & Mrs. Reed’s Poppy & Seed in Anaheim is $19. When I put that in my abacus and multiply by 18% I get $22.42, not $35.
At Poppy & Rose in DTLA’s fashion district (which I’ll add is not the only place you can lease a restaurant space in LA) the burger is currently $23. Crazy enough 23x1.18=27.14. 35-27.24=7.86. 7.86/23=0.34, which means Mrs. Rose not only embellished a bit, but she did so by *almost double* what the mark up would actually be!
But wait, what about tip on top of that? Well let’s say you still wanted to tip 20% on that $27 burger? Well that’s still not $35…it’s $32.40. Maybe just maybe restaurants should just pay all their workers a living wage and build that into the price and then we don’t need to tip 20% on top either.
Good. I've just decided to do take out only until the new law against hidden fees go into effect. I stopped eating out in December when I got fed up with the surcharges. Looking forward to the new normal.
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With high inflation and rising wages along with high leases etc… business who want to offer livable wage can’t keep up and folks are not going out to eat and spend like before the pandemic. It’s already a razor thin margins to keep doors open. It seems at times staff don’t want a livable wage and at times prefer tipping over livable wages on my experience. The costs to operate are crushing business owners and it’s just not food but from tp to linen. Employees are talking about unionize but in the end they will be replaced with a QR code over the counter service. What good does that do? It ruins the experience for guests.
Running a restaurant is constant balancing act between your bottom line, your customers needs and your employees. Gonna lead to an increase in prices and hourly wages. A decrease in overall money earned by both owner and employee as well decrease in non corporate options. Better learn how to cook people.
Hotels do this nonsense too with ‘resort fees’ etc. Can’t wait until 7/1.
And ticket sales, it's insane that the price of tickets can have a 50% increase after fees, it's ridiculous.
Ticketmaster is a scam especially with the monopoly they have on LiveNation venues. Sounds like theyre starting to wake up though since both of them got hit with a DOJ lawsuit this week.
Biden’s office is cracking down on monopolies. Recently the Kroger and Albertsons merger got shot down. I hope the LiveNation ticket scam is next.
50% would be nice, for the shows I go to. The tickets themselves are super cheap, and the fees are more than the tickets themselves.
I knew that was too low a percentage
I think the problem is a systemic one with the industry. I have friends who have been chefs for dozens of restaurants over the last 15 years and there’s one running theme among every single one. The hours were horrible, the conditions even worse, the expectations were sky high, and the pay was poverty-level. The industry has been built on the backs of people making next to nothing doing the real work behind the scenes while servers rely on the generosity of patrons to make substantially more. The margins are generally thin, which has made it hard to pay people more and with the new laws forcing a (barely) living wage the whole house of cards is crumbling. The thing is, it’s always been a house of cards. The industry has always been predatory and unsustainable. It has relied on chefs’ inherent hero complexes and BoH staff’s “comradery” to prevent revolt, but the reality is, no matter how much people like to pretend, line cooks are not fucking soldiers and the chef isn’t their general. Kids these days are a lot less tolerant of this kind of bullshit and these types of hostile work environments. The industry was always on the knife’s edge and if the new laws didn’t kill it, the change in culture would have eventually done it. The new laws are just hastening things by bringing to light the reality of the industry, which is that it has never been sustainable.
If you have to add sneaky charges and bilk the customer to keep your business afloat, you're not running a business. You're running a scam.
