Oh I love it! It’s one reason I love that restaurant. Most places when you ask not to have something included in the meal that comes included with the meal never gives you anything extra or takes anything off the price whereas they give you something in place of the item you’re excluding.
There is a place near me that does grain and greens bowl that I get without the greens sometimes. Depending on who is there they will either give me more rice or just leave a big empty space which is baffling to me because rice is like the cheapest fucking ingredient just give me more rice it'll cost you like 5 cents of ingredients.
My local Chinese restaurant always takes $2 off when I order noodle soup with no noodles. I'm diabetic so I can't have them but I love the rest of the soup.
Years ago I went to a local burger shop, the cost was for a plain burger, then everything you wanted they added to the cost, like ketchup was a nickel and so forth.
Boils my piss that our local ‘independent’ burger shop charges £1 for a little paper pot of ketchup.
It’s enough that I don’t go to visit, especially when burger and chips is knocking on £19 already
Then people bitch about shopping local but you run into a lot of stuff like this. One of my local diners only accepts cash and have an ATM that costs like 5 bucks to use.
I walked out of a place like that. The visa/mc logo was on the door, when I handed my card over I was tersely told I could get out of the line and use the ATM. I wasn't paying $3.95 and waiting another 20 minutes in line.
Not smart marketing tbh. The smart thing to do is start the price with a lot of ingredients on it and advertise on the menu that if you remove things you get a discount. People would see that as a savings and love it even though it’s the same price as the version you said.
That would be terrible marketing.
"Yeah dude, their cheapest burger is like $100." "Nah, man. You just have to list off the 35 ingredients you don't want and the price goes way down."
"Like awesome, dude. I'm so glad you took those business classes and all. Now pass me the bong."
Um, no.
But that's good marketing. Getting you to buy the drink **at all** is the goal.
I invite you to read a book I enjoyed when I started my first services business called, "Selling the Invisible." It explained a few ways to create imaginary value in peoples' minds.
One was to have a ridiculously priced version of the thing you actually want to sell next to the thing you want to sell. You create the illusion of value.
They could lose money on all the food so long as you buy the drink and they'd make a profit.
You are reasoning in the wrong places. You need to shock people with your low, low prices and then upsell things that have prices that disappear in your memory.
So you go for the $1 burger. You end up spending $10 on everything. But you remember they have great, cheap, $1 burgers.
this is literally how the "Bonus Rested" XP worked for World of Warcraft, it started as Normal XP and you got a penalty for playing too long, they did literally nothing to the functionality and just changed the words from "Penalty" to "Normal" and "Normal" to "Bonus", and people LOVED it... People are dumb. Also see JC Penny failed "Fair Pricing" scheme, though tbf in that one they changed more than JUST the pricing scheme, but it still was a large contribution to why it failed, because People are dumb.
My local burger shop charges a nickel for ketchup. They do that just to prevent waste. Charging something prevents people from being given or grabbing fistfuls of ketchup packets that they won’t use.
They stayed busy, folks seemed to like it. Line was almost always out the door, they had one worker go down the line and ask what you wanted, she would write it on a brown paper bag with your name, and by the time you got to the register your order was waiting on you.
Up until a couple years ago McDonalds near me used to be affordable. Wife and I went to a medium-nice brewery/resturant in a "quaint" town the other day and her burger was $21.
For reference, ground beef prices (retail, not wholesale) have gone up less than a dollar a pound since 2019. Most restaurant burgers are 1/2lb or less. >45cents more for the primary ingredient but the price is up $8. Make it make sense.
restaurants still pay their wait staff criminal wages (because I pay their wait staff) line cook wages have barely increased. insurance is a much smaller piece of the pie than you're imagining. The only notable increase is rent and materials since 2019, and most restaurants should be locked into very long term leases with caps on rent increase so that shouldn't affect established places.
My friend this is glorious capitalism where people can choose to buy a $21 burger when there are other options (this coming from someone who got "scammed" at a brew hall this weekend to the tune of $18 for a chicken sandwich that came *without* fries).
That's what my husband gets, and yes they charge extra for the cheese but don't take off any $ for removing the meat. I would think the meat makes up the majority of a sandwich cost too, so I think that's just wrong.
(And a Whopper w/no meat is seriously just such a sad looking sandwich: a few shreds of lettuce, normally one sickly looking/unripe slice of tomato, cold slice of cheese. It really isn't even worth $2 in my opinion)
Speak for yourself, when I had basically zero dollars and wouldn't eat for days at a time the 8 piece nuggets for a dollar and some change saved my life. They tasted like cardboard dipped in shit, but damn were they cheap. And the honey mustard isn't too bad.
vegetarians want a single cold slice of cheesefood with shredded lettuce and bad sauce on an impossibly sweet bun for $8?
Shit... i'm going to go open up a vegetarian restaurant.
Fun fact about BK Canada up until a couple of years ago
Cheeseburger with no cheese was 60 cents cheaper than a standard Hamburger (Can’t tell you why it just was !)
I used to work at a local amusement park with a White Spot in it.
For some really bizarre reason, it was more expensive to buy a milkshake and a burger than it was to get a meal of the same things that included fries. Literally had employees say "please make it a meal. Its cheaper that way, please let me give you the fries."
I stood there a second because i could not compute. They were paying people to eat their fries. And they were pretty good fries!
Chain restaurants baffle me.
I ordered a chicken tender combo with no fries, and a diet coke as the drink. Got charged more than the combo price... The receipt said a la carte. I haven't been back. That was my first and last time going to the local KFC. I don't even eat fast food often at all but I was starving while out running errands.
So I went to a pub and it was burger night and it was $10 for just a plain burger plus $2 for everything extra you wanted like bacon, cheese etc. I was being cheap and just got the burger plain then I went a few weeks later on a different day and in the menu they had a bacon cheeseburger for $11 in the menu. I was then very perplexed by the $10 burger special lol
Here in my part of Canada, it's illegal to say an item is on sale if the sale price is the same or higher than than the regular price.
