> Something that always bugs me is restaurants that charge $2 or $5 surcharge for takeout. I'm saving the restaurant a ton of money by not using the dining room

> Something that always bugs me is restaurants that charge $2 or $5 surcharge for takeout. I'm saving the restaurant a ton of money by not using the dining room, why would they discourage that? My parents owned a small family restaurant in Europe when I was little. We never charged extra for takeout, but it was viewed as lower margin as dine in, largely for two reasons. 1. For takeout we usually missed out on the revenue on drinks and desserts, which have enormous margins (think multiples rather than percentages). 2. A lot of the extra labour for dine-in was internalized by the family. Now you might object that using the wife and kids as cheap labour is not an honest calculations of the margins, but with family labour you can (a) largely circumvent the tax wedge (high in Europe) and (b) the presumably undercompensated labour is ofset by higher profits which still stays in the family if the head of family is careful with money.