Andrew Friedman

speaker

369 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 2 May

Andrew Friedman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Something You Should Know · Do Plants Think? & Why Dining Out Feels So Expensive - SYSK Choice · 2 May 2026 podcast

So the customers really don't have a choice.

It just changes everywhere at once.

Everyone's on the same playing field.

And what a lot of restaurateurs had said to me is they wish, I don't think this will happen because I don't think it's an issue most people think is important enough, but they wish that somebody would enact a city, state or federal ordinance or regulation that simply forbade tipping.

You know, restaurants in New York City that went non-smoking years ago did it when the city forbade it.

So they didn't it wasn't their decision.

Customers couldn't really be upset with them.

A similar example would be when people wanted to require guests to be vaccinated.

to come into their restaurants when it was the restaurant making the decision.

I mean, there were near violent incidents in New York when that happened.

Once the city made it a rule, most of that stopped because no one saw it as the restaurant's decision.

So that's what I think it would take for this to probably ever get better in this country.

Well, what that service charge is that people are reacting to, it's like when you go to a hotel or the best example is you go to a resort and they add a resort fee to the price of your stay.

you know, when you're in your reaction, very logically should be, well, why don't you just make that the cost of my room?

Cause that's effectively what it is.

Restaurants would rather just have a higher, uh, average price per dish out of which everybody simply gets a salary and there is no tipping, or maybe there's voluntary tipping.

If you feel like you had extraordinary service, uh,

But what the service charge that you're referring to really is, in most cases, it is a halfway house to not having tipping because they don't want to raise the menu price because people look at their menu and get turned off.

But they also don't want to have customers kind of hold this over their staff to treat them in an abusive or disrespectful way.

So they kind of see that as a way maybe to ease people into the idea of just

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