I got this fun fee after trying to order takeout from Buffalo Wild Wings (yes I’m naming and shaming). How exactly does adding a dollar help you operate takeout? It’s literally less work than waiting on a table. This is nothing more than a shameful cash grab to pad profits.
I cancelled my order and got local street tacos instead.
EDIT: Look what I found this morning, lol https://www.today.com/food/restaurants/buffalo-wild-wings-takeout-fee-backlash-complaint-rcna90228
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McDonalds is especially egregious recently. Time was you could get a set for ¥500 (about 5 dollars) Then suddenly all the menu items went up to ¥700 - ¥900. That starts to get very very close to the alternatives which are much better. The only competitive edge they had was price really.
Same in Europe, MacDonalds used to be the cheap fast option. Now it’s almost restaurant prices. If I pay restaurant money I expect restaurant quality, not fast food.
No shit. Last time I went with my girlfriend we just had some fries, couple burgers and nuggets.
€34! Not doing that again.
“Yes I’m naming and shaming”
God i love not being on Reddit
I’d bet all the cash in my wallet that the tacos were significantly better than anything from Buffalo Wild Wings.
They were delicious, cheaper, and I don’t know what my dumb brain was even thinking
I barely even go out nowadays, I just try and fail to make it myself.
Fortunately I married someone who can cook better than anyone I’ve ever met and they’re frugal. Every meal is centered around whatever main ingredient is going to go bad first to ensure we don’t throw away food, ever (and any scraps we do have leftover get fed to the chickens to produce more butt nuggets and meat).
These days the quality of food at restaurants has gone way down and one can often cook a much better meal at home. Like we have gone to a few hole-in-the wall places with pretty decent food, and then we have gone to pretentious up-scale places where the prices are 3x higher than normal and the food was still only mediocre - even fancy yacht club restaurants where almost everyone is stuck up and acts like they’re better then the staff have terrible food. I have to laugh that they think it’s worth $50 for a cheesburger when it tastes no better than what I could get from Applebees (at least they could have used higher quality beef for the burger! Nope - sysco special).
ChatGPT really helps make things easier for even novice cooks like myself - just tell it what you have and ask for suggestions then directions.
Honestly I don’t miss going out for food and paying those dumb ridiculous prices
As a non-US citizen, this is a ridiculous greed.
As a US citizen, this is a ridiculous greed.
It’s literally less work than waiting on a table.
It’s not as if they’re paying their waitstaff normal minimum wage in most states; tipped employees can be paid less if the tips make up for it.
You’re correct, and that’s another beef I have with the whole industry.
It’s actually more of the problem. They can pay wait staff 2.13 an hour, but they cannot make them pack up take out orders for that. So it literally does cost them more to do take out.
They do exactly that
Yes they can.
I think the point is that if all the staff do is pack up take out orders, they legally cannot make them do it for $2.13/hour. The employer legally has to pay tipped employees minimum wage if tips do not cause them to reach minimum wage. More time on take out orders is less time earning tips.
More broadly, most wait staff aren’t going stick around even if they’re being paid minimum wage and getting no tips. They’ll go elsewhere where they can earn better — presumably somewhere they can consistently earn tips.
If all the staff does is pack up takeout orders, they can legally be paid $2.13 an hour.
Wrong. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped “Basic Combined Cash & Tip Minimum Wage Rate” means that if tips do not meet the federal minimum wage, the employer must make up the difference.
What part of that do you think applies to this discussion?
Do you think it’s illegal to tip on a Togo order?
From what I’ve heard, that rule is quite rarely enforced. Since some portion of tips is probably going to be in cash, the employer doesn’t have a 100% perfect ledger of how much each person made in tips, so they aren’t just going to automatically fill that gap unless the employee asks for it and backs up their claims.
There are a few implicit incentives at work that would prevent an employee from pursuing that course of action unless it’s happening really regularly. I’ve heard stories about people trying to go after it and facing “unrelated” retaliation. While such retaliation would be illegal if a causal link were proven, the entire thing is shrouded in so much plausible deniability that I imagine most people would just find it easier to take a few dollars loss than pursue legal action. Another thing preventing such action is that many cash tips often go unreported, so attempting to bring all of the numbers to the floor in a legal setting is not something most servers would want to try anyways.
Anyways, that only guarantees a wage of $7.25/hour. That’s a poverty wage, and the thought that employees need to fight their employers just to get that is depressing. States differ, but a pretty large number still use the federal minimum wage. Any employer that can’t manage to pay their employees a living wage, much less $7.25/hr, should absolutely go out of business.
The answer to all of this is to remove the nonsensical reduced minimum wage for tipped workers. Some states have done this (WA comes to mind) - they make state minimum wage plus tips. Worth noting that the restaurant industry there is doing just as well as anywhere else, so clearly it’s not such a harmful thing to establishments.
It’s averaged out across a pay period, and in my twenty plus years in the service industry I’ve never heard of a server making less than minimum wage. They’re generally the highest-paid employees on a per hour basis.
The group of people who benefit the most from tipping are the servers.
Stick to topics you actually know something about.
