So when will fast food places start charging for napkins and ketchup packets?

Cafe Society
1

I’ve noticed a trend for the past couple of years or so for fast food restaurants to start to cut off all of the “freebies” they offered in the past. Where I work is within walking distance of a fast food plaza so I’ve been able to see the freebies go away in real time for the past five years.

McDonald’s is the one I’ve seen the most happen too. First they took the napkin dispensers out of the lobby and you now have to ask for napkins. Next they stopped giving out bagged croutons for salads unless you asked for them, then they cut out bagged croutons for salads entirely. Next they made a hard limit to how many sauce cups you get for chicken nuggets, now if you get a 4 or 6 piece they only give you a single one (though if whoever is working drive-thru is in a hurry they’ll just give you a handful just to get you out of the way)

Similarly, every pizza place near me has gotten rid of both Parmesan cheese and red peppers in their little paper packets and are now selling them in small containers for an additional fee of course. This must have happened at all chains at the same time fairly recently as I still have Pizza Hut and Dominos red peppers packs in my work desk for future use.

I understand they’re doing this to cut costs and pad the bottom line but I’m curious to what we’ll see next, the eventual charging for ketchup packets and what not. (I’ve also noticed now a lot of places will only give you one or two ketchup packets with fries now unless you specifically ask for more than two)

2

In Russia, McDonald’s does charge for ketchup packets and dip sauces. Don’t remember if it does in places like the Baltics or Poland.

3

Yeah, they already do this in many European fast food places (Germany and Austria, at least). It’s been this way for at least 15 years. It’s not a hard and fast rule, though. Some places charge for every condiment package, some charge only for certain kinds, and some don’t charge at all. Salt and pepper are, mercifully, always free IME.

4

That doesn’t seem to be a thing out here in the central plains of the US. Most such condiments are free when requested in any kind of reasonable quantity. The only such incident I’ve experienced recently was when picking up a couple of pizza from a shop named after a certain diminutive Roman emperor, I was charged for extra dipping marinara.

5

Popeye’s is really stingy with the dipping sauce. They charge for extra sauces, and often either short me on the sauces I asked for with my order, or just conveniently “forget” altogether.

6

Chicken nugget dipping sauce seems to be the only one that incurs a charge in the NE US. Some places try to change things, such as ketchup pumps, and little plastic containers, and giving out napkins, but it appears that those are often short lived or not absolute, like being able to get the ketchup packs by asking.

Many pizza places have shakers of pepper, parm, and some spice ?oregano? and to go one gets a small container or a packet, no charge, but you may have to ask for them, or they ask if you want them.

7

This is the kind of thing that I’d expect to happen, not as a company-wide change, but in individual stores if people were abusing the napkin availability (by taking way more napkins than they needed, or by coming in and grabbing napkins without buying any food).

8

Charging for catsup and napkins? There goes the napkin sandwiches!

9

What I’m seeing is a combination of having to specifically ask for things, not having open dispensers (neither of which involves more money), or having to pay for extra. Mainly this discourages waste.

I’m not sure what it’s called but there’s an economic principle where some things are cheap enough that it’s not cost-effective to keep track of and charge for each individual use. Which is why the Star Trek portrayal of Ferengi charging for things like the ink you use to fill out a form isn’t realistic.

10

It’s more to cut costs/waste than to bad the bottom line, especially if you can get them free by asking.
At my store, we have packets of condiments and salad dressing. A few years ago we had to set a limit on how many you can take and charge after that. Selling dressing packets isn’t going to pad the bottom line, but it stopped people from buying a [personal sized] salad and taking 6 packets of dressing or buying a chicken salad sandwich and taking a handful of mayo packets. Let’s be honest, most people are going to toss the extras in a kitchen drawer or throw them out as soon as they finish eating, but we still have to pay for them. At 10-20 cents a piece (our cost) it eats a good chunk of the profit on a 3-4 dollar item.