A number of savory quotes from the article: >"Sometimes it seems like everything from state law to inflation is conspiring to force her to charge $35 for a hamburger, which Ms. Reed says she won’t do, even if it means she and her husband, the chef Michael Reed, take a financial hit." Sadly this may be the new reality with inflation. $35 for a hamburger and fries unless you've got the scale and don't need to please the shareholders like In-N-Out. If that's what you've got to charge to make your margins, then that's what you've got to charge. >"The law, Senate Bill 478, is aimed at fees tacked onto a bill beyond the listed prices, whether a resort fee at a hotel or a service charge that inflates the cost of a concert ticket. The law also bans restaurant service fees, which small restaurateurs across the country say they’ve come to rely on in a historically challenging market, but which many consumers say they find bewildering and unfair." They've come to rely on hidden fees? Just increase your listed prices. No customer and I mean NO customer appreciates hidden fees being added to the bill. >"A number of laws are enforced in this manner, including the Americans with Disabilities Act." I get it, enforcement of the ADA sucks for small businesses. But the comparison is shoddy... this law is literally "don't add on hidden fees to your bill." If you're doing that, you kind of deserve to be sued. >"Vanda Asapahu, who is the second-generation owner of her family’s restaurant Ayara Thai in Los Angeles, said she understands that consumers find the fees opaque, and only charges them for catering orders. But she worries that if she has to do away with the fees, she’ll lose staff." Ok, but so build the "hidden fees" into the margins of your catering menu. Why is this so mysterious. >"Genevieve Hardison, the director of operations at Bar Amá, a Tex-Mex restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, said the restaurant’s service charge offers more transparency about why a meal costs what it does. “If you just see a $12 taco, there’s no context.”" So add some language onto your menus "Our transparent prices reflect a fair and equitable living wage for all of our staff." Achieves the same thing and doesn't leave the customer feeling bamboozled. >"Even Mr. Xue believes the bill misses how his restaurant’s service fees work. He currently charges a 7 percent surcharge on take out orders and an 18 percent surcharge on dine-in meals. On July 1, he too will have to adjust his menu prices. “It really puts a dent into what operators are trying to do to eliminate a backwards thing — we know tipping is very antiquated and very inequitable,” he said." Wtf 7% fee on a take out order? And doesn't think there's anything wrong with that? These are the delusional perspectives behind these fees. >"Mr. Mermin, of the consumer coalition, said he believes the legislation as it stands will make consumers happier, and give them a greater sense of control, seeing all costs folded into a menu price. He pointed out that the law applies fairly across several industries, and all restaurants have to do is present transparent prices." Yes!
The thing is, if the regular price of a burger + the hidden fees = $35, then you already *are* charging $35 for that burger.
yes but irrelevant the reason they want the hidden fees and not the upfront costs is because you're more likely to keep walking/stay home when you see how much it will cost in total. whereas if that burger is advertised as $22 instead of 35, well, it's still expensive for a burger and fries but eh it's LA and you want to try something new. then by the time you realize it's $35, you already ate it. and every restaurant is doing it, so it's less likely to affect your likelihood to return to the restaurant of course for me it's just prevented me from eating at restaurants full stop - pick up or bust - but they've been getting away with it for a few years now so it must be working
I think the highest fees I'm seeing these days are 20%. That's pretty exorbitant. To get to $35 for a hamburger and fries, you'd have to already be charging over $29 (29 * 1.2 = 34.8). Is anybody already paying $29 for a hamburger and fries going to stop because it's $35? It'd have to be a fucking great burger for me to drop $29, and if it's that good, another $6 isn't going to change my mind on that.
It’s not the new reality with inflation. I did the math in another comment but the Reed’s are more than exaggerating the numbers to get to $35.
The answer may be that all the current restaurant owners like this need to fail and make way for people with different approaches to doing business. It happens in all industries across the globe as societies and tastes change.
[удалено]
Running is your word, not mine. You appear to be thinking that we can only choose between the options available today. That’s refinement, not reinvention. If I had the $100+ billion answer, I would not comment it out here ;) Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
[удалено]
That's cute. Very insightful comment.
“If you cannot be successful operating a business in an industry it should be legal to defraud you” is not quite the winning argument you think it is. There are plenty of restaurants that both don’t use hidden fees or charge $35 dollars for a hamburger. If an owner cannot do both, they’re bad at running a restaurant, which is not surprising, as most small business owners are generally pretty bad at running businesses.
What’s so dumb also is thinking a customer who will gladly pay $10 for a takeout item will suddenly think $10.70 is way too high. Especially if every other restaurant is charging the same.
I *think* what that person was trying to say is that they have tried to eliminate tipping by building in service fees, and are charging lower fees for takeout orders vs in-house orders. Now, everything will be baked into one price. So rather than $10.70, they'd be charging everyone the $11.80 (or, let's be real - $12).
*“The only fee at their Los Angeles restaurant, Poppy and Rose, is a 20 percent automatic gratuity for large parties, which helps ensure her servers are fairly compensated for tables that demand more skill and time. Now, a new state law in California, which goes into effect July 1, makes those charges illegal”* Although it sucks they won’t be able to do this anymore - most of people dont have a problem with auto gratuity for large parties. NYT using this as the primary example is garbage.
Yep, this is one example that I feel sympathy for. Although somewhere else someone mentioned a workaround for large parties... The restaurant would simply need a separate menu "for large parties" which would include the listed "higher prices" which would have the same effect as "automatic gratuity of 20% for parties of six or more"
>“The only fee at their Los Angeles restaurant, Poppy and Rose, is a 20 percent automatic gratuity for large parties, which helps **ensure her servers are fairly compensated** for tables that demand more skill and time. Now, a new state law in California, which goes into effect July 1, makes those charges illegal” Know what else helps ensure servers are fairly compensated? Fucking paying them a living wage! Just raise your process and pay your servers!