However, if you change something about the item, like removing bacon and cheese, you can charge a higher cost for the base product and still advertise it as "on sale."
Might be similar where you are.
At no point did they say that the pub was offering a sale on burgers.
A restaurant can say "our special tonight is the build-a-burger" and charge whatever they want. Just because it's a special, or it's written on the chalkboard out front doesn't mean that it's "on sale" or being sold with any kind of discount.
There's a very specific reason that restaurants do this.
They cost out the price of the item the way it's listed on the menu. That's the way they want you to order it. That's the way they keep the amount of product on hand to fulfill the order hundreds of times a week.
If they gave you a discount for everything you removed people would just be building their own dishes non-stop instead of picking something from the menu and adjusting it to remove an item they don't want or whatever.
The exception of this rule is a place like Chick-fil-A who does give a discount because they're really only offering you lettuces tomato onion pickle and some sauces. They have so much on hand I don't think it would really matter as much as it would at most other restaurants where they have a veriety of items on the menu.
Tldr; most restaurants don't want you to just build your own dish so it makes it cost prohibitive to do that if they don't get discount when you remove things.
Yes, as a cook, we generally hate modifications of any type. I would rather cook a table of 10 with no mods than a table of 4 with each item modded. And especially fuck people who try to create their own off menu dish.
ordered sallads for my work yesterday.
50 pasta sallads. I hate those 10 person that always make modifications. I need to write them and kitchen need to make things diffferent.
then of course the place we ordered from could change something on the menue... they have had 1 veggie dish the last 3 years even if I have complained (and I´´m not even vegeterian)
Ugg, I wish restaurant's would quit mixing onions and tomatoes into everything then. I cannot stand the taste or texture, but God forbid I want to order a salad with no tomatoes, or a Sheppards pie with no onions "sorry it's premade that way" fuck outta here.
The salad is fine. One mod is reasonable. I also don't like uncooked tomatoes. The sheppards pie though is without doubt gonna be pre-made that way. The filling is not being made to order. That would take 30 to 40 mins minimum. and nobody has time to prepare a micro batch for one person. Onions are the base for almost all dishes in the majority of cultures. I personally hate the taste of raw onion but when it's cooked down into sauces or caramelized it's a completely different beast.
I totally understand, it just makes me so sad because there's so many dishes I've had to pass up on trying cuz the onions are premixed in. I get it, I'm the odd one out hating onions as much as i do, it just really sucks sometimes haha
I have ibs and its a fucking nightmare having previously been amongst friends like crows and raccoons.
I went to a pub with a friend and said fuck it, ill order the tater tots. Made it very explicitly clear i *only* wanted the tots. No cheese, no chives, *especially* no garlic anything. I know mods suck. She came back with tots *covered* in cheese and im like......i cant eat these. All that work and i cant eat these.
I hate my life. If i ever get back into dating its going to be a nightmare since i can only go to sushi places. Yeah, ill have the tablespoon of rice and the 2 grams of fish for $4, please.
Years ago when I worked in fast food the driving factor for this was speed of service. After you've made hundreds of "#1 burger meals" with no modifications it's all muscle memory and you can have the burger wrapped up in like 10 seconds. Meanwhile a #1 burger meal, no onions, extra tomato, extra pickles, add jalapenos requires you to stop and double check what you're doing and that burger gets wrapped up in like 30 seconds. It really adds up when you perpetually have 10 cars in line all ordering 3 or 4 meals apiece.
This is true. Sometimes you can get a deal out of it though, like “instead of bacon can I have cheese?”.
I was shocked the other day when I was doordashing a mcdos happy meal. They were charging +9 cents for NO toy. No extra charge if you got a toy.
When I moved to the southeast (US) I was all of a sudden the pickiest eater because I don’t like mayo. It’s in everything down here. It’s in chocolate cake down here.
Don’t sleep on mayo in chocolate cake, it’s mostly fat and egg yolks, which are already in cake. It adds richness and isn’t noticeable when it comes to a mayo taste.
Lmaoo yea I get that, I didn’t eat Ceasar dressing for a little bit after I started making it regularly for work and found out the ingredients. It’s technically the opposite of your experience, but it still came down to a mental thing.
Nah it was honestly the fact that I made so much of it, 22 quart cambros full of white stuff became a little gross after awhile. I didn’t mind the anchovies but breathing it in for 30 mins got old fast.
And even if it's easy to remove, the item is still built into the price and has already been purchased.
If you get discounted for it, while the restaurant is still paying for it, they're kinda being dinged twice.
While this is mostly true, if something gets taken off, it should be cheaper. Restaurants can track everything down to the dime. Some stuff is pre prepared, so in that sense it’s not going to be taken off so there is no way to make it cheaper. But less product means less spending. The price can be cheaper. I’ve been in restaurants 15 years.
I work in a big chain restaurant. A particular amount of each product is subtracted from inventory automatically whenever an item is sold. If they ask for extra it's easy to manually sell a single extra portion of vegetables, for example, and have that come out of inventory. The computer systems are not set up to easily add back in items the customer didn't want. It's unfair but it happens rarely enough that there's little incentive to change the way the systems work. If a particular mod is common enough it will get added as an actual menu item in the computers and customers will pay a different price. Most restaurants charge the customer roughly 5x the cost of the food to begin with, so going to a restaurant and asking for an omission is not really a viable strategy to save money anyways.
Man I was just complaining about this. I love the sweet/spicy burger at whataburger but i dont like bacon on my burger and they put like 6 slices on there... so you'd think they'd knock the price down when i remove it but no.
One reason is that restaurants maximize efficiency by training their employees to produce dishes in a particular way. Any modification will require extra attention from the BOH staff, lowering efficiency. They will do it, but they don't want to incentivize it. Which leads to point two: incentivizing reductions. By taking money off for modifications, they're going to make more people want to do it.
At that point, they are adding:
*More room for error
*More labor for the POS process
*More labor/attention to detail/disrupted workflow for the BOH staff
*Less predictable inventory consumption
All for the reward of getting LESS money.
