That’s illegal in New York. If the receipt doesn’t break out the sales tax from the price, New York will take the entire amount to be the price:
http://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/publications/sales/pub34.pdf (PDF!!!1!)
I’m sure that you were charged an additional amount because of the food.
I have never been to a bar where they charged a sales tax on booze (though the owner still pays the state, it’s just built into the cost). Bars do this so it’s easier for bartenders to handle quick transactions with dozens of drunk patrons at once.
Maybe not where you shop.
It could be simple error on the part of the computer. I assume that’s the issue I have been seeing. I work behind the bar at a corporate chain resturant. Usually the computer charges tax on drinks but occasionally I will notice that it doesn’t. Payment type is not a factor. The price is on the receipt that I hand to the customer before I know how they are going to pay.
(BTW, no one is offering me sex or drugs for drinks. Damnit!)
“Cash discount” has been used as loophole by some companies for years as a way of passing along the cost of credit card transactions. It’s never been very common, but at one time I worked for a company that was primarily net terms payment who did this. We distributed our price list based on cash discount. It was challenged by at least one customer that I know of and we were found to be in compliance with our merchant agreement. Visa and MasterCard used to prohibit surcharges but to the best of my knowledge they never had the right to prohibit cash discount. The only retail businesses I’ve ever seen using this loophole are gas stations. It’s still not common but I’ve seen it more than a handful of times in NY, which also has a legal prohibition of credit card surcharges.
As part of a multi-year class action lawsuit settlement reached this past July, Visa and MasterCard agreed to remove the surcharge prohibition on credit card charges, but they are still prohibited on prepaid or bank account linked debit cards. There are consumer laws in ten states that make this practice illegal, but starting this month it’s allowed with restrictions in the rest of the US.
Be Aware: Credit Card Purchases May Soon Carry a Surcharge
Frankly, I wish all financial transactions offered a cash discount. I have no aversion to carrying cash and when I spend it where credit cards are accepted, I am literally paying the merchant 2-3% more than a customer using a credit card. In my own transactions as a sales rep, I ask what the intended method of payment is and factor credit card fees into my quotes.
ive been a bartender for over 10 years in over 20 bars in manhattan in williamsburg; i can shed a little light here.
basically, when you arent being charged tax, its because its incredibly inconvenient to handle the calculations while working at any kind of fast pace. it makes more sense to keep your bartender moving rather than calculating and handling odd amounts of change, not to mention what a pain it is to handle loads of coins in the house’s bank. we dont “charge” tax in cash transactions, but of course we pay tax on what we sell. it generally comes out of our end, in the name of expediency. (your seven dollar beer might otherwise be listed on the menu for 6 dollars leading to a charge of 6.53, or it might be listed at 7 for 7.62, depending on where the business in question figures in its own tax obligation.)
this problem evaporates when youre running a credit card through a POS system, which is what we call the computer behind the bar. it calculates the tax for you. if you receive a receipt from the POS, chances are it will have tax included whether or not you have also purchased food. if you opt to pay in cash on an amount like 14.52, the bartender will almost always eat the difference and give you back 6 dollars for a 20. this goes both ways (youll likely get back 5 dollars for a 20 on a check of 14.87) and transactions effectively wind up subsidizing each other over the course of the night. plus or minus 2 or 3 dollars is a common standard for how your settlement should look at the end of the night.
you will see that sometimes adding food to a bill adds tax to the bar items as well. this is a quirk of some POS systems, but its intentional. you can disable charging tax for bar only checks for the above listed reasons, but it makes no sense to ever not charge tax for food–nobody is bothering a bartender for a steak from 3 people deep with the intention of getting back to their friends in a hurry. POS systems tend to choke on this distinction once food is added–it basically becomes a bookkeeping nightmare.
as far as bartenders adding cheaper booze to premium bottles… ive never seen it happen. ive worked in over 20 bars and am intimate with the running of many, many more and… it just doesn’t happen. your bartender USUALLY has enough balls in the air without sitting in the basement with a funnel for an hour after his shift filling crusty old bottles of premium whiskey with rotgut. a busy bar goes through too many bottles for this to make any kind of financial sense. yeah, ive seen it happen that somebody orders something the bar doesnt have and the bartender says “give 'em this, theyll never know the difference.” but if any owner ever asked me to spend time swapping booze, id laugh in their face and give them the 20 bucks theyd be saving and never come back. bartenders usually really love hanging out in bars themselves. it would be weirdly dishonorable to pull some crap like that. (i do recall ONE case where a guy out in jersey got busted for doing this a few years back. i think he owned a couple chain restaurants. i thought it was hilarious that hed have to pay a huge fine for something that would have saved him very, very little money in the first place.)
watch what happens when a busy bartender’s bottle runs empty in the middle of a drink. we usually hurl it into the trash with great vengeance and furious anger and rip open a fresh bottle, sometimes with our teeth. yeah, some bartenders will pull some scams–theyre as corrupt as everybody else, and theyre in charge of booze and cash at the same time, which is a dangerous combo–but there are limits and there are always eyes watching.
Some capital letters in appropriate places would be nice. They would also make it more likely for people to read your post.