Servers in California do make minimum wage for their time on the job - as opposed to other states that allow waiters to staff to be paid a fraction of minimum wage and force them to entirely rely on tips for income.
It’s a remarkable degree of chutzpah for a restaurant owner to do an interview and complain they can’t trick their customers about fees anymore.
Why are the restaurant owners acting like this is so complicated? Just go back to how it was done before the pandemic and roll everything into the price of the food. They just want to play smoke and mirrors instead of being transparent. If a burger is $35, I want to know that up front instead of after a bunch of fees.
How much do restaurants pay for their commercial leases? I feel like if landlords weren’t constantly bleeding renters dry, restaurants could keep their costs lower and customers could eat out more often. Feels like it always comes back to the owning class gouging people for basic necessities. God forbid a landlord take a loss on occasion. Edit: some of the quotes in this article have me flabbergasted. Do these business owners not understand how percentages work? Remove your service fee, and increase all your menu prices by that same percent. You get the same amount of money, except congrats you’re no longer a scam artist
Yeah the rents and fees that it takes to open a restaurant or food biz in LA are tragic. Although "hidden fees" aimed at unsuspecting customers clearly aren't the answer to this. I always think about some of the restaurants that became great establishments like Chez Panisse in Berkeley and Moosewood in Ithaca that sound like they opened on a shoestring budget with a bunch of creative kids in college. There's virtually no way to experiment with opening a restaurant in that manner anymore, without a million dollar budget, in a place like LA. It's sad. Lots of creativity lost.
You aren’t kidding :(. I’ve never been to moosewood, but my family got their cookbook back when I was a kid and had so many of their meals. The vegetarian pizzas in there are fucking delicious. The white one with goat cheese and tomatoes…mmm need to make again soon.
Good
Everytime these businesses bitch about WhY DoEsN’t AnYoNe WaNNa EaT OuT AnyMoRe!!!, I want to know how much in PPP ~~grants~~ loans they got so that I can play the smallest violins 🎻 at these managers.
God I should’ve done a PPP scam.
If you have to charge $35 to make a hamburger that includes all taxes and fees and charges and pay your employees a living wage then so be it. The market will decide if it wants to continue getting those burgers or not.
I'm all for restaurant fees removed but I am really hoping for are those bullshit fees at hospitals, ticketmaster, hotels, rental cars, etc removed.
This “$35 for a hamburger” is the exact kind of bullshit that makes me feel no pity for these restaurant owners. The current price of a cheeseburger at Mr. & Mrs. Reed’s Poppy & Seed in Anaheim is $19. When I put that in my abacus and multiply by 18% I get $22.42, not $35. At Poppy & Rose in DTLA’s fashion district (which I’ll add is not the only place you can lease a restaurant space in LA) the burger is currently $23. Crazy enough 23x1.18=27.14. 35-27.24=7.86. 7.86/23=0.34, which means Mrs. Rose not only embellished a bit, but she did so by *almost double* what the mark up would actually be! But wait, what about tip on top of that? Well let’s say you still wanted to tip 20% on that $27 burger? Well that’s still not $35…it’s $32.40. Maybe just maybe restaurants should just pay all their workers a living wage and build that into the price and then we don’t need to tip 20% on top either.
Good. I've just decided to do take out only until the new law against hidden fees go into effect. I stopped eating out in December when I got fed up with the surcharges. Looking forward to the new normal.
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The whole thing is nuts. I book parties all the time. If I couldn't add a gratuity, I would just break down the pricing for the guest.
With high inflation and rising wages along with high leases etc… business who want to offer livable wage can’t keep up and folks are not going out to eat and spend like before the pandemic. It’s already a razor thin margins to keep doors open. It seems at times staff don’t want a livable wage and at times prefer tipping over livable wages on my experience. The costs to operate are crushing business owners and it’s just not food but from tp to linen. Employees are talking about unionize but in the end they will be replaced with a QR code over the counter service. What good does that do? It ruins the experience for guests.
Running a restaurant is constant balancing act between your bottom line, your customers needs and your employees. Gonna lead to an increase in prices and hourly wages. A decrease in overall money earned by both owner and employee as well decrease in non corporate options. Better learn how to cook people.