Now, if you want to go in the other direction, there’s Taco Bell. They’ll give you so many sauce packets it’s almost a joke. The last few times I’ve been there, I’ve counted how many I got. I don’t think anyone needs 19 hot sauce packets for two tacos.
TLDR, it’s done so people take (or buy) what they actually need instead of taking them specifically because they’re free.

11

I ask for their Diablo sauce, and I ask for as many packets as they’re allowed to give me. Results have ranged from 2 to 31.

12

I’m surprised many of them don’t bother to say thank you when you pay. Does not bother me but I wonder did they stop asking employees to say thank you?

13

If drive through workers could just put the coins in my hand and then the bills, I’d be happy.

14

If they don’t already add the cost of these items to there products, they’d be poor businessmen. Makes you wonder why when you ask for ketchup they give you a whole handful of packets.

15

I worked at Wendys way back and they tracked paper costs as a separate item and that was napkins and cups and forks/spoons,etc. I assume they still track it now.

16

Some people admittedly do abuse free napkin privileges, but there is also the fact that the dispensers are often jammed so full that a single tug will discharge a dozen napkins into your hand when you only wanted a couple.

17

I agree when it comes to things like forks and napkins. But when I was running a pizza restaurant, the ONLY time I ever started charging for something was when I felt the customer abuse of free stuff was going too far.

The best example I remember was ranch dressing. We made it ourselves, and portioned it into little 2 ounce Solo cups. The original idea behind having ranch was for our salads. When dipping pizza in ranch started to become popular, we would give customers a cup if they requested it. As the years went by, more and more people would ask for absurd amounts (like 4 cups for a single slice from the front counter, or 12 cups for a 12" pizza), then leave half or more of it behind. So I started charging 25 cents a cup.

Unfortunately, like with all things, a few jackasses ruined it for everyone else.

18

Dick’s in Seattle has always charged 5 cents for packets of ketchup and mustard.

19

At my place we do a good chunk of catering. When we first started, we would supply, for free, all the (disposable) plates, napkins and forks provided you spent a certain amount. Plenty of people would scoff at the idea that we were charging for them, citing other places that gave them away for free. I’d typically point out that A)WE have to pay for them and B)if you look at their prices, they’re without fail, more expensive then ours.

In any case, once you get over a certain threshold, the profit was there to absorb the cost. But plenty of people would still abuse the policy. I can remember one person, in specific that would go out of his way to abuse it. He place an order for, say, 30 people and ask what his total was. He’d then add things, just a few at a time (ie ‘uhh, put on 6 more sodas, what’s the total now?’ type stuff). As soon as he hit the threshold to get the charge waived for utensils/napkins/plates, he’d not only add them on, but remind me that they were free. The problem was when I’d say ‘How many place settings do you need?’, he’d say something like ‘send enough for 50, no make it 70 people’.
So, he’s taking this to a place that has, at most, 30 people and bringing more than double the place settings that he needs…because they’re free.

When we were dealing with him, we considered making some sort of policy to limit how many we would send (for free), but in the end we just discontinued that.
On a somewhat similar note, a lot of people get annoyed that we charge for delivery. Sometimes, with places super far from us, I have to explain that my driver will be gone for two and a half hours, so no, $30-$40 isn’t that much, in fact it really just covers time and gas. The funny thing is that in all these cases, I always give them the option of picking it up themselves (a lot of people don’t realize that’s an option). About half the time their response is ‘I don’t have time to drive all the way to your store, pick this up and take it out there’, to which I’ve always wanted to say ‘so, you don’t have the time to do it, but you want us to do it for free?’.

And this all goes for anything we charge extra for. Again, people seem to forget that literally everything we do, be it a service or a physical product, costs us money. We have to pass along the charge one way or another. We typically choose not to incorporate a lot of those charges into the other products so people that don’t want/need them aren’t paying for them anyway. And because if something is free, people will take it for no other reason than because it’s free.

20

In Soviet Russia you don’t eat fast food, you eat slow food.