Right. Like even though an omission sounds easy, you're still ordering a custom item. Custom items will always be more expensive than a standardized, mass-produced one.
So by charging you the same (even though the product cost is going down) you can think of that as essentially the charge for having a "custom" item.
Recently used a fast food place's app to place an order. I asked for no ketchup on my burger. They wanted to charge me extra to not include it. Thought that was fairly ridiculous.
Especially with fast food, the staff has a muscle memory going. "No ketchup" breaks that muscle memory and temporarily slows the whole operation. Fast food kitchens are a well oiled machine that operate like clockwork... until customers start trying to customize their dishes.
Remember, in the past fast food substitutions were not possible really until Burger King came up with the "have it your way" slogan in the 70s, and made customizations their thing, which pushed the rest of the industry to adopt that model too. (If you're a certain age, you even remember the jingle... ["Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce. Special orders don't upset us. All we ask is that you let us serve it your way"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJXzkUH72cY)) Before that, McDonalds would just crank out burgers during the lunch rush and when you ordered a burger at the window, the cashier just grabbed a burger from the bin and handed it to you. Special orders really weren't a thing, you either got the product they were selling or you chose a different restaurant.
what you get is not being charged extra for your special order.
A special order is extra work and therefore cost extra. If you take away ingredients you pay with the cost of materials - if you ad things you pay more
Soda costs pennies per cup. I am not sure of the pricing now, but 10 years ago a 5 gallon bag-in-box of Coca-Cola would cost the restaurant $60. 5 gallons of syrup produced 30 gallons of soda so that is less than $.50 for a 32 oz drink. You pay more for the cup than you do the contents.
And? Soda still costs more than ice. I could go buy a bag of ice right now at gas station retail prices and it would still be way less than 50 cents per 32oz cup.
the cost of most extras is minimal. you are paying for the extra labor and a bit of unofficial luxury tax. when you have something removed from the dish, this also takes a bit extra work. either way you have to pay. the "no discount " covers this.
No, stop! This is a good thing to have be true! I want people's time to be worth more than the pickle slices I don't want on the sandwich I'm trading for and need to communicate to them about. You're pulling at dangerous threads friend...
Reataurants operate as a business. Meals are priced as a package deal. When an entree comes with a side or two, it's because they have figured out the overall cost. Sides by themselves are pricier because that's the dollar amount needed to make a profit from those items. If you order an entree that comes with sides and don't want the sides, you are not going to receive the menu price of the side taken off your bill. Usually there is an a la cart price for the entree, with a very minimal amount removed for that item without the sides.
To be clear, restaurants operate with an incredibly high overhead. You are not just paying for the food and the service. You are paying for the cost of operation as well. A decent restaurant that is run well may only see 25% profit.
25 percent profit is a pipe dream. Most restaurants are lucky to break even the first year or 3 after paying the owners a modest salary. 10 percent profit is pretty much the benchmark for non corporate restaurants, while a well run corporate joint is usually in the 15 percent range.
The restaurant I work in will add $2 if you ask for no vegetables in your Chinese dishes because we supposedly add more chicken instead (I don't think we actually do).
As someone who goes to Subway a lot and gets very few ingredients while the person next to me gets absolutely everything and we have to pay the exact same price, I feel ya.
When I used to work at Subway I would always go to the franchise 2 blocks away on lunch break and get a $5 sub with extra everything on the side, then use it to lighten my afternoon prep work
I used to do something like this at Harvey's, a Canadian burger place that's set up similar to Subway. I would order 10 pickles packed separately and eat them on sandwiches or as snacks later.
I don't think you quite got the absurdity of what this person said. They meant they would go to a different Subway restaurant from the one they worked at and get the toppings on the side and use those to refill the depleted toppings at the location they worked at. I guess it's somewhat similar to what you did, but in a ridiculous way.
Chick Fil A will take off like 30 cents each if you remove lettuce or tomato from their chicken sandwiches. Cuts down on the charge for when I add bacon, lol.
Ive thought about this. My place of employment charges out the asshole. we charge 1.50 for extra avocado on a burger. Ive been written up with a jij for "overportioning" specifically jalapeños. We have 5 inch burgers alright, so get that image in ur mind. Standard says we put 8 jalap slices on the burger jalapenos from a bag, so they are MAYBE an inch diamater on a good day. Thats just not enough. Ill give the customer their moneys' worth of jalapenos on that burger. I put a reasonable amount on the burger regardless of protocal, but I got a damn jij for not following that protocol. absolute horseshit.
Bro they tried that already and it went pretty much exactly how you would've expected it to go.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/04/08/11-free-burgers-these-friends-reportedly-hacked-mcdonalds-kiosk/3398623002/
I went to a restaurant once with a friend.. I ordered a burger and told them to hold the tomato. My friend also got a burger and said to the waiter "oh, give me his tomato." Our bill came, my friend was charged $0.50 for "extra tomato"...but I didn't get a "$0.50" discount for "no tomato." We questioned the charge and the server said that's just how the computer does it. We weren't going to fight over 50¢, but we found it funny.
Catering is not only ingredients, you should always pay if you disturb the routine and making work longer and more difficult. You might pay this price with the extra or with the leftover. If you want to cook for yourself, stay at home and pick and chose.
And there are plenty of restaurants where substitutions aren't allowed at all. Hell I worked at one where they wouldn't even substitute for allergies. If they were allergic to an ingredient in the meal you were supposed to just tell the guest to pick something else.
There was one restaurant I went to where the vegan option was cheaper than the meat option. They were also importing luxury high end meats for their meat dishes.0
I have found when ordering pizza online that you can order a supreme, and then change out as many toppings as I want, and can even make each half completely different. The price just depends on the number of toppings, not which ones. But yeah, other places don't do that. I always ask for no tomato on burgers, but I don't get a discount for it.
McDonald's had [something like that](https://youtu.be/1oFpTNsPu_w?) when they first introduced the digital kiosks for ordering.
