Topic: The Holidays Act (2004)

Okay, so this little piece of legislation forces employers to compensate their employees for working on a Public Holiday by giving them time-and-a-half and a day off.

This, I suppose, is good.

However, why does this then automatically have to get passed on to the customer by applying a surcharge?

An example of this is the local restaurant we went to on Saturday, where the surcharge would have been 15% if we had gone today or Sunday.

The food is not 15% better. The service certainly isn't.

Why discourage customers by putting on the surcharge?

Why not just absorb it?

Good point, Kall.

Certainly here in Tga over the weekend the restaurants were full, but the service was appalling - so many new ones who had not experienced the madness of the annual Jazz Festival, and were "customered-out"..... meaning they were so stunned by the crowds, and tired, that service was not anywhere up to normal standards, and regular customers were treated really quite badly, and all with the surcharge on Friday and Sunday....

Really not a good thing, when restaurants rely on regular patronage... :shrug:

I am dead set against the Hotel Assn's surcharge idea :angry:

I mean, imagine if McDonalds started it . Or BP!!!

Trouble is, there'll be enough people who don't mind paying, that the restaurants' business won't be too badly affected, and theree'll be no pressure to stop charging.

I noticed in Australia, in the holidays every where we ate had it noted at the bottom of their menus that a % surcharge would apply on public holidays. It varied from place to place, the more touristy places had a larger surcharge. But I think peope just accept it and choose to do something else if they don't want to pay the surcharge.

I heard somewhere that the Hospitality Association (or whatever they are called) were against there members applying the surcharge, and if you went to a member cafe or whatever they were encouraging patrons to "dob" them in.

Why not just add a fraction of the 15% to everything across the whole year?

It will work out some tiny amount and nobody would notice.