Rabbits Against Magic by Jonathan Lemon for July 19, 2023

Don’t forget the mandatory 15% bus staff tip, 20% cook staff tip, 25% hospitality staff tip, 20% cleaning fee, 10% recycling fee, and 20% garbage fee.

If you bring your own take home container for leftovers, there is a $5 fee per container; your own reusable bag, $0.50 each.

If you pay by credit card, 4% will added; debit card, 2.5%.

Financing is available at a low APR 25.9%

It’s what you get for dining at Applefee’s.

Or a fee for breathing….

It’s the dumping fee tomorrow that you will pay dearly for

SNL had a sketch about a Scottish restaurant where everything was a la carte, as here—except the bagpipe music; that was free, but you had to pay to make it stop…

(Personally, I love bagpipe music, and haggis!)

For most of my life, restaurants were quite expensive. Couples went out to eat, but parents almost never took their families — it cost too much. As a child, my family ate out together perhaps once or twice a year, usually on some very special occasion.

Sometime around the 1990s, that all changed. Eating out became relatively cheap. Families started routinely eating out together. What changed? Restaurants stopped paying their employees a living wage. $2.13 A hour, plus tips. Those cheap meals you were eating were possible only because the people serving them were underpaid and overworked.

Now, that’s changed again. People refuse less than a living wage when there are better options, They’ve gone to jobs that pay better. And restaurants are still adjusting. Strange fees are one of the ways.

But this isn’t something new. The high cost of eating in a restaurant was the way the world worked before the 1990s. It’s back, and it’s a better way, with waiters and waitresses able to afford real lives.

Boo!! Boo!!