5 ms·

Now on the menu at Toast: A new 99 cent fee

• jghn 3y ago
  Toast already charges the business. And now they're charging the customer. This is absurd.
  • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    This is what is expected. This is what you as a business owner are required to do in order to please your investors and shareholders. Otherwise, you will be replaced with somebody who will. As it was in the beginning, and shall be always, world without end. Amen.
    • ghaff 3y ago
      It's hardly just businesses. Around where I live it's very common for local government to have an online payment processor that charges a fee. I assume the town gets a no-fee or reduced-fee service in exchange for that service having the right to impose a fee. You can always just send a check instead (or have your bank do so, which I do).
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • asdajksah2123 3y ago
      This is absolutely not expected for normal businesses. Normal businesses provide other businesses a service, charge them a profitable fee for services rendered, and make a few tens to hundreds of millions in profit a year and keep shareholders, employees, customers, etc. happy. VC funded scam businesses spend billions of dollars in VC funding selling their services at a loss for the single purpose of establishing themselves as a monopsony/monopoly, and then once they've established enough dominance, and destroyed the possibility of a competitive market through VC funding, they turn on the screws and start charging monopoly prices. Basically, they succeeded in using the "tech startup" and/or "unicorn" branding to somehow bamboozle governments and citizens into believing their entirely monopolistic, anti-free market behavior was not monopolistic and anti-free market. Oh, and I still don't understand why we aren't recognizing the massive contribution this is playing in inflation. I buy a sandwich today from my local sandwich shop and I get the exact same service I did 15 years ago, except now anywhere between 15-45% of the money goes to some other company not integrated in the local economy whose only purpose is to provide a pretty interface and/or steal my data.
      • jghn 3y ago
        > the massive contribution this is playing in inflation Further, and I'm not necessarily against this part but it's also contributing to tip inflation in a big way. Now everywhere I go has that Toast tip %age screen when I buy something no matter how much or how little actual service was provided. Like most people I feel social obligation to click the button. And voila, now tips are expected for buying a pack of gum at the corner store. At least that money is presumably going to the workers and not the tech bros behind the scenes.
      • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
        Show me one of those “normal businesses” They are either entirely extinct or critically endangered as financialization is rapidly consuming literally every human interaction.
  • Frost1x 3y ago
    Another flavor of enshitification: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/11/users-advertisers-we-are-all-trapped-in-the-enshittification-of-the-internet https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/11/users-...
• jhatax 3y ago
  This is particularly grubby behavior by Toast. They are already charging restaurants to use their platform. Reaching into every customer’s wallet for $0.99 (hidden fee) per transaction > $10 is greedy. They know it’s disgusting, which is why users have to click the Info button to see details about the fee. Most customers will not notice and just pay this hidden fee, but that doesn’t make the practice palatable. There have to be other ways for Toast to achieve profitability.
  • mananaysiempre 3y ago
    I’ll note that this is in part enabled by the byzantine tax structure in the US, which basically nobody can be expected to tell offhand how much tax they’d be required to pay in a particular place at a particular moment for a particular product. (On the other hand, I’ve seen EU countries with like—the horror!—two or three different nationwide VAT rates for different classes of products require receipts to detail the rate and amount used for each line item specifically.) I’m fairly okay with calling this an acceptable trade for having (by modern standards) very independent and well-funded local governments, but I still feel I should point out this’d be more or less impossible in most of the first world.
    • ezfe 3y ago
      That is a bs claim - sure, an online store can't guess prices without additional information (just like shipping needs a zip code to estimate on most order pages) But a physical store - everything is the same price no matter who buys it. Paper towels are never cheaper or more expensive at the grocery store unless the paper towels themselves change price. And it's not like receipts don't already divide things up - unprepared food (in MA) is untaxed, but prepared food and some other things are so grocery store receipts already divide food up into categories and indicate where the taxed items are.
      • mananaysiempre 3y ago
        I’m not talking about a store guessing prices or tax, I’m talking about a consumer doing it. If I remember I’m generally paying 20% VAT on my purchases and suddenly I’m seeing $3 of “tax and fees” on my $10 pre-VAT bill, I’ll probably know somebody’s doing something funny. If a store receipt (online or offline) is furthermore legally required to put the pre-VAT price, VAT rate, and post-VAT price for each item separately, there’s no way to sneak in a sudden $1 fee except for putting an item for SUDDEN FEE: $1 somewhere in the list. Presumably such an item would have annoyed quite a few people more quickly and efficiently than the current situation where they need to read about it in the Boston Globe, which might have made the vendor more reluctant to impose the fee to begin with. Again, I’m not saying this situation doesn’t have its own merits, just pointing out that it only exists because there’s an opaque “tax and fees” item to sneak things into to begin with.