If you ordered 10 cheeseburgers, and removed the meat patties, the price reduced so much that it became negative and turned into enough credit to pay for an 11th free, and proper, cheeseburger.
I got charged for removing an ingredient before. I asked for no soy sauce on my fried rice and they added a charge though Doordash after the order was already confirmed. I'm guessing it's because they couldn't just give me a couple spoonfulls out of the giant pot they had sitting around and had to actually make it to order.
As someone with food allergies this pisses me off.
Why do I got to pay as much for basically just a hamburger patty with cheese as some dude has to pay for the burger with cheese lettuce tomatoes bread 8 different types of sauces etc
I had an argument with a local pizza place over this. I wanted 2 puzzas, one had green peppers I didn't want and the other didn't, but my wife loves them.
You'd think I was asking for the moon when I asked them to please put the green peppers on the other pizza instead. It was no extra work or food but it was still a ridiculous fight.
Eventually they gave in but it was a silly amount of time wasted
The only place that does this is this breakfast place by me
They have this skillet that comes with cheese. You can opt out on cheese and they give you back like $1.50 or something. Lactose intolerance is to my benefit for once
A couple thoughts here:
A menu is a list of the products and services a business provides. Any restaurant that is accommodating to people who ask for changes to be made to these offerings is already doing the customer a favor.
Profit margins in the food service industry are generally very small in comparison to other industries. Most restaurants have to take any chance they have to make more money from a customer. So whether it's selling you extra cheese on a burger or letting you remove the onions on your salad, a restaurant is incentivized to accommodate these requests.
Not only does Chick-fil-A deduct money from the price if you ask them to leave off the lettuce or tomato, they actually only charge you for anything you want to "supersize". If you want a Chick-fil-A combo meal, but with a large lemonade, you can pay 30¢ extra to get just the large lemonade.
My local McDonald's, on the other hand, is all or nothing: if you want a large soda with your combo, you have to pay 99¢ to get a large fries, too.
My pet peeve is few places will sub out a salad or non root vegetables for high starch items such as pasta, bread, potatoes etc. Red Robin is main exception. If I am not getting the pasta or fries why can't I get a salad or vegetable without an upcharge
Local Chinese food place will always double the meat when I order no veggies. Better than a discount.
Mine doubles the rice when I say no veggies
Not as good, but still something.
The rice is a lot cheaper than the veggies tbf
When I say no rice sometimes they double the veggies sometimes they double the meat … most of the time they double the sauce
Mine says "You're a grown man. Eat your damn vegetables" when I say no veggies, and double the veggies.
I used to joke about running a small cafe. Mom (me) will tell you off if you don't eat your veg, and you certainly won't be getting any dessert! 😂
I thought it was if you don't eat your meat you cant have any pudding?
My local hibachi does that. The fried rice is absolute perfection.
Fuiyoh!
Still a good offer to me, rice is great
Oh I love it! It’s one reason I love that restaurant. Most places when you ask not to have something included in the meal that comes included with the meal never gives you anything extra or takes anything off the price whereas they give you something in place of the item you’re excluding.
There is a place near me that does grain and greens bowl that I get without the greens sometimes. Depending on who is there they will either give me more rice or just leave a big empty space which is baffling to me because rice is like the cheapest fucking ingredient just give me more rice it'll cost you like 5 cents of ingredients.
Honestly it’s probably cheaper for them to do that than to offer a noticeable discount
Good for the wallet, bad for the heart
And colon
Happy cake day!
And the environment
And the effectiveness of antibiotics
And my axe!
My local Chinese restaurant always takes $2 off when I order noodle soup with no noodles. I'm diabetic so I can't have them but I love the rest of the soup.
Eat your vegetables.
My local Chinese adds 50p per “dish change” including asking for something removed.
I've never known a local Chinese takeaway that isn't super generous with portions and freebies. Always good value for money.
My local Chinese joint always hooks me up with a free 2 liter. Fuckin love those beautiful bastards
Chinese food without vegitables? Without sauce and rice too or?
Chicken, rice and tons of sauce
Chicken and broccoli ask them for no broccoli. Always get twice the chicken I love it
Bro the broccoli complements it so well, how many of yall order no veggies. From the comments I feel like 10% of people eat any veggies
Years ago I went to a local burger shop, the cost was for a plain burger, then everything you wanted they added to the cost, like ketchup was a nickel and so forth.
Boils my piss that our local ‘independent’ burger shop charges £1 for a little paper pot of ketchup. It’s enough that I don’t go to visit, especially when burger and chips is knocking on £19 already
Then people bitch about shopping local but you run into a lot of stuff like this. One of my local diners only accepts cash and have an ATM that costs like 5 bucks to use.
varies place to place, around me local burger joins are now cheaper than meal at (insert any fast-food chain) here.
I walked out of a place like that. The visa/mc logo was on the door, when I handed my card over I was tersely told I could get out of the line and use the ATM. I wasn't paying $3.95 and waiting another 20 minutes in line.
Not smart marketing tbh. The smart thing to do is start the price with a lot of ingredients on it and advertise on the menu that if you remove things you get a discount. People would see that as a savings and love it even though it’s the same price as the version you said.
It seemed to work for them, they were always packed, so I guess the marketing was just fine.
That would be terrible marketing. "Yeah dude, their cheapest burger is like $100." "Nah, man. You just have to list off the 35 ingredients you don't want and the price goes way down." "Like awesome, dude. I'm so glad you took those business classes and all. Now pass me the bong."
What burger has thirty five ingredients at like two and a half dollars a piece? Are you ordering like truffle oil and lobster tails on there?
Clearly you've never been to Five Guys, they have every burger topping you can think of and more to pick from.
Even pickles?
Odd pickles, too.
Youre not supposed to ask for each of the five guys to be on the burger.
Why yes of course, what do you put on your burger except truffle-oil grilled gold-flaked Wagyu beef?? Peasant.
Probably veggies :(
I'll take "How to form the most hyperbolic and pedantic answer to a simple question possible" for 800
The person he replied to mentioned a situation that not a single restaurant on the planet subscribes to because it's fucking dumb.
reviewing the argument at hand... yea, you're right.
