I bet I am not the only noticing how expensive restaurants are now. Even fast-food places are getting so high, I am starting to avoid them.
Inflation is taking its toll on everything from gas to groceries, clothing and pretty much everything.
I ran across an article on what some restaurants are doing so they don’t change the prices too much on the menu, but you could still pay double what you used to for night out of the kitchen. It would be best to be on the lookout for some new “service” fees that are showing up
Ḟees for a noncash adjustment, fuel surcharge, kitchen appreciation, wellness free, forced gratuity and temporary inflation fee have been appearing, and it didn’t help that Mastercard and Visa raised transaction fees in April.
To offset the rising cost of doing business, merchants are leveraging this new tactic. The practice is rather like
“shrinkflation” when snack food companies reduce the size of packaging and/or portions to make it harder to spot a price increase.
These fees are effective because unless most people are paying close attention (which most don’t at first), they fail to notice them. One person who did notice it grabbed her cell phone to Google the “temporary inflation fee” that had been added to her check ($2).
Besides restaurants, general contractors and lawyers are also using this ploy.
The downside to this new practice, as one restaurant discovered, business can drop off.
A restaurant that instituted a wellness fee of 5 percent did so as a strategy to help provide health insurance and encourage employees to return to work – the fee ads $5 per hour to employee wages in some cases.
A certified financial planner offered this advice: look at the menu costs ahead of time when dining out, and then double the cost of your entrée to get a more accurate estimate of what the check will be.
Honestly, if I go out and my steak isn’t as I ordered or the service is horrible, I don’t want to be forced to pay a “kitchen appreciation” fee or specific amount of gratuity.
And when it comes to a fuel surcharge, I already paid through the nose at the gas pump to get there to order food that has is sky high now.
It would appear that I will be getting more familiar with my own kitchen. But cooking won’t take that long - with the rate inflation making groceries so high and the home menu shrinking, it shouldn’t take long to fix those Ramen noodles for dinner.