Cost of takeout bags, containers, IT, all that jazz, the company believes it should be able to pass on to the customer without raising it’s menu prices. I don’t know it’s a classic “cash grab” so much as a business attempting to recoup as much as it can from a sale. Last time I checked BFF wasn’t doing all that great. But in the end, I agree completely with you in that these Fees are so fucking annoying, one after another, never ending.
Cost of takeout bags, containers, IT, all that jazz,
And then we subtract the cost of plates, dishwashers, chairs, menus, tables, IT for their internal POS and seating systems… gosh, sounds like I should be getting a discount!
Did you submit a handwritten ticket,pay with cash, and order without ever looking at the menu? Did you do so without taking up any time of an employee or occupying any space in their establishment for any amount of time? Did you ask them to just give you all of the raw ingredients in a Togo container without actually cooking anything?
Of course not, so you used everything you just whined about getting a discount for.
Do you really think they plate the food in the back of the house, then turn around and dump that plate of food into a container, and then wash the plate?
No wonder they need to charge extra.Do you really think the food just springs into existence without having to be cooked or prepped?
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This take is insane. You must be a mod at r/antiwork
That’s crap too because of you dine in and have leftovers they don’t charge for a take home container. They didn’t have to wash plates or silverware. It should wash out.
Yeah, and that was on top of having it “suggest” a 25% tip, which I had to manually type in a custom amt of 0. I’m not tipping for goddamn takeout ffs
Automatic and compulsory tipping culture in the US for every single thing is just out of control.
The original poster added context in a comment, saying that the location they ordered from was a Buffalo Wild Wings Go store, a contactless version of the establishment.
Was the location you were ordering from one of these? Maybe instead of paying proper wages like fast food restaurants these assholes were trying to make up for people being unlikely to tip for pickup to keep the profits from being able to pay employees barely anything?
Mine was not, it was a traditional BWW establishment. Tbh, I didn’t know they had such a thing lol
You voted with your wallet. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work.
except actual voting is 1 person = 1 vote. shareholders, corporate conglomerates, and lobbyists have made it that 1 person gets millions upon billions of votes. when we do vote with our wallets and buy from the places we want to support, the corporations always win in the end. either by buying them out, or because what we supported decided to cater to shareholders instead of customers. just look at what happened to reddit
That’s how free markets work. Free markets and capitalism are different things.
If capitalism worked Buffalo Wild Wings wouldn’t exist. Trash food. Go to a local pub or something.
The value that chain and fast food restaurants bring isn’t quality. Their value is (1) convenience, and (2) consistency.
Many people will often prefer to have a known quantity quickly in preference to a highly probably better but uncertain quantity slower. Every Dunkin Donuts has donuts that taste the same as all the other locations. That’s more valuable than people think.
That’s why those locations are successful.
These chains are going out of business because their demo is dying. People who know how to use the internet to find well liked local spots don’t go to these places.
https://moneywise.com/life/food/millennials-are-killing-off-these-restaurant-chains
Capitalism does work in the voting with your wallet. However there’s two things that tend to get in the way. Laziness and mergers. Either customers don’t care and/or all your other opinions got bought out.
You forgot regulatory capture and socialism for the business owners
We don’t have pubs in the area next to my local BWW. Lots of places don’t have pubs.
Ya that makes sense.
If you are sitting in the restaurant, you are probably paying for some ridiculously overprized drinks as well.
Maybe compare it to ordering the same stuff but picking it up yourself.
Or compare it to yet another innocuous bs fee slipped in under the radar by companies testing what they can get away with
i spent $20 at Arby’s for a burger, fries, and shake (as a meal). just go to Olive Garden… seriously lol
I don’t know if this is the case everywhere, but here a lot of chains are switching to doordash partnerships, which is just gross. At this point I’ll stop ordering delivery/takeout from any chain that does this because I’m just that disgusted by Doordash and Uber.
On the bright side, if you’re in a city, usually there are more than enough delivery co-ops or in-house delivery services available that it’s not too painful to ditch delivery apps.
Why does dd and Uber disgust you?
This may be imposed by the take out provider. Some states/municipalities also tack on extra fees
There is no provider. This is me, driving to the restaurant, walking to the counter, and getting my food.
Payment provider. BWW may have a contract with a payment provider, in which they don’t pay the fee to use this payment platform for a flat fee of $1 per.
This is of course, all speculation.
It was/is just Buffalo Wild Wings themselves.
https://www.today.com/food/restaurants/buffalo-wild-wings-takeout-fee-backlash-complaint-rcna90228
For only takeout orders?
I could see it. Online billing probably uses a different payment provider than physical machines. And it’s probably a smaller proportion of their business, so they’re not willing to eat the cost like they do for physical machines.
I don’t think I’d call $1.00 absurd, but I’m not a fan of such fees. Am I allowed to bring my own containers and bags to avoid this cost?
Borderline absurd but 100% asinine
I grabbed a single burger at Wendy’s last weekend and it was $6.50. That was my last trip to Wendy’s…I expected half that!
I have to say, where I live Wendy’s is actually cheaper than McDonald’s, so if I’m craving a cheeseburger I hit up Wendy’s instead. But yeah prices for fast food are absurd nowadays.
