AI Summary
5 min read“The minute we got these, we could take four, five, six tables outside, not worry about having to run in for every single order, and nearly halve the time that we needed to serve.” That’s Miguel Aguilar, a former server in Jersey City, describing the impact of handheld payment devices. His experience anchors the first of three petty economic grievances aired on this episode of The Indicator—all of them about paying for food at restaurants. The throughline is that small annoyances at the point of sale often reveal deeper economic forces: coordination problems, franchise incentives, technological inertia, and the hidden costs of doing business in a fragmented regulatory environment.
The Checkout Wait: A Problem with a Price Tag
Steven Bisaha’s grievance is the classic restaurant checkout dance: flag down the server, wait for the check, hand over your card, wait for it to come back. It is inefficient for customers and costly for servers. Miguel Aguilar explained that before his restaurant adopted handheld devices from Toast, the old pen-and-paper system constrained how many tables a server could handle. After the switch, his capacity jumped from two or three tables to four, five, or six, and the time needed to serve each table dropped by nearly half.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:06) **Petty Economic Grievances: The Setup** - Waylon recounts being denied Dunkin' Rewards at an airport, sparking the idea for a segment on petty economic grievances about restaurant payment.
- 2 (02:25) **Grievance 1: The Tedious Checkout Process** - Steven describes the multi-step, time-wasting ritual of paying a restaurant bill with a server.
- 3 (03:19) **The Solution: Handheld Payment Devices** - Miguel explains how handheld POS devices from Toast solved the checkout bottleneck, allowing faster table turnover.
- 4 (04:39) **Grievance 2: Prices Without Tax** - Waylon expresses his frustration that US restaurant menus don't show the all-in price including tax, unlike most other countries.
- 5 (05:29) **The Economics of Tax-Exclusive Pricing** - Sherry Kimes outlines three reasons restaurants don't include tax in menu prices.
- 6 (06:53) **Grievance 3: The Dunkin' Rewards Airport Exclusion** - Waylon returns to his original grievance: airport Dunkin' locations don't participate in the Dunkin' Rewards loyalty program.
- 7 (07:58) **Why Airport Fast Food is Different** - Waylon investigates the likely reasons for the exclusion, finding clues from other chains and an industry analyst.
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Show Notes
On today’s show: Redeeming fast food rewards points in airports, not knowing the full price of your meal upfront, and the pen-and-paper restaurant bill slowdown.
Fact checking by Sierra Juarez.
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