San Diego Restaurants Serve “Dining Surcharge” After Minimum Wage Hikes
January 06, 2017
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Legal Insurrection has often chronicled the unintended consequences of minimum wage hikes across the country, from worker struggles in Seattle, automation replacing service personnel, the closing of a popular eatery in New York, and the loss of jobs at UC Berkeley.
Now, in my home town of San Diego, diners are being served-up a surprise along with their bills as a result of voters approving a minimum wage hike in last June: A dining surcharge.
Girding for the second minimum wage hike in six months and the fourth in 2-½ years, many of San Diego’s full-service restaurants are introducing for the first time an average surcharge of 3 percent of the meal’s cost to help cover increased labor expenses that some operators say amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single year. ...Hoping to preserve what restaurateurs insist are already thin profit