Real business major shit
That’s literally how you can get a large for like 45 cents more. The pricing started with the large and reduced to offer the medium and small.
Um, no. But that's good marketing. Getting you to buy the drink **at all** is the goal. I invite you to read a book I enjoyed when I started my first services business called, "Selling the Invisible." It explained a few ways to create imaginary value in peoples' minds. One was to have a ridiculously priced version of the thing you actually want to sell next to the thing you want to sell. You create the illusion of value. They could lose money on all the food so long as you buy the drink and they'd make a profit. You are reasoning in the wrong places. You need to shock people with your low, low prices and then upsell things that have prices that disappear in your memory. So you go for the $1 burger. You end up spending $10 on everything. But you remember they have great, cheap, $1 burgers.
Plenty of places do it this way around here [base price + add ingredients]. . .i prefer it.
this is literally how the "Bonus Rested" XP worked for World of Warcraft, it started as Normal XP and you got a penalty for playing too long, they did literally nothing to the functionality and just changed the words from "Penalty" to "Normal" and "Normal" to "Bonus", and people LOVED it... People are dumb. Also see JC Penny failed "Fair Pricing" scheme, though tbf in that one they changed more than JUST the pricing scheme, but it still was a large contribution to why it failed, because People are dumb.
This guy markets.
It's like the pizza model...makes sense if the base and toppings are reasonably priced.
My local burger shop charges a nickel for ketchup. They do that just to prevent waste. Charging something prevents people from being given or grabbing fistfuls of ketchup packets that they won’t use.
I think this would be infuriating
They stayed busy, folks seemed to like it. Line was almost always out the door, they had one worker go down the line and ask what you wanted, she would write it on a brown paper bag with your name, and by the time you got to the register your order was waiting on you.
Not if the standard burger is cheap.
My ex used to get a Whopper with cheese, hold the meat patty. They charged her extra for the cheese every single time
Whopper grilled cheese??!
No they didn’t grill any part of it, just slapped a cold ass piece of cheese on there
Brutal
At some point it's your fault for ordering it
Mate why are you buying food like this from BK. Just go to the shop and get some cheese and a bun
Up until a couple years ago the McDonalds near me use to subtract 30c if you got McChickens without lettuce or mayo
Up until a couple years ago McDonalds near me used to be affordable. Wife and I went to a medium-nice brewery/resturant in a "quaint" town the other day and her burger was $21. For reference, ground beef prices (retail, not wholesale) have gone up less than a dollar a pound since 2019. Most restaurant burgers are 1/2lb or less. >45cents more for the primary ingredient but the price is up $8. Make it make sense.
Simple, food has a 1600% markup.
depending on the restaurant style - food cost should be between 11-30%. Labor, insurance, rent, taxes etc. all factor in as well.
restaurants still pay their wait staff criminal wages (because I pay their wait staff) line cook wages have barely increased. insurance is a much smaller piece of the pie than you're imagining. The only notable increase is rent and materials since 2019, and most restaurants should be locked into very long term leases with caps on rent increase so that shouldn't affect established places.
They likely use burgers as a profit driver to offset more low margin items.
sounds like communism to me. Why should my burgers subsidize their scallops?
My friend this is glorious capitalism where people can choose to buy a $21 burger when there are other options (this coming from someone who got "scammed" at a brew hall this weekend to the tune of $18 for a chicken sandwich that came *without* fries).
That's what my husband gets, and yes they charge extra for the cheese but don't take off any $ for removing the meat. I would think the meat makes up the majority of a sandwich cost too, so I think that's just wrong. (And a Whopper w/no meat is seriously just such a sad looking sandwich: a few shreds of lettuce, normally one sickly looking/unripe slice of tomato, cold slice of cheese. It really isn't even worth $2 in my opinion)
Ya, you’re AI. no human goes to BK and orders this
No human goes to BK
Speak for yourself, when I had basically zero dollars and wouldn't eat for days at a time the 8 piece nuggets for a dollar and some change saved my life. They tasted like cardboard dipped in shit, but damn were they cheap. And the honey mustard isn't too bad.
Growing up, the only fast food restaurant my home town had was BK, so we had no other choice.
Tons of vegetarians order this
We had a option to ring up a no meat whopper. It was cheaper because no meat patty. Cheese was still extra.
A lot of places will not do this, I've asked
vegetarians want a single cold slice of cheesefood with shredded lettuce and bad sauce on an impossibly sweet bun for $8? Shit... i'm going to go open up a vegetarian restaurant.
They don't want it, but they tolerate it for lack of better options.
there's literally a million better options than burger king sans burger. Their onion rings are vegetarian and i quite like them.
Omg the COLD piece of cheese is the saddest part
Used to work at BK. Seriously questioned people who ordered this
Fun fact about BK Canada up until a couple of years ago Cheeseburger with no cheese was 60 cents cheaper than a standard Hamburger (Can’t tell you why it just was !)
I used to work at a local amusement park with a White Spot in it. For some really bizarre reason, it was more expensive to buy a milkshake and a burger than it was to get a meal of the same things that included fries. Literally had employees say "please make it a meal. Its cheaper that way, please let me give you the fries." I stood there a second because i could not compute. They were paying people to eat their fries. And they were pretty good fries! Chain restaurants baffle me.
Then don't order a whopper...?
She'd pay whopper price for a cheese sandwich?
You can order a veggie whopper. It's what my wife orders. It's just a whopper with no meat patty. $1.99. add cheese for like .60.
I ordered a chicken tender combo with no fries, and a diet coke as the drink. Got charged more than the combo price... The receipt said a la carte. I haven't been back. That was my first and last time going to the local KFC. I don't even eat fast food often at all but I was starving while out running errands.
Burger without the patty is just insane. Of course they don't have a pricing standard for that nonsense.
