… But they won’t tell you until you’ve finished your dinner.
In a (thankfully brief) visit to already high-priced Palo Alto, the “fine dining” restaurant surprised us with a bill that included the usual California state sales tax and local restaurant/hospitality tax and a mandatory sky-high “tip,” but a new charge of 3% on the overall overpriced figure attributed to “management-imposed costs.”
When we inquired about these costs, the beleaguered waitperson raised zher (non-gender-indicative pronoun required: remember, we’re in Palo Alto) eyes and admitted that the charges were **government**-imposed costs due to the hike in the minimum wage, but calling them that would have (ahem, chortle, cough) invited scrutiny of the overall operation by the local thought police.
12:17 pm on July 11, 2017