• beowulfey 3y ago
  I know nothing about starting a business. Can someone explain why so many companies these days struggle to make a profit? Is it because they spend with wanton disregard of long term financial balances, thanks to huge up-front funding boosts clouding their optics? Or because inflation has so screwed up how customers value things that companies cannot charge what their products are worth? Or maybe that they are all just bad products? I have no idea, but from an outsider’s perspective, it is starting to get silly hearing about so many companies incorporating shitty manipulative pricing schemes in poor attempts at profitability. It just seems unsustainable.
  • nikanj 3y ago
    Part of it is overinflated org charts. Both Instagram and Whatsapp managed with an engineering team of a dozen or two people until acquisition. Typical SV startups have a dozen or two engineering teams, each with multiple people. I have no idea what they’re all doing, but it probably involves lots of rewrites
    • disgruntledphd2 3y ago
      To be fair, neither IG nor WhatsApp were actual businesses before their acquisition. Sure, WhatsApp had their euro fee which theh waived for everyone. IG could definitely have been profitable without FB but it would have taken a loooonnnnng time.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    There are basically a ton of companies in the business of delivering services that people/businesses want but aren't willing to pay the cost of providing them. This is especially true with personal services that don't really have significant economies of scale but it's a big factor overall.
  • Hemospectrum 3y ago
    There's profitability for the business, and then there's profitability for the shareholders. The latter is the bigger problem because it compels all businesses to become increasingly profitable at monotonically increasing speeds. If only we strangled all the profitability out of the stock market (with some really draconian taxes and regulations) we could rein in capitalism and have a more sustainable economy. But that's a pipe dream.
• a_cardboard_box 3y ago
  Telling someone they're gonna pay $10 + taxes and then giving them a bill for $11 + taxes is obviously fraud and I'm not sure how we got to a point where we seem to accept it. I don't know if we need stricter rules or better enforcement, but whatever we're doing now isn't working.
  • dheera 3y ago
    We need to get rid of taxes being separately listed as well. Taxes should be treated as a business expense. I pay you for food, then you pay for electricity, water, heat, supplies, taxes, insurance, etc. and keep the profits. That's how it works. Just state one number on the menu for each item and charge exactly that number. I'm more likely to buy something that says "$12" than "$10+taxes" because it's deterministic and not some vague probability distribution in my head of how much "taxes" is.
    • konha 3y ago
      That’s how it works in Germany. Consumers see final prices and an itemized invoice shows how much tax is included in the price. Advertising prices to consumers that do not include taxes is against consumer protection laws over here.
    • apricot 3y ago
      Exactly. As a customer, what matters is my out-of-pocket expenses. I don't care what portion goes to the store, the distributor, the wholesaler, or the government. I care about how much I pay. I am fortunate to live in a country where the price that's advertised is the price I pay, but every time I visit the United States I am amazed that people are OK with buying something without it being clear in advance how much it costs. And let's not even start about your demented health care pricing.
  • vinyl7 3y ago
    It really seems like all business regulators have been fired and it's just pure anarchy right now.
    • 3y ago
• A_Duck 3y ago
  So Toast make most of their money on hardware and accompanying software Cost of Goods Sold (COGS): $2,227 million Non-production costs: $884 million R&D: $280 million Non-production and R&D costs don't seem excessive. Toast, Inc make a good product widely used and yet cannot make a profit after ten years, and are unwilling to raise the price of their actual product (hardware) to cover costs. Their big competitor is Square who also lost $540m last year. If ZIRP-era tech funding across the industry pushed down restaurant equipment prices such that it's not profitable for Square and Toast, have VCs been indirectly subsidising my dinner?
  • habosa 3y ago
    I think our collective minds are warped if we don’t find it odd that a restaurant software company has a 280M research and development budget.
    • djbusby 3y ago
      I found it odd too. What kind of real research could they be doing. Not all ideas that a team riffs on qualify a research. Maybe this is another case where IRS audits could help out?
    • A_Duck 3y ago
      10% of the cost of goods sold on R&D doesn't seem too wild. That has to include all (hardware) product design and likely a good chunk of software development costs as well. For NCR, a 'boring legacy' POS manufacturer that number is 6%, but they have a bunch of older existing products (founded in 1884!)
  • ghaff 3y ago
    >have VCs been indirectly subsidising my dinner Sure. And your "cab" rides and your co-working space and... Just like they did during dot-com. Just different categories of products.
• _nalply 3y ago
  Probably Toast will get away with this. I see, for example, a declared price of $11.29 for a meal and pay. This is however not what is charged. There is a 11% tax. Add $1.24. There is 18% tip. Add $2.03. There is a 99 cent fee. A day later I get a text that I am charged $15.55 (shrug). Disclaimer: I am from Europe.