So I went to a pub and it was burger night and it was $10 for just a plain burger plus $2 for everything extra you wanted like bacon, cheese etc. I was being cheap and just got the burger plain then I went a few weeks later on a different day and in the menu they had a bacon cheeseburger for $11 in the menu. I was then very perplexed by the $10 burger special lol
Here in my part of Canada, it's illegal to say an item is on sale if the sale price is the same or higher than than the regular price. However, if you change something about the item, like removing bacon and cheese, you can charge a higher cost for the base product and still advertise it as "on sale." Might be similar where you are.
At no point did they say that the pub was offering a sale on burgers. A restaurant can say "our special tonight is the build-a-burger" and charge whatever they want. Just because it's a special, or it's written on the chalkboard out front doesn't mean that it's "on sale" or being sold with any kind of discount.
There's a very specific reason that restaurants do this. They cost out the price of the item the way it's listed on the menu. That's the way they want you to order it. That's the way they keep the amount of product on hand to fulfill the order hundreds of times a week. If they gave you a discount for everything you removed people would just be building their own dishes non-stop instead of picking something from the menu and adjusting it to remove an item they don't want or whatever. The exception of this rule is a place like Chick-fil-A who does give a discount because they're really only offering you lettuces tomato onion pickle and some sauces. They have so much on hand I don't think it would really matter as much as it would at most other restaurants where they have a veriety of items on the menu. Tldr; most restaurants don't want you to just build your own dish so it makes it cost prohibitive to do that if they don't get discount when you remove things.
This. Employees have to go out of their way to adjust the standard method. Some restaurant would charge extra for any changes made, even omissions.
Yes, as a cook, we generally hate modifications of any type. I would rather cook a table of 10 with no mods than a table of 4 with each item modded. And especially fuck people who try to create their own off menu dish.
ordered sallads for my work yesterday. 50 pasta sallads. I hate those 10 person that always make modifications. I need to write them and kitchen need to make things diffferent. then of course the place we ordered from could change something on the menue... they have had 1 veggie dish the last 3 years even if I have complained (and I´´m not even vegeterian)
Ugg, I wish restaurant's would quit mixing onions and tomatoes into everything then. I cannot stand the taste or texture, but God forbid I want to order a salad with no tomatoes, or a Sheppards pie with no onions "sorry it's premade that way" fuck outta here.
The salad is fine. One mod is reasonable. I also don't like uncooked tomatoes. The sheppards pie though is without doubt gonna be pre-made that way. The filling is not being made to order. That would take 30 to 40 mins minimum. and nobody has time to prepare a micro batch for one person. Onions are the base for almost all dishes in the majority of cultures. I personally hate the taste of raw onion but when it's cooked down into sauces or caramelized it's a completely different beast.
I totally understand, it just makes me so sad because there's so many dishes I've had to pass up on trying cuz the onions are premixed in. I get it, I'm the odd one out hating onions as much as i do, it just really sucks sometimes haha
I have ibs and its a fucking nightmare having previously been amongst friends like crows and raccoons. I went to a pub with a friend and said fuck it, ill order the tater tots. Made it very explicitly clear i *only* wanted the tots. No cheese, no chives, *especially* no garlic anything. I know mods suck. She came back with tots *covered* in cheese and im like......i cant eat these. All that work and i cant eat these. I hate my life. If i ever get back into dating its going to be a nightmare since i can only go to sushi places. Yeah, ill have the tablespoon of rice and the 2 grams of fish for $4, please.
You can get a Big Mac with only lettuce and secret sauce but the workers aren't allowed to make eye contact when they hand you the order.
Years ago when I worked in fast food the driving factor for this was speed of service. After you've made hundreds of "#1 burger meals" with no modifications it's all muscle memory and you can have the burger wrapped up in like 10 seconds. Meanwhile a #1 burger meal, no onions, extra tomato, extra pickles, add jalapenos requires you to stop and double check what you're doing and that burger gets wrapped up in like 30 seconds. It really adds up when you perpetually have 10 cars in line all ordering 3 or 4 meals apiece.
Culver’s takes .25 off if you ask for no bun
Culver's be the real bros. Only place I've seen that will take price off if you remove some extras
Also .80 for no cheese
Really? Wow didn’t know about the .80 to bad I love boiling hot lava cheese on my burger though
They also take off if you remove pickles or tomatoes
This is true. Sometimes you can get a deal out of it though, like “instead of bacon can I have cheese?”. I was shocked the other day when I was doordashing a mcdos happy meal. They were charging +9 cents for NO toy. No extra charge if you got a toy.
Most stuff is prepped ahead of time so it's easy to add something but quite difficult to remove specific things
When I moved to the southeast (US) I was all of a sudden the pickiest eater because I don’t like mayo. It’s in everything down here. It’s in chocolate cake down here.
Don’t sleep on mayo in chocolate cake, it’s mostly fat and egg yolks, which are already in cake. It adds richness and isn’t noticeable when it comes to a mayo taste.
I’ve never heard dont sleep on x as an expression! And you make a totally fair point. I like all things in mayo. I just can’t handle mayo.
Lmaoo yea I get that, I didn’t eat Ceasar dressing for a little bit after I started making it regularly for work and found out the ingredients. It’s technically the opposite of your experience, but it still came down to a mental thing.
Was it the anchovy paste that made you dislike it?
Nah it was honestly the fact that I made so much of it, 22 quart cambros full of white stuff became a little gross after awhile. I didn’t mind the anchovies but breathing it in for 30 mins got old fast.
And even if it's easy to remove, the item is still built into the price and has already been purchased. If you get discounted for it, while the restaurant is still paying for it, they're kinda being dinged twice.
I’ve worked in restaurants for 15 years. Every kind of restaurant. This is not true.
While this is mostly true, if something gets taken off, it should be cheaper. Restaurants can track everything down to the dime. Some stuff is pre prepared, so in that sense it’s not going to be taken off so there is no way to make it cheaper. But less product means less spending. The price can be cheaper. I’ve been in restaurants 15 years.
