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Americans, we don’t really know how things work in this economy. That goes for just about anything — buying a car, buying a TV. But the one that matters most is how we buy food.
So how do we find out the economy is hurting and in danger? The business people tell us first. They’re the ones who have to go buy the car and the TV before we do. They’re the ones who have to buy the food before we eat it. That means they’re carrying the risk up front. And when they’re under pressure, that means we’re under pressure — whether we’ve felt it yet or not.
Don’t forget the truckers, either — the ones hauling those goods from the port to the shelf when they come from overseas, or from one end of the country to the other when they don’t. Instead of getting angry at any of these folks, we ought to adjust our own lives accordingly and support the local businesses that serve us.
A news story out of Houston this week put all of that on one plate. Let’s break it down.
A 90-year-old restaurant, a 3.5% surcharge, and a very angry comment section
At Lankford’s in Bellaire, Texas, a family-owned Houston restaurant with roughly 90 years of history, owner Paul Prior says he hasn’t raised a single menu price in the three-and-a-half years the location has been open. Instead, he added a 3.5% surcharge for customers who pay by card — because credit card processing fees alone were running him $5,000 to $10,000 a month.
He talked about bacon and napkins both being close to double what he used to pay. He talked about beef, to-go containers, and plastic bags. And he said something that I think is the real headline: prices skyrocketed during the pandemic and, for the most part, never came back down. Read that the way I read it: “I’ve been eating this pain for years, and now I have to do something.”
Then came the poll at the end of the video, and the comments. Roughly 80% of poll takers said they’d ask the manager to remove the surcharge. The other 20% said they’d pay it — and not come back. In the comment section it felt like 9 out of 10 people were strongly against him. We’ll get to that. But first, the vocabulary you need to understand this story.
Word of the day #1: Input costs
Input costs are everything a business has to buy or pay for before it can sell you anything. For a restaurant that means the food itself, the labor to cook and serve it, the building (rent, property taxes, insurance), utilities, the supplies (napkins, containers, cleaning products), and — here’s the one people forget — the fee the card company takes every time you swipe.
Here’s the thing about input costs: the customer never sees them. You see a $14 burger. The owner sees the beef, the bun, the cook’s wages, the lease, the gas under the flat-top, the napkin, the box, and the 2–3.5% skimmed off the top by the card network. When those go up, the $14 burger has to go up, or the owner eats the difference out of a very thin margin. And since 2019, they’ve gone up a lot. The National Restaurant Association estimates total expenses for an average restaurant jumped 36% between 2019 and 2026, led by food and labor, with utilities, occupancy, supplies, and card fees all posting double-digit increases.
Why are bacon and napkins so much more expensive?
This is the part that fascinated me, because bacon and napkins have nothing in common — one’s a pig, one’s a tree. They didn’t go up for the same reason. They rode two totally different supply chains to get to his invoice.
Bacon: a livestock story
Bacon is cut from pork belly, one of the most volatile cuts in the whole meat case. Nationally, retail bacon ran about $4.73 a pound in early 2020, spiked to a record $7.61 in October 2022, and was still around $6.58 in July 2026, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. It rocketed up and floated most of the way back down — but never to where it started.
Why won’t it come down? The U.S. sow herd is the smallest it’s been since 2016. Export demand stayed strong after African Swine Fever wrecked China’s hog production. California’s Prop 12 forced more space per breeding pig, and that applies to anyone who wants to sell pork there. And the middleman keeps the spread: the gross margin on turning raw belly into sliced bacon ran about $5.43 a pound in 2025 versus $4.45 in 2014. The farmer isn’t the one getting rich off your BLT.
One honest wrinkle: at the national level, bacon has actually been stable to slightly cheaper in 2026. So if a reporter says “pork is fine right now,” he’s not lying — and neither is the owner. They’re measuring different windows. The reporter is looking at this year versus last year. The owner is looking at his invoice versus what he paid before COVID. Both are true. Remember that; it matters later.
