Adventures in Restaurant Management: Junk Fees

This week the Attorney General's office of MA issued a statement that declared "junk fees" illegal in MA. These are fees that are lumped into all kinds of consumer purchases like concert tickets, hotel bookings, apartment rentals, etc. and these new regulations prevent businesses from adding any of these fees to your purchase. They are claiming this will make for more transparency for consumers as to what the bottom line will be. Sounds great in theory right?

Except they also lump restaurants into the list of regulated businesses. That means that all the restaurants that have been working for literally YEARS to help create a more sustainable payment structure for their workers by incorporating included service fees into their models are now being forced, with no notice, to restructure back to the old model of "no tip included."

This means all you folks asking for restaurants to just include the price of service into their food are going to get what you asked for. We had to remove our 5% kitchen appreciation fee (put in place to offset the pay disparity between front and back of house during our busiest times) and raise the price of all of our menu items by $2. What does this do? It gives you LESS transparency as a consumer as to how much food costs and how much we are paying our team. So while it might sound good on paper when you go to purchase a hotel room, or car, or rent an apartment, or buy Coldplay tickets for your mistress... what it's actually doing is making the service industry less equitable.

You can read more about why raising our prices doesn't actually fix anything in this incredibly well written piece by restaurant and business owner Lauren Friel of Rebel Rebel and Dear Annie, along with the statement of the instituted regulations posted on the AG's page on Mass dot gov.

If you are as outraged by this as we are, maybe reach out to our legislators on our behalf:

State Rep. Steven Owens, 29th Middlesex, 617-722-2230, Steven.Owens@mahouse.gov

State Senator Patricia Jehlen, Second Middlesex, 617-722-1578, Patricia.Jehlen@masenate.gov

Attorney General's Office, 617-727-2200

Governor Healey's Constituent Services Main Office, 617-725-4005.