CHANGE CHEATERS: Bumping a bill up to the next dollar violates NYC law. (
)
It makes no cents — and it’s illegal.
Some New York restaurants have quietly begun to round bills up to the next dollar — bilking unsuspecting diners out of hard-earned pennies and more.
Restaurateurs say counting change slows things down so they’ll round the receipt upward if more than 50 cents is involved.
That was the excuse offered by a waitress at Dutch Boy Burger in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, this month when an angry diner noticed an added 47-cent charge.
She’d sat at Franklin Park, a bar connected to the burger joint, and ordered $6 fries. The bill showed 53 cents added for tax and a 47-cent “rounding” fee — making the total exactly $7.
“That is my money you literally just took for absolutely no reason besides being too lazy to go to the cash register in the next room,” she wrote on Yelp.
Dutch Boy owner Matt Roff called the round-up a computer error.
“We figured a loss for us or the customer of one to four pennies was understandable, but we were then made aware that the system had been rounding to the dollar,” Roff said. “We stopped that method a long time ago.”
In August, Chipotle was caught bumping up totals at high-traffic spots. Reps claimed that rounding sped up long lines. But after some bad press, the chain said it would round down in diners’ favor.
Surpassing the posted price violates the city’s consumer-protection law, a Department of Consumer Affairs spokeswoman said.