Napkins: a wood-pulp story
Napkins ride a completely different pipe: wood pulp, energy, freight — and, as of a few weeks ago, tariffs. Paper products got their first big shove during the pandemic, when demand for virgin pulp went through the roof. Then this past May, paper maker Navigator raised tissue and napkin prices another 5% to 7% on energy, logistics, raw materials, and labor.
Then came the big one. On August 22, 2026, the U.S. put 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods, including the softwood pulp American paper mills depend on. Canada hit back with a 50% duty squarely on paper towels, napkins, and raw wood pulp. That Canadian pulp is roughly half of U.S. paper-towel production and about 30% of a toilet-paper roll; U.S. mills buy about 2 million tons of it a year and have used the same suppliers for 30 years. You can’t just switch trees overnight. So every disposable in his building — napkins, to-go boxes, cups, bags — climbs together.
Why haven’t food prices come back down since the pandemic?
Here’s the single most misunderstood idea in this whole story: “inflation is cooling” does not mean prices go back down. It means they rise slower — from a permanently higher floor.
Look at how it stacked. Food inflation ran +9.9% in 2022 — the fastest since 1979 — then roughly +5% in 2023, +2.3% in 2024, and +2.9% in 2025. Each increase sits on top of the last one. A plate that cost $10.00 to make in early 2022 costs about $12.30 to make today just from food inflation. The rate slowed down. The level never reversed.
And most of the costs underneath physically can’t reverse:
- Wages are sticky. Restaurant worker pay is up 41% from pre-pandemic levels. You can give a cook a raise. You can’t take it back without losing the cook.
- Rent reset higher. Landlords pushed commercial rents up as their own property taxes and insurance surged, and a lease is locked in for years.
- Energy doesn’t refund you. Energy prices rose 15.7% over the 12 months ending June 2026, touching everything from the delivery truck’s diesel to the gas under the range.
For prices to actually fall, you’d need deflation — and deflation almost only shows up in a recession, alongside layoffs and pay cuts. So “when are prices coming back down?” has an uncomfortable answer: mostly, they don’t, unless something breaks badly enough to make everybody poorer. This owner isn’t waiting on a spike to pass. He’s living on a plateau that isn’t going to descend. That’s what “elevated since the pandemic” really means.
Why charge extra for credit cards? How it works for the owner
This one is straightforward, and I think most people get it in their gut: every time you swipe, the card network and the bank take a cut — typically somewhere in the 2% to 3.5% range. The owner has to pay it. So he passes it to the customer who chooses to use the card. At $5,000 to $10,000 a month, that’s $60,000 to $120,000 a year disappearing before he buys a single strip of bacon. The surcharge is simply a smart way to get back some of the money he’s been eating.
But there are a few nuances people miss, and they explain why this is harder than it looks:
- The rules are a patchwork. As of 2026, Connecticut and Massachusetts still ban credit card surcharging outright, while bans in states like New York, California, Texas, and Florida were struck down in court. The card networks cap the surcharge (generally around 3% to 4%), require merchants to register the program in advance, and require it to appear as a separate line item.
- It usually can’t touch debit. Most programs only apply to credit; debit cards are treated differently, which is why some owners find the setup more complicated than expected.
- Disclosure is where it breaks. A surcharge posted at the door and on the menu is a policy. A surcharge that appears for the first time on the check is a betrayal — and, as we’ll see, that’s the exact thing customers punish.
(General information, not legal advice — any owner in the 757 thinking about this should confirm Virginia’s current rules and their card processor’s requirements first.)
Are restaurant margins really that small? And should we, as customers, care?
Yes, and yes. Restaurants have some of the smallest margins of any industry in America. Full-service restaurants typically clear less than 5% net; the broad range for independents is about 3% to 6%. Before COVID a typical restaurant ran around a 5% pre-tax margin; at the 2022 cost peak, a $900,000-a-year restaurant saw pre-tax income collapse to about 1.2% of sales.
