Starting on May 11th, 2017, a Toronto restaurant has added a three per cent surcharge to each bill in order to cover its new employee benefits program.

“We needed to bring in more money to pay for the benefits,” says Heather Mee, co-owner of Emma’s Country Kitchen. “It’s either raising our prices or [the surcharge, and] for us, this was a more honest and transparent way of doing that. . . . If there’s a clear, separate item, we can track it easily. We’re accountable to the fact that it’s not going into our pockets. It’s going only into the benefits program.”  Read more…