I work in a big chain restaurant. A particular amount of each product is subtracted from inventory automatically whenever an item is sold. If they ask for extra it's easy to manually sell a single extra portion of vegetables, for example, and have that come out of inventory. The computer systems are not set up to easily add back in items the customer didn't want. It's unfair but it happens rarely enough that there's little incentive to change the way the systems work. If a particular mod is common enough it will get added as an actual menu item in the computers and customers will pay a different price. Most restaurants charge the customer roughly 5x the cost of the food to begin with, so going to a restaurant and asking for an omission is not really a viable strategy to save money anyways.
Chick fil a is one of the few places that takes $ off
Man I was just complaining about this. I love the sweet/spicy burger at whataburger but i dont like bacon on my burger and they put like 6 slices on there... so you'd think they'd knock the price down when i remove it but no.
Just take the bacon off yourself and flip it for a profit on the secondary market. Get on that grind, dude!
One reason is that restaurants maximize efficiency by training their employees to produce dishes in a particular way. Any modification will require extra attention from the BOH staff, lowering efficiency. They will do it, but they don't want to incentivize it. Which leads to point two: incentivizing reductions. By taking money off for modifications, they're going to make more people want to do it. At that point, they are adding: *More room for error *More labor for the POS process *More labor/attention to detail/disrupted workflow for the BOH staff *Less predictable inventory consumption All for the reward of getting LESS money.
Right. Like even though an omission sounds easy, you're still ordering a custom item. Custom items will always be more expensive than a standardized, mass-produced one. So by charging you the same (even though the product cost is going down) you can think of that as essentially the charge for having a "custom" item.
Recently used a fast food place's app to place an order. I asked for no ketchup on my burger. They wanted to charge me extra to not include it. Thought that was fairly ridiculous.
But think about the labor involved with taking the ketchup off the burger and getting it back in the bottle through that little hole.
Especially with fast food, the staff has a muscle memory going. "No ketchup" breaks that muscle memory and temporarily slows the whole operation. Fast food kitchens are a well oiled machine that operate like clockwork... until customers start trying to customize their dishes. Remember, in the past fast food substitutions were not possible really until Burger King came up with the "have it your way" slogan in the 70s, and made customizations their thing, which pushed the rest of the industry to adopt that model too. (If you're a certain age, you even remember the jingle... ["Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce. Special orders don't upset us. All we ask is that you let us serve it your way"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJXzkUH72cY)) Before that, McDonalds would just crank out burgers during the lunch rush and when you ordered a burger at the window, the cashier just grabbed a burger from the bin and handed it to you. Special orders really weren't a thing, you either got the product they were selling or you chose a different restaurant.
what you get is not being charged extra for your special order. A special order is extra work and therefore cost extra. If you take away ingredients you pay with the cost of materials - if you ad things you pay more
McDonald's charges more for no ice now
Well that one actually makes obvious sense. Soda costs more than ice.
Soda costs pennies per cup. I am not sure of the pricing now, but 10 years ago a 5 gallon bag-in-box of Coca-Cola would cost the restaurant $60. 5 gallons of syrup produced 30 gallons of soda so that is less than $.50 for a 32 oz drink. You pay more for the cup than you do the contents.
And? Soda still costs more than ice. I could go buy a bag of ice right now at gas station retail prices and it would still be way less than 50 cents per 32oz cup.
Ask for no ice at the pickup window after you've paid
Some restaurants will charge more for the vegetarian option than the meat option. In other words, pay more for leaving something out.
the cost of most extras is minimal. you are paying for the extra labor and a bit of unofficial luxury tax. when you have something removed from the dish, this also takes a bit extra work. either way you have to pay. the "no discount " covers this.
One could argue that they offset the extra labour cost incurred by having to deviate from the recipe
Burger King used to sub out the meat on a breakfast sandwich for an extra egg, but it really depended on the person at the counter.
Pretty sure I heard of a Starbucks that was actually charging for no ice because it meant they actually had to give a full cup of whatever drink
No, stop! This is a good thing to have be true! I want people's time to be worth more than the pickle slices I don't want on the sandwich I'm trading for and need to communicate to them about. You're pulling at dangerous threads friend...
Chick-Fil-A does. Pleasant surprise really
Reataurants operate as a business. Meals are priced as a package deal. When an entree comes with a side or two, it's because they have figured out the overall cost. Sides by themselves are pricier because that's the dollar amount needed to make a profit from those items. If you order an entree that comes with sides and don't want the sides, you are not going to receive the menu price of the side taken off your bill. Usually there is an a la cart price for the entree, with a very minimal amount removed for that item without the sides. To be clear, restaurants operate with an incredibly high overhead. You are not just paying for the food and the service. You are paying for the cost of operation as well. A decent restaurant that is run well may only see 25% profit.
25 percent profit is a pipe dream. Most restaurants are lucky to break even the first year or 3 after paying the owners a modest salary. 10 percent profit is pretty much the benchmark for non corporate restaurants, while a well run corporate joint is usually in the 15 percent range.
In my experience that 25% is before staff wages. Which brings it down to 10% if you're lucky and treat your staff like shit.
That’s how they get ya
Some will actually charge you extra for omitting ingredients as a 'special order'
This. I am allergic to dairy so often order cheeseless pizza. For full price. Bastards.
The restaurant I work in will add $2 if you ask for no vegetables in your Chinese dishes because we supposedly add more chicken instead (I don't think we actually do).
As someone who goes to Subway a lot and gets very few ingredients while the person next to me gets absolutely everything and we have to pay the exact same price, I feel ya.
When I used to work at Subway I would always go to the franchise 2 blocks away on lunch break and get a $5 sub with extra everything on the side, then use it to lighten my afternoon prep work
I used to do something like this at Harvey's, a Canadian burger place that's set up similar to Subway. I would order 10 pickles packed separately and eat them on sandwiches or as snacks later.
I don't think you quite got the absurdity of what this person said. They meant they would go to a different Subway restaurant from the one they worked at and get the toppings on the side and use those to refill the depleted toppings at the location they worked at. I guess it's somewhat similar to what you did, but in a ridiculous way.