For the record, grocery stores run even thinner — about 1% to 3% — so restaurants aren’t literally last. But restaurants are thin and fragile: perishable inventory, heavy labor, almost no pricing power, and a product people cut first when money gets tight. Compare that to software at 20% to 40% or professional services at 15% to 35%, and you understand why a 4-point margin gives an owner no room to simply absorb a 36% cost increase. The National Restaurant Association’s own math says the average restaurant needed a 30%+ price increase just to keep the 5% margin it had before the pandemic — not to grow it. Just to stay where it was.
This is general knowledge now. You can pick it up watching Shark Tank. You can pick it up watching this very news hit. So yes — it should be under consideration when we sit down to eat. When things go up, the owner has almost nowhere to put it. Which brings us to the poll.
Is the poll an outlier? Are people hostile to restaurants raising prices?
I wanted to know if what I saw at the end of that video was just an angry corner of the internet. It isn’t. The national numbers say the same thing, just quieter:
- J.D. Power’s 2026 credit card study found 59% of cardholders sometimes abandon a purchase when they hit a surcharge.
- Among small businesses that surcharge, 32% say customers cancel a purchase at least some of the time.
- PYMNTS found 56% of consumers are very or extremely likely to switch merchants over surcharge fees.
- Nearly a third of consumers, 31.6%, say they avoid using their credit card entirely if a merchant surcharges.
So no, the poll isn’t an outlier. It’s just louder. Which is a perfect place to introduce our second word.
Word of the day #2: Epistemics
Epistemics is a fancy word for a simple question: how do you know what you think you know? It’s the discipline of asking where your information came from, how it was measured, and whether it actually says what you think it says.
Apply it to that poll. An online poll and a comment section over-represent the angry. The people who are fired up click; the people who’d shrug and pay 50 cents on a $14 lunch just scroll past. So the “92% against him” is real signal about intensity, but it’s not a true count of what his paying customers would do at the register. The direction is real. The size is inflated by who bothers to comment.
Now apply it to the bacon numbers from earlier. Remember — the headline says pork is stable this year, and the owner says his bacon nearly doubled. Good epistemics says: both are true, because they’re measuring different windows. That’s the whole skill. Before you get angry at a number, ask what window it’s looking through.
The comments were harsh — and that’s the real problem
A few that stood out, and what the research says about them:
“Why not raise the price of the food instead of charging a surcharge?” My honest response: what’s the difference? The money is the same. But people are upset about it, and it turns out there’s science behind why. In one survey, 54% of people said a “cash discount” felt more positive than a “credit card surcharge” even when shown the final prices were identical. Same dollars. Opposite feeling. A surcharge reads as a penalty; a discount reads as a gift.
“I’d be upset if they told me at checkout instead of before I sat down.” This one I understand more than the rest. The research agrees: it’s the surprise, not the fee. Most people don’t mind a small, disclosed fee — they abandon the purchase when it shows up unannounced at the end. Fair point. Post it at the door.
One of the few comments in the owner’s favor: “Everyone is feeling the pinch, and you can eat much more cheaply at home without a surcharge.” True on both counts, and we’ll come back to it.
Then it got rough. “Surcharges will ONLY push customers away… it not only sounds bad, IT IS BAD!!!” — “They can add a fee, but I’ll just cook at home.” — “Hard to fight inflation when you lose enough customers to shut your restaurant down.” — and the coldest one: “Please cover his closing which should happen in the next couple of months.”
And yet, right there in the same thread: “PAY CASH or the penalty with a card. I’d just pay cash for my meal. This place serves VERY good food.”
If the poll and the comments are any indication, people are not liking what this owner is doing. And in my opinion, that’s bad. We should be supporting him as much as we can.
He’s being punished for being honest
This is the thing that surprised me most after researching it. The data says the customer-friendly move is to call it a cash discount — a common practice — and people feel better about the exact same price. In other words: the numbers say the customers want him to lie to them. Don’t tell us we’re paying a surcharge; tell us we’re getting a discount.
Here’s the trap, though. If he had dressed it up as a cash discount, somebody in that same comment section would’ve said, “I see what you’re doing — you raised prices without saying so.” Somebody does a TikTok: local restaurant owner tries to get slick with his customers. According to the numbers, the owner can’t win either way.
