At the Lebanese restaurant near the uni, they charge more if you dine in. their excuse is for the service charge to serve and clean the dishes. It is also applied to Costa- maybe the largest chain coffee shop in UK at the moment. They are charging you more for dine in. However, I am at out the brew, a coffee shop and their charge more for those who take away. While in the library café, you will get 15p discount if you bring your own cup…
Here is my thought.
In Indonesia, we don’t charge more to those who will take away or dine in. Every kind of services are already on their calculation. In fact, Starbucks for example will give discount to those who bring their own cup.
Environmental cost
It is great and must get appreciation to those people who care about the environment by bringing their own coffee cup and dine in! they don’t liter the environment with plastic cup or Styrofoam, which I have seen as a huge issue here in London particularly. Most of the restaurants in New Cross for example, are given away the Styrofoam easily to the customer who takes away their food. Some of them give a plastic box although they are refused to take the empty box back to reuse it.
So when Out of the Brew charge more to you who take away, it makes me love this café even more. They don’t want the customer liter the plastic cup and bring bad impact to the environment. Put it in the economic point of view; by making the customer to dine in, it actually open the opportunity for them to order more. And they are only served coffee in the ceramic cup and glass, not a plastic one.
There are 2.5billion coffee cup a year on the recycle bin (BBC, 2006) horray!! So if your customer chose to dine in, served them without more cost!
Cleaning cost
Seriously! With or without people dine in or take away, you still need to clean everything, restaurant still put ‘service charge’ on the bill. Should it already on your cost of production before your sell the product? If I much consider about the charge, I prefer to take a take away service every time I go to a café or restaurant, it cost me less than dine in of course. But I wish I don’t have to, unless I am in a hurry. I prefer to sit, eat or drink and enjoy my time at the café.
In this case, yes, I think you should charge more to those who take away their food rather than those who Dine In. For the sake of the environment, stop littering!
nroshita 