Regarding not refilling bottles, at least around here, refilling bottles with another liquid is REALLY illegal. I’ve heard of bars getting in trouble for filling (say) giant novelty liquor bottles with water to make them look full.
I’ve heard one person say (might have been here) but I’ve never looked seen the law myself that the bartender is allowed to keep a single bottle of booze with water in it specifically for when patrons want to buy him/her a drink. So they’re not hammered by the end of the night. There was a name given for the bottle. I can’t remember it now.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the laws stating a bottle can’t be refilled with another brand/type of liquor (and in some cases are even required to be destroyed), but I could never find anything about this fake one the bartender is allowed to have.
There was a bar here got busted for faking premium vodka, but he was making his own (so he was evading excise as well). But it’s rare. Busted partly because Smirnoff really doesn’t like other people trading on their name.
Worked with another guy who was watering the spirits so he could give free drinks to the girls when he was young one summer. They had one very nervous afternoon while the excise was in, but they only checked the beer in main bar, they never came into the lounge. The owner (probably) never knew, but the bar was very, very, very popular that summer, because the free drinks pulled the girls, and the girls pulled all the young men.
Different here in the UK. I was a barman way back last century before we even had electronic tills. I know all the fiddles that went on then, and I am sure that some still exist, even though the bar person has a clever till to do all their accounting.
In an English pub, you would normally pay cash for drinks. In fact it used to be illegal to sell drinks on credit in a public house. The proliferation of credit and debit cards, and now with contactless payments has done away with that, but the idea of rounding up or down is unheard of. If you buy three beers at £4.75 each, you will always be charged £14.25.
The simplest fiddle for staff is short changing, so when you tender £20 for the above transaction; instead of the £5.75 you should get, you might be given a handful of coins adding up to a pound or two less.
Management will sometimes substitute the expensive spirit supplied by the brewery for the same brand bought cheaply in a supermarket (this only cheats the brewery). Watering down is not unheard of but it is pretty risky as they are not just up against trading standards, but HMRC (IRS) as well.
Everything you buy in a pub has VAT added (currently 20%) and all alcohol has duty added as well. About 40p on a single scotch or vodka and 52p on a pint of beer. All of this is included in the advertised price.
As an aside, spirits are sold in 35mm tots, and beer is sold by the pint.
And another bar (which I’d forgotton about) busted for selling fake Coca-Cola. The owner was buying post-mix cola at the supermarket, at ~1c per glass, and not paying the Coke company ~50c per glass. Coke didn’t take them to court – just lent on them to make purchases equivilant to the amount they were selling.
I’m not sure I understand this- are you saying the bar was buying bottles or cans of soda at the supermarket for less money than fountain soda would cost?
Barring a contract to buy direct from coke, I can’t see how it would be an issue to buy Coca-Cola from the grocery store (or probably Sam’s) if it’s cheaper. However, from what I’ve heard, if someone orders a “Rum and Coke”, there has to be “Coke” in the glass unless you say 'we don’t have Coke…Pepsi (or RC or whatever) okay?" Makes sense, but not being in the bar business, I haven’t looked it up myself. You certainly hear waitstaff say it often enough.
ETA, it would be like having 10 bottles of Bacardi on the bar back and when someone orders a Bacardi Diet, you pour them whatever the rail rum is. They SEE that Bacardi, they CALLED the Bacardi, they’re certainly not expecting to get whatever you stock the rail with.
Bottles and cans are “pre-mix”. The company pre-mixes the syrup and the carbonated water before selling it wholesale.
“Post-mix” is the system where the suppliers sells bottles of syrup, and somebody separately sells carbon dioxide, and the bar buys those components individually and mixes them. It was the traditional pre-Coca-Cola American soda-fountain method of supply.
In Aus, post-mix is very rare, except in bars. In bars in Aus, it’s the general rule: if you buy a glass of run & cola over the bar, the bartender has a soda-water gun that has buttons on it for selecting different post-mix syrups.
You can buy generic pre-mix cola syrup for much chaeper than pre-mix Coca-Cola syrup, which is ok, except that it doesn’t taste the same, and you’re not supposed to lie to the customers about it.
It’s generally not. You’re allowed to have a cash discount. You’re just not allowed to have an “everything but credit” discount.
So the issue wasn’t pre-mix vs post-mix, but selling ‘generic cola-flavored product’ as ‘Coca-Cola ™’?
Yes.
Years and years ago while going through school, I worked the books and we would back the tax out of a cash sale while balancing the night’s books.
"You’ll answer to the Coca-Cola corporation of the USA " (actually, they had to answer to the local Coca-Cola bottlers licensee)
Sorry , confused again. I could see if the bar had to pay a fine to some government agency or lost a license for the fraud of selling the cheap stuff as coke. I could see if they lost business because they were serving the cheap stuff. But what I can’t see is how Coke could force them to buy Coke. Surely they could serve “rum and Pepsi”* or “rum and RC” or “rum and cheap generic cola” as long as they didn’t call it “coke”.
*(I have never been corrected in a bar if I ask for a Coke and they actually serve Pepsi.Happens all the time in restaurants, but I’ve never seen it in a bar, even when I know they serve Pepsi.)