So he told the truth. “This is hurting me, and I have to do this.” No smoke and mirrors. Either he didn’t know the data, or he didn’t care — he wanted to be straight with people. And I say good for him. It helps educate the public on what’s really going on. I just hope people actually want to be helped.
The base problem is this: the customer isn’t willing to understand things from the business owner’s perspective, but expects the business owner to understand from the customer’s perspective every time there’s a problem. That’s not a fair trade.
You’re paying for a service — and it’s a blessing and a luxury
My second-biggest point. When you go out to eat, you’re not just buying food. You’re buying a service. You didn’t want to cook, so you’re paying for everything that comes with that: the building, the employees, the equipment, the cleanup, and how much that person deserves to be compensated for doing all of it so you don’t have to.
You want food fast? That’s going to cost. You want slow, sit-down food? That’s going to cost. And if it’s really good, you bet it’s going to cost — and come with a lot of things attached to it.
We live in America, and we’re blessed to have these choices at all. Going out to eat is a luxury here, even when it doesn’t feel like one. We ought to see it as both — a blessing and a luxury — and understand how it really works before we blame the person cooking it. I think that’s what the poll is really telling us: not that the owner is wrong, but that we don’t understand what we’re looking at.
What is a ghost kitchen? (And why he’s considering one)
In the report, Prior mentioned the business has been approached about running ghost kitchens. Here’s what that is.
A ghost kitchen (also called a virtual or cloud kitchen) is a restaurant brand that only exists for delivery and pickup. No dining room, no host stand, no servers, no tables to bus. You order it on DoorDash or Uber Eats, it’s cooked in a commercial kitchen somewhere, and it shows up at your door — and you may never realize the “wing joint” and the “burger spot” you ordered from are the same kitchen.
Why it makes sense for a guy like Prior: he already owns a kitchen, the equipment, and the staff. During slow hours that expensive real estate is sitting idle. A ghost kitchen lets him run a second (or third) delivery-only brand out of the same line, using the same inventory, with none of the extra rent, front-of-house labor, or dining-room overhead. It’s the classic move when your margin is thin and your fixed costs are already paid: squeeze more revenue out of the assets you already have. Keep that idea in mind. It applies to you too.
If they have to cut back, so should we — and then make more money
Times are tougher for a lot of people, on both sides of the counter. So here’s the honest adjustment. Cutting back is the first move, and it’s a fair one: cook at home more, pay cash when there’s a surcharge, treat the sit-down dinner like the luxury it is. That commenter was right that eating at home is cheaper.
But cutting back has a floor. There’s only so much you can trim. This owner isn’t just cutting — he’s looking for ghost kitchens, bulk buying, and new revenue. He’s trying to make more money. And if the business owner has to find extra ways to bring money in, so should we.
That is the entire 757BizClick mission: get everyone an online business and an extra stream of income. Because yes — besides cutting back, what else can you do? You make more money. The most flexible way I know to do that from a kitchen table in the 757 is to build something online that runs while you’re at your day job, and I’ve been doing it for over 14 years.
If you want a place to start, the platform I use and recommend is Wealthy Affiliate. It walks you step by step through picking a niche, building a website, and earning through affiliate marketing — the same model that pays this site. Free starter account, no credit card needed to look around. If a restaurant owner with a 4% margin can go find a second stream, you and I can too.
We’re in this together
Walking into somebody’s business used to be a cozy, family-like thing. We’re losing that, and this comment section is proof. We need to know — on both sides of the register and the service line — that we’re in this together. It doesn’t always happen on both sides. After more than nine years delivering across Hampton Roads, and as a customer myself, I can tell you that firsthand.
So here’s where I land. Costs reset to a plateau that isn’t coming down. This owner’s margin is near the floor of the whole economy. He chose the honest lever instead of the slick one, and he’s catching heat for it. If you’ve got a Lankford’s in your own neighborhood — a place that’s been feeding people for decades and is now taxing itself just to keep the lights on — go eat there. Bring cash. Tip well. And understand what you’re looking at before you put down your spoon.
Then go Make Something Happen.
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