AI Summary
→ WHAT IT COVERS Waylon Wong, Darien Woods, and Steven Besaha examine three restaurant payment frustrations — slow card checkout, tax-exclusive menu pricing, and airport loyalty program exclusions — explaining the economic logic driving each practice. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Tableside payment devices:** Handheld card readers from companies like Toast eliminate the four-step traditional checkout process. Over 170,000 U.S. locations had adopted them as of March, with servers reporting nearly half the time needed per table and easier bill splitting. - **Menu pricing collective action problem:** Restaurants omit tax from prices partly because any single restaurant displaying all-in prices appears more expensive than competitors showing pre-tax figures. All restaurants would need to change simultaneously, making unilateral action a competitive disadvantage. - **U.S. tax complexity barrier:** Unlike single-rate systems such as New Zealand's nationwide sales tax, U.S. restaurants navigate overlapping federal, state, county, and city tax rates. For printed menus especially, calculating and displaying accurate all-in prices across jurisdictions is operationally difficult. - **Airport franchise loyalty gaps:** Fast food loyalty programs frequently exclude airport locations because large concession operators run their own point-of-sale systems incompatible with individual chain loyalty tech. Participation in rewards programs is typically left to franchisee discretion, not mandated by the parent brand. → NOTABLE MOMENT Dunkin' Donuts PR promised Waylon a detailed explanation of why airport locations skip rewards programs, then went silent despite repeated follow-up emails — leaving the original grievance entirely unresolved and unexplained. 💼 SPONSORS [{"name": "Vanguard", "url": "https://vanguard.com/investorchoice"}, {"name": "Capella University", "url": "https://capella.edu"}, {"name": "Workday", "url": "https://workday.com"}] 🏷️ Restaurant Economics, Loyalty Programs, Menu Pricing, Payment Technology
