Back in my wilder days, one of my favorite books was “The Modern Drunkard” by Frank Kelly Rich. Boy that book had a lot of good advice. Also, a lot of terrible, terrible advice. Anyway, one of the better pieces of wisdom in there really stuck with me over the years: if you can’t afford to tip, you can’t afford to drink in a bar. Go to the liquor store.
Apparently neither Christopher Ashbach nor his lawyer, Jon Farnsworth, ever read “The Modern Drunkard,” or if they did, they certainly didn’t get as much out of it as I did. Ashbach recently had the shocking experience of dining at a restaurant, and then (gasp!) facing the horrifying prospect of having to pay a three percent surcharge on his bill that was disclosed in advance on the menu. And all of this just so that the people making and serving his food could stay alive! You couldn’t blame the guy for being outraged, or Farnsworth for thinking there was a decent lawsuit to squeeze out of the whole ordeal.
Blue Plate Restaurant Co. is the entity being sued, and I’ve been to a number of their fine establishments. Menu prices vary, of course, but at almost any of their locations, you can get out for under $20 if you just want a burger and a beer. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to run up a tab of over $100 even if you came in for a relatively fancy dinner for two. So, if we’re giving Ashbach the benefit of the doubt, he saw maybe an extra three dollars on his tab. Then, instead of going to some other restaurant next time or cooking at home (or, you know, just living with the fact that going out to eat costs money and three dollars is not a lot of it), he decided to become the named plaintiff in a class action lawsuit.
The three percent charge in question is what is referred to as an “employee wellness surcharge” among the restaurants in my neck of the woods that have started tacking it on to the end of customers’ bills. As in a lot of other big metro areas around the country, in Minneapolis and St. Paul, the local minimum wage has been increasing, and businesses like restaurants have also been increasingly required to pay for healthcare coverage for their employees. Restaurants on the West Coast first pioneered the idea of adding an employee wellness surcharge to customers’ bills so as to both provide health insurance to employees and stay in business. In 2017, the idea caught on in the Twin Cities.
Now, someone finally worked up the courage to put together a class action about the employee wellness surcharge. Why would someone think that it is illegal to disclose that you are going to charge an extra three percent before you actually charge an extra three percent? Well, to paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, lawyers find a way.
To be fair, the complaint alleges “fraud, misrepresentation, and deceptive practices.” To the extent a restaurant could be said to be being deceptive by just writing on the menu, where the dumb might not read it, that there would be a three percent surcharge, well, fair enough. Still not a great argument, but I get it. The one actually good point Farnsworth made thus far is when he told Twin Cities Business magazine that “there’s a fundamental lack of disclosure about who’s getting the benefits and where that money is going.” If the restaurants had just jacked up the price of everything on the menu by three percent, instead of wanting to get goodwill points by flagging to their customers that the price increase is so that the people handling their food have healthcare, there wouldn’t be any dispute about the legality of the whole thing. I guess if you want the credit by calling it an employee wellness surcharge, you better actually be applying the proceeds to employee wellness. Even so, I don’t think forcing a restaurant to spends tens, and maybe hundreds, of thousands of dollars defending against a lawsuit is a good way to ensure they have money set aside for people’s health insurance.
All things considered, this is a dumb and miserly lawsuit, especially for this time of year. Running a business costs money, for workers’ healthcare and lots of other stuff. Just pay the three dollars, man, or if you really can’t stomach that, stay home and cook. Maybe “The Modern Drunkard” isn’t for you, maybe give Dickens a try. I believe the Ghost of Christmas Future had a lesson about Tiny Tim’s fate if Scrooge didn’t pay for some goddamn family health coverage for his worker.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.