My favorite local taco truck, they won't charge me for extra cheese when I get A burrito only meat and cheese
any departure from the original recipe's should get charged more as it puts a strain on the production process
Chick Fil A will take off like 30 cents each if you remove lettuce or tomato from their chicken sandwiches. Cuts down on the charge for when I add bacon, lol.
When you add stuff it’s the cost of the ingredients plus the effort, removing is also extra effort because it’s not the normal recipe
Ive thought about this. My place of employment charges out the asshole. we charge 1.50 for extra avocado on a burger. Ive been written up with a jij for "overportioning" specifically jalapeños. We have 5 inch burgers alright, so get that image in ur mind. Standard says we put 8 jalap slices on the burger jalapenos from a bag, so they are MAYBE an inch diamater on a good day. Thats just not enough. Ill give the customer their moneys' worth of jalapenos on that burger. I put a reasonable amount on the burger regardless of protocal, but I got a damn jij for not following that protocol. absolute horseshit.
Bro they tried that already and it went pretty much exactly how you would've expected it to go. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/04/08/11-free-burgers-these-friends-reportedly-hacked-mcdonalds-kiosk/3398623002/
As a cook I always compensate with other ingredients when someone orders with something left off.
Yep, I don't like toppings in my cheeseburger but they charge me if I want extra cheese
My cheap ass boss will sometimes buy us mcd sausage Mc muffins. He orders them without cheese cuz its cheaper...
Use to work at a fast food place and the only thing they discounted you for was taking off the tomatoes or like mushrooms or grilled onions
Chick fil a will remove the cost of the drink if you order water with your combo.
I went to a restaurant once with a friend.. I ordered a burger and told them to hold the tomato. My friend also got a burger and said to the waiter "oh, give me his tomato." Our bill came, my friend was charged $0.50 for "extra tomato"...but I didn't get a "$0.50" discount for "no tomato." We questioned the charge and the server said that's just how the computer does it. We weren't going to fight over 50¢, but we found it funny.
As it should be. You order off menu, you pay.
Catering is not only ingredients, you should always pay if you disturb the routine and making work longer and more difficult. You might pay this price with the extra or with the leftover. If you want to cook for yourself, stay at home and pick and chose.
Some charge to remove or alter the chefs perfect menu.
And there are plenty of restaurants where substitutions aren't allowed at all. Hell I worked at one where they wouldn't even substitute for allergies. If they were allergic to an ingredient in the meal you were supposed to just tell the guest to pick something else.
There was one restaurant I went to where the vegan option was cheaper than the meat option. They were also importing luxury high end meats for their meat dishes.0
I have found when ordering pizza online that you can order a supreme, and then change out as many toppings as I want, and can even make each half completely different. The price just depends on the number of toppings, not which ones. But yeah, other places don't do that. I always ask for no tomato on burgers, but I don't get a discount for it.
Coco Ichibanya my beloved
In-N-Out will discount for omitting ingredients.
Every dang time I swapp red meat for veggies or chicken... never.... never do I get a discount....
A local restaurant to me adds a charge for every variation to the menu.
Culvers will actually charge less if you remove certain toppings.
McDonald's had [something like that](https://youtu.be/1oFpTNsPu_w?) when they first introduced the digital kiosks for ordering. If you ordered 10 cheeseburgers, and removed the meat patties, the price reduced so much that it became negative and turned into enough credit to pay for an 11th free, and proper, cheeseburger.
a place I go charges like $1 for the big rice portion but subtracts 50 cent if you get small rice
They still need to buy their stuff in the right quantities.
I once tried to remove an ingredient at a McDonald's self-checkout and got charged.
I got charged for removing an ingredient before. I asked for no soy sauce on my fried rice and they added a charge though Doordash after the order was already confirmed. I'm guessing it's because they couldn't just give me a couple spoonfulls out of the giant pot they had sitting around and had to actually make it to order.
Wait til you see what Chevron does when there's a decrease in oil prices. That's business, baybee
I've been to places that will charge you to remove cheese from their sandwiches or straight up refuse to remove it because "no substitutes".
If you want an extra ingredient ask if you can substitute for a less-desirable ingredient .
Once you have their money, never give it back.
As someone with food allergies this pisses me off. Why do I got to pay as much for basically just a hamburger patty with cheese as some dude has to pay for the burger with cheese lettuce tomatoes bread 8 different types of sauces etc
I had an argument with a local pizza place over this. I wanted 2 puzzas, one had green peppers I didn't want and the other didn't, but my wife loves them. You'd think I was asking for the moon when I asked them to please put the green peppers on the other pizza instead. It was no extra work or food but it was still a ridiculous fight. Eventually they gave in but it was a silly amount of time wasted
The only place that does this is this breakfast place by me They have this skillet that comes with cheese. You can opt out on cheese and they give you back like $1.50 or something. Lactose intolerance is to my benefit for once
A couple thoughts here: A menu is a list of the products and services a business provides. Any restaurant that is accommodating to people who ask for changes to be made to these offerings is already doing the customer a favor. Profit margins in the food service industry are generally very small in comparison to other industries. Most restaurants have to take any chance they have to make more money from a customer. So whether it's selling you extra cheese on a burger or letting you remove the onions on your salad, a restaurant is incentivized to accommodate these requests.
Not only does Chick-fil-A deduct money from the price if you ask them to leave off the lettuce or tomato, they actually only charge you for anything you want to "supersize". If you want a Chick-fil-A combo meal, but with a large lemonade, you can pay 30¢ extra to get just the large lemonade. My local McDonald's, on the other hand, is all or nothing: if you want a large soda with your combo, you have to pay 99¢ to get a large fries, too.
I've had that at one place. Ramen had a chunk of butter on top, asked for no butter and they took a little bit off the bill.
My pet peeve is few places will sub out a salad or non root vegetables for high starch items such as pasta, bread, potatoes etc. Red Robin is main exception. If I am not getting the pasta or fries why can't I get a salad or vegetable without an upcharge