Three euros extra
After a price explosion: a restaurateur pulls the ripcord and now charges admission to his restaurant
If you want to dine in Horst Ingendorn’s restaurant, you first have to pay a flat rate of three euros – a kind of entrance fee. (icon picture)
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Anyone who currently runs a restaurant must be good at math. Operating costs are through the roof. In order to absorb the additional costs, a restaurateur is now charging his customers an entrance fee.
Life has become expensive and is becoming more and more expensive. In March, the inflation rate climbed to 7.3 percent. Higher than it has been for four decades. Every grocery purchase is a slap in the office. Tomatoes are now being offered for sale at exorbitant prices, and some cooking oil has even become scarce. Added to this are the rising energy costs. The restaurateurs, who would have to make their offer more expensive to compensate for the additional costs, are also feeling this. But instead of increasing the prices for the individual dishes, a restaurant owner from North Rhine-Westphalia is now using a rather unusual strategy: If you want to eat in his restaurant, you have to pay admission.
He says he would have preferred to avoid raising prices, but he had no other choice. “Because I’m constantly shopping and ordering, I’m close to the prices and I’m noticing how it’s increasing every day,” Horst Ingendorn told “WDR”. He calculates that the prices for vegetables have risen by 30 percent, meat by up to 50 percent and frying fat by over 100 percent. Not to mention the energy prices – plus 2000 percent. “And then at some point I pulled the ripcord and said we have to do something now,” says the restaurateur. But because he didn’t want to change the card, he opted for the all-inclusive surcharge model. For almost four weeks, all guests who want to eat there have had to pay an extra flat rate of three euros, children excluded.
Entrance fees for restaurant: Guests show understanding
An unusual decision. “The phenomenon of someone taking an entrance fee is actually the first time I’ve heard that,” said Thorsten Hellwig, spokesman for the German Hotel and Restaurant Association (Dehoga), the broadcaster. You know that in clubs and discotheques, possibly also from abroad, but he has never heard anything like it in this country. Hellwig also does not assume that the attempt by the Ratingen restaurateur will draw wider circles, that other restaurateurs will follow suit across the board.
The coming weeks will show whether Ingendorn had the right instinct with his idea or whether he still has to change the prices on the menu. In any case, according to his own statement, he does not make a profit with the flat rate. He describes the additional three euros more as damage limitation, refers to the hard Corona months and staff that had to be brought back at great expense. He tries to keep the prices as moderate as possible so that people don’t take the joy out of going out. So far, he says, the guests have shown understanding for the measure: “I think that this openness or honesty in conveying it that way is actually quite good.”
