Nice. I think you and I share co-author status on the scientific paper that is bound to come from this.
Science rules.
Fast food? Of course I’ll be charged for it. Restaurant? If I ask for (and get) extra sauce or cream or similar then if I’m not charged extra, I’ll leave a bigger tip.
It can’t be sold under the name “cheese” in the US, either. Even the deli stuff (not the “cheese food” that comes individually wrapped) is sold as “Pasteurized process American cheese.” Not sure what the advertising laws are, but watching commercials like this one or this one, I notice they avoid the word “cheese” to refer to their product, just “singles” (although they do use the phrase “cheese” in the second one they talk about making “grilled cheese” with it, though they do not refer to their own product as “cheese.”)
It’s pretty rare that every item on the menu has exactly the same markup.
Whether to charge a small extra fee for similar items with slightly different cost structures is up to the management. But it’s not nearly as simple a decision as calculating the cost of ingredients and adding a static margin. Bundling is good.
Fast food, I’m surprised when I don’t get charged. I never get charged for extra pickle at In N Out though, so that’s nice.
Sit down restaurant? I am surprised when I get charged for small stuff like BBQ sauce for my fries instead of ketchup. I got charged 50 cents when I asked for BBQ sauce to dip my fries at a pub-type restaurant recently. I had ordered the BBQ sandwich and the sauce was really good so I wanted some for my fries instead of ketchup. That seems cheap to me. I mean we ordered beers and food and then they go and charge 50 cents for sauce. You’d think they could just throw that in for free.
Tortillas. It pisses me off when I go to a supposedly “Mexican” restaurant and they bring three tortillas, and expect me to pay more for more. Tortillas are dirt cheap and with good Mexican food you use a lot of them. The real salt in my wounds is that they’re usually willing to continue replacing totopos/chips for free.
Jimmy Johns doesn’t include cheese on their Bootlegger that I order. I dislike tomatoes and ask for them to be removed. saving the restaurant money. Tomatoes are quite expensive these days. But then then still charge me extra for cheese. yeah, that bugs me.
most restaurants are like that. they are too inflexible. not recognizing that a slice of cheese is much cheaper for them then that slice of tomato I decline.
I always ask for an extra syrup with my McDonalds big breakfast (includes pancakes). So far they haven’t charged me extra. Probably because I ask for it at the pickup window. 
I’ve already paid and they probably don’t want to ring up a quarter on their cash register.
I think they recognize it. They just don’t care.
I went back to McDonalds today and very explicitly asked for a hamburger McDouble. It came with cheese on it.
You might have better luck asking for a double hamburger, since that’s an actual item they have a button for.
I’m not really sure what you’re saying, but just for the record, calculating food costs and setting prices in a store that sells food (deli style as well as catering) is one of my jobs.
That might be the case or it might just be that the owner has told them that if the customer adds a slice of cheese, they need to add xx¢ to the bill but hasn’t given them any instruction about downcharging for removing tomatoes (or the policy is that there is no downcharge for taking something off sub).
If someone comes into my store and orders something that is ‘bundled’ (ham and rolls, soup w/ crackers etc) but doesn’t want part of it, the cashier isn’t allowed to change the price, no matter how much the customer protests. Not even the mangers can do it. The only way for it to be done would be for the someone to get in contact with me or the owner AND for one of us to happen to know, off the top of our heads, how much that item costs and be able to decide, quickly, how much we can off the sale price.
This actually reminds me of an incident in a northern NJ Burger King about 12 years ago. They had a big national sale–I believe it was cheeseburgers two for $2. So I ordered four hamburgers, some fries and drinks and the total rang up way too high. The hamburgers rang up for something like $1.59 each. I told the cashier she was over-charging me. Her response was that “Cheeseburgers are on sale; not hamburgers!” I literally laughed out loud that they were charging me more for a hamburger without cheese than they would charge for one WITH cheese, and when I called the manager over, he backed up the cashier. I canceled the order, and for three years living in that area thereafter, we would say “F— You Burger King” every time we drove past that place.
