New sub-pizza etc. joint in town. I order a grilled chicken caesar salad. Salad is $ 6.99. Total + tax is 50 cents over expected price. Inquiring I am, told all salads are without dressing and all dressing are 50 cents per small container.
But… it’s caesar salad doesn’t that come with at least one container of caesar dressing? No the croutons are what make it caesar salad I am told. Hungry, not going to fight pay the 50 cents and move on.
Is this the usual practice in any localities for the initial dressing to be a la carte (I understand mutiple dressing often cost extra) and priced extra or was she probably just new and ignorant?
Those types of a la carte pricing drives me crazy. It gives the sense that you are being nickled and dimed to death. Had the price of the salad been $7.49 with “free” dressing, then you wouldn’t have batted an eye, and the restaurant would have gotten the same money.
Now, they pissed you off for no reason.
Croutons make a caesar salad? That’s a new one for me.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard of something like this, and am inclined to call BS. If she’s not just new and ignorant, I’d either mentally adjust the price of the salad to $7.49 + tax and reconsider whether I’m willing to pay that, or avoid the place entirely, because anywhere that thinks a Caesar salad shouldn’t come with Caesar dressing obviously knows nothing about food or customer service, and won’t be getting my business.
I’ve costed all our dressings for my restaurant, and they are all around 10-12 cents an ounce. Caesar dressing IS a bit more expensive because of the anchovies, but we are talking pennies per portion. If you are paying $7 for a salad, you paid for your salad dressing. The 50¢ charge should be for extra dressing, as that works out to be close to a normal food cost (30-40%)
I wouldn’t go back. Once I got carry-out pizza, and they charged me $0.35 for the box. Never went back there either. Wish I’d just not paid, and gone elsewhere.
That’s my point. Say the pizza was $10.99 but they pissed you off for charging 35 cents for the box. Had the pizza been $11.99 with a “free” box, you would have thought nothing of the 1 dollar extra, the restaurant would have been 65 cents richer, and they wouldn’t have lost a customer. I can never understand why any business prices things extra like that.
Airlines are a lot worse about this than any restaurant. Raise your fares by $5 across the board and give everyone the $5 snack, and nobody would notice the price, but everyone would rave about how nice you are to your passengers. And don’t even get me started on charging you extra for making it easier on them to deal with your luggage.
Airlines have to avoid doing this because so many people buy airline tickets from websites that display the competing ticket prices side by side. Shaving a dollar or two off the price may move an airline to the top spot and make the sale. And in order to shave the prices as low as possible, airlines have to move everything they can off the ticket price.
Which is no excuse for restaurants. They don’t face the same kind of comparisons. They’re better off incorporating these items into a higher base price because people, like the OP, are more likely to be annoyed by an added charge.
I can grudgingly see why airlines do it this way. How do you book a flight? If you are like me, you go to your favorite travel site, put in your dates and the site returns a list of flights based on price. If all else is equal, and you see one flight at $260 and one at $265, you will likely pick the one for $260.
Nothing in the results talks about extras, but even if you did see that the $265 flight provided a free $5 snack, you would probably say, “Meh, maybe I won’t be hungry, and if I am, I’ll just pay the $5 then.”
I do however compare the baggage check fees and add those into my calculation, but many people see the flight at the top of the search results, like the price they see, and don’t give a second thought to the nickel and diming.
Isn’t the dressing what makes it a Caesar salad? They could call it a romaine and crouton salad with grated cheese, but how can you call it Caesar without the dressing?
Except that in my experience, all else is never equal. When I buy a plane ticket, there are usually about 8 or 10 cheap flights that are all within about $10 of each other, and then a big jump to more expensive flights. Out of the cheap flights, I choose whichever one is at the most convenient times. If there were two flights at the same times but with a difference in price, I would of course choose the cheaper one, but I’ve never seen that happen.
