This restaurant believed they had it covered with the website disclaimer, and maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, I’m neither a lawyer nor an American so I really can’t say. Certainly every TOS or EULA I’ve ever agreed to has reserved the right to change the terms whenever it felt like it, and rumour has it American law has been supporting such business practices, and I really can’t see how “prices subject to change without notice” is any different. Even so, the restaurant tried to accommodate him.
Is there any meaningful regulation of computer companies there? I suspect it is no better than here, so small businesses, especially small businesses older than the Internet and run by computer innocents are very likely going to make bad business decisions when establishing a web presence.
Of course updating your website isn’t any harder than printing menus, but chances are that the cost of doing so is much much higher than printing new menus. The cost of starting over entirely with a whole new website will certainly be prohibitive, and can easily run into the thousands of dollars, a huge outlay for a small business operating on a finite budget.
More than once I’ve seen menus in small restaurants where the prices on the menu changed with white-out and a pen. I’ve even seen hand written changes on the printed give-away menus. Such manual changes are not possible with a website controlled by others elsewhere. When small businesses are forced into exceeding their budgets, they go out of business.
If the restaurant serves good food my inclination is to cut it some slack. A little human empathy was called for here.
When I spent 6 months with zero income, living off my meager savings, I sure as hell cared how much my food cost. I had an extremely tight budget for “entertainment” which included all take-out and restaurant meals (about $50 per month), so over-charging me by $4 would have been beyond infuriating, probably melt-down inducing (that’s a whole visit to the taco truck down the drain!). Now I can afford to eat a $4 over-charge but it would still piss me off, because I know many people can’t.
Not in my experience. Maybe some big chain pizza places, but most little places that do delivery (Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, cheap Mexican) are still writing up tickets by hand and passing them along to the kitchen on paper. You have to ask for the total, then wait for them to go add it up, figure the tax, etc. which often seems to irritate the person who’s taking the phone order. That’s assuming that the frequent language barrier can be worked around. I’ve been hung up on by harried staff before I could even ask for the total.
That’s one reason GrubHub, Eat24, etc. are doing so well - ordering online bypasses the communication hassles on the phone, and gives you a clear running total, plus adds an intermediary service that will help negotiate for you if your order arrives missing stuff or never shows up. But of course they take a cut, and so many small places probably are reluctant to work with them. (Maybe if they had an accessible, accurate menu online, I’d call them directly! And round we go.)
