Why would you let a POS company charge your customers $0.99 to place an order with your restaurant?

 

The POS Giant Toast is charging their customer's online customers a $0.99 fee without asking and keeping all the money.

This is what happens when you buy a system from a payment processor promising you the world and not charging you very much. In this case they are charging their restaurant clients customers a fee on online orders. Not only that they are keeping the fee for themselves to "Provide affordable digital ordering services for local restaurants" This is madness and this practice is making restaurant owners mad all right. I'm sure they are hearing from their customers and in fact probably losing customers. 

Is this in the Restaurant End User License Agreement? Who owns the customer, Toast or the restaurant?

You have to ask yourself how is this legal? I think the simple explanation is because the restaurant owner probably agreed to it when they signed up for the Toast service. How else could Toast get away with this? Also if the restaurant is in a State that requires sales tax on mandatory service fees (most states that charge sales tax do) than the customer has to pay the sales tax, the restaurant has to collect sale tax on money they didn't receive and remit that to the state while paying the credit card discount on that sales tax. For the restaurant owner this is a lose lose lose deal! For toast it's a win win as they are making a dollar per transaction and they have no skin in the game. 

Will this slow toast down?

I think the months to come will show if this move was a winner or not. If Toast sales start slowing down it will be easy to point to this move as the cause. If their sales don't slow down what does that say about the restaurant owners?  Easy fix is don't buy or use a system that locks you down with credit card processing. If you can't use any processor you want, don't buy it!