It’s becoming more common for Chicago restaurants to tack on a surcharge at the bottom of your bill.
The purpose? To cover the health insurance expenses of restaurant employees.
Recently, NBC 5 Responds obtained receipts from Mi Tocaya in Logan Square that added a 3% surcharge to diners' bills. Robert’s Pizza and Dough in Streeterville is also tacking on the expense.
NBC 5 Responds tried to reach these restaurants to talk about the surcharge, but we did not hear back from them.
Matt Notowidigdo is a professor of economics and business at the University of Chicago. He says there are no industry regulations against adding surcharges to restaurant bills.
"It's worth asking, why are we seeing this in restaurants now?," he asked. "The simple answer is when the pandemic economy recovered after the reopening, some of the sectors that were hit hardest were anything connected to leisure and hospitality and healthcare.”
Notowidigdo says that in a post-pandemic world, concerns about worker benefits, along with escalating prices of labor and goods, have caused companies to get more creative.
NBC 5 Responds
“It was hard to get workers to come back to work in those sectors, and as a result, wages for those workers started to go up a lot," he said. "I think if you think about this from the restaurant's perspective, they're trying to retain their workforce, they're trying to hire workers, they're going to need to pay them more, they're going to need to give them more benefits like health insurance, and then you have to figure out how to pass that on to consumers.”
Businesses are required to provide health insurance benefits if they have 50 or more employees, according to provisions of the Affordable Care Act.
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