• Larrikin 3y ago
  Does toast provide any value to the customer going to the restaurant now that they have added this fee? Why wouldn't I go on the toast menu, pick everything I want, see the fee and then just call the restaurant? Door Dash and GrubHub have tried integrating into the restaurants website and charging ridiculous fees for delivery, there is even less value in having a fee for pick up.
  • jayroh 3y ago
    Call? On the phone? Haha, nah man. That ain’t it. Sorry for the tone of my reply but - no. People use toast because it’s convenient and no humans are involved.
    • Larrikin 3y ago
      Are you so awkward that you would rather pay a dollar than talk? Slowly picking what you want on a website and seeing all your options without having to quiz an employee for a bunch of time on the phone is the convenience. Knowing exactly what you want and saying it aloud is not an inconvenience.
      • nicbou 3y ago
        I'm not the person above, but I don't miss calling to place orders. I miss it even less at the end of a long day, a few beers in, in a country that speaks a third language. I book through a screen when I can, at my own speed. It's nicer.
        • NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
          Calling in orders was unthinkable most times, unless I knew that the business was accustomed to delivery orders anyway. But usually, there was just no need or reason for me to call in ahead for orders. (I don't own a car, so I certainly wouldn't be picking up, always dining in.) However, ordering pickup food online is an amazing service now. I picked up this habit quite recently, when I realized that Google Maps makes it super easy. They present your choices between GrubHub, or the restaurant's own website, or other services. So what I do is get on the bus, then when I'm about 20 minutes away, I'll just open up my phone and order ahead. Credit card payments are no problem; I often use PayPal with GrubHub, or Google Pay. Calling in an order on the bus would be unthinkable, since I would not be reciting my credit card details by voice in a public space. But online ordering makes it a piece of cake. This Toast fee may be affecting me soon; I recently started patronizing a coffeehouse that uses Toast, and ordering ahead seemed like a really good idea. We'll see.
• djbusby 3y ago
  Another corporate overlord rent-seeking. Use VC money to make product, use VC money to allow to sell product cheap. Gain clients. Product is "sticky". Seek rents.
  • nicbou 3y ago
    It's crazy how much of the VC-funded economy is about taking over a vital road then instilling a toll.
• charles_f 3y ago
  What is their business model? It seems like they're providing an online service, are they already charging the business a recurring fee?
• kylec 3y ago
  This is really really disappointing. I thought since Toast is frequently used as the POS system for restaurants, using the app to place an order was like placing it directly with the restaurant, no middle men like DoorDash or Slice or whatever. If I’m going to have to pay a fee to use the app, maybe I’ll just call in my order/place it in person instead.
• hedora 3y ago
  Consumer protection laws used to cover this sort of thing. Companies should be forced to honor the lowest advertised price for a good. If they are caught not doing so, they should have to refund the money, in cash, up to a 10-20 year statute of limitations, with interest, and with the highest priority in any bankruptcy proceedings. Executives with a report that signed off on the pricing scheme should be subject to wage/stock clawback. “Lowest advertised price” needs to have a simple definition. I propose the following: The courts take a price list or other piece of marketing material produced by the vendor, removing all information that is rendered at less than 90% the size of the actual price. They then apply any mandatory sales tax that is paid directly to the government. The minimum result of doing this with any publication the vendor produced within the prior six months is the price the vendor must honor. Sale dates and other promotion terms must be under 25 words and the same size as the price. This would ban a few common practices that are problematic: - Cell phone companies advertise low prices per line, then produce contracts at 3-4x that amount. Actual monthly bills have an additional 10% markup. - City politicians mandate an after-you-have-eaten “living wage surcharge” be added to restaurant bills, instead of having the price of labor be included in the menu prices. - The state tax for take out items at restaurants in California is lower / nonexistent, depending on the item. However, the state tax collectors intentionally overestimate the fraction of diners that eat at restaurants (with high variance), then charge restaurants for the difference between reported tax and estimated tax, with a presumption of guilt. Therefore, most restaurants just always overcharge customers tax, then pay the balance to the state, in what is effectively a protection racket.
• rektide 3y ago
  Toast is also used at many dine-in situations. Sounds like that's not yet going to see this fee. Could you imagine what a pain it would be to have a fee like this & have staff around to take the flak for it? These mechanized economic processes allow companies to put humans at their complete mercy, in a way where no real response is possible. Far off technological control.
• snehk 3y ago
  America really needs a federal law so that the advertised price is the price you pay and not a cent more. That's really all it takes. When I look for a AirBnB here in Germany, the advertised price must include everything and I mean everything. When I booked one from the US, the initial price was low but then they added about five fees for stuff and the price went up at least 30%. It was completely ridiculous.