I’m saying that, sure, you can charge $0.35 more for the chocolate milkshake than the vanilla, or you can look at the percentage of each that you sell and just charge, say, $0.20 more for both (or whatever amount it is that gets you to the same revenue).
When I go to a restaurant and they have 6 sandwiches that all cost 5.99, it’s unlikely that the ingredients for each all cost exactly the same. But I don’t really care if my Egg Salad is subsidizing the guy who orders a Rueben by $0.20. I just order the one I want, and it’s all close enough.
There is an actual cost in terms of cognitive load and feelings of goodwill if you price out everything a la carte. If I go to a hotel, and the room is a bit cheaper, but the soap, shampoo, and toilet paper are sold separately, I’m going to be pissy and annoyed about being nickeled and dimed, even if I didn’t really need shampoo that night. Similarly, if you ordered a sandwich and they charged you $0.04 for mayo and $0.08 for mustard, you’d think it was ridiculous and cheap. So it’s not as simple as just figuring out the cost of ingredients and adding it up.
I’d have to agree with the cashier and manager in the above scenario too. The advertised special was on cheeseburgers, not hamburgers. Also, it probably came from corporate and they could not alter it.
ETA: Reply to fjs1fs.
Two things;
-
I’m going to believe that most of the complainers, given a minute, will understand it’s not just the cost of the extra pickle that is reflected in the charge, but also the added cost of having to make a ‘special’ request burger. It takes more time, obviously, than just grabbing one off the shelf.
-
Processed Cheese Food Product is a compromise the Canadian Food standards reached with Kraft. Because while they start with something qualifying as cheese (contains live culture), by the time the processing is done, it’s technically NOT cheese, (contains no live cultures). You can test this yourself, simply leave it out and let it mold. Except it won’t, it will turn into a piece of oily hard plastic. Real cheese manufacturers insisted on it not being called simply cheese. In Canada Kraft ‘American Cheese’ slices are labelled simply, Kraft Slices, for this exact reason.
So change your order to four cheeseburgers – and hold the cheese. <shrug>
And I’m not surprised that he did. I would never assume that, just because one thing is on sale, I can get a lower price on a different thing, even if that different thing is a stripped down version of the thing that’s on sale. You don’t get to make your own rules, even if your rules seem more logical.
(Although, if you do want a logical rationale, one possibility is that they thought, “If we put cheeseburgers on sale, we can make a whole bunch of them up at once and be reasonably sure of selling them all pretty quickly. It’s more efficient if we offer a special on that one specific thing.”)
Yep. Unless the special was for cheeseburgers as is (so you had to take the ones they premade, with no ‘hold the pickle’ or ‘extra ketchup’ allowed either) then it should have been easy to just leave off the cheese.
If it was for premade cheeseburgers, I can see why they didn’t allow the “no cheese” version.
I had clients complaining about paying extra for a specific (additional) service. I raised the price and then gave a discount to people not wanting the add-on. No more complaints. People don’t like being charged more, but can handle not receiving a discount.
I expect to pay extra if either the menu or the server says I’ll be paying extra. Basically I like to be told what my food will cost and think that’s reasonable.
At upscale restaurants it’s different - usually extras will be free, but some of them assume that if you can afford to go there you won’t notice a charge for breadsticks that you didn’t order, and that’s taking the piss.
For Burger King and the like I know from my brief working at one that ordering something different means the worker making the food has to be told about it and make it specially, while the regular orders are just assembled on a schedule and put on the rack to be sold within a time limit, at least if it’s busy, which they usually are. And it’s likely that, if that customer changes their mind, their special burger won’t get sold and will be dumped. It’s extra hassle you’re paying for as much as the extra item.
This means that charging more for taking something off could also be charged higher, but that would not go down well with customers.
Back in the day, that used to be the default way that any hamburger/cheeseburger that was ordered without onions would be prepared.
That’s because the special order requesting “no onions” inevitably came right after you had just plopped the rehydrated onions (and rehydrated onion juice) on the 24 burgers you were grilling. We used to keep a small drink lid handy on the grill to scrape off the onions.
Of course, we never worried about allergies back then (assuming onion allergies exist). :smack: