A friend and I went out for a lovely Christmas Eve dinner at Satay Bistro. The food there is quite good and the décor was festive but when we received our bill we were hit with an unexpected item on the receipt called a “non-cash adjustment” for 3.5% of the total bill.

When we flagged down our waitperson to inquire about the charge, we were told that since we were paying by credit card, we were responsible for the additional charge.

Now it made sense why the table next to ours pulled out a wad of cash to pay their bill. Seemed kind of strange, but they must have been aware of this policy change while we were not. It seemed funny to us that after 30 years of conditioning consumers to pay by debit or credit card and not cash, now we would be expected to carry around large sums of cash.

We were further informed that management had decided to instill this new policy to reward cash payers rather than charge everyone for the credit card processing fees.

While the waitperson called it a cash discount, the reality is it was a credit card fee surcharge. If this were truly a discount then the bill would have been reduced for the cash-paying patrons to reflect their cash purchase so they would not be subject to paying the credit card processing fees.

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