Recent Comments

Rare Society is much better located across from Loquita and more Funk Zone vibes. This is in the dead middle spot where kids love to wheelie bike and transient population loves to hang. Will be interesting to see how it does.

Charging for CC fees is odd, clunky, and feels hostile to the customer. It's an established cost of doing business that any operator should be able to anticipate and account for in a pricing model. We'd consider it absurd to charge for, say, the restroom - providing facilities is a cost of doing business and factored into the model. Why not just raise prices at a place like Rory's? I suspect the real issue is ongoing inflation of the materials and labor necessary to run a restaurant operation and Rory's not wanting to raise prices so trying to find savings elsewhere. But customers are educated. We know the environment is inflationary. And if we're really talking about 3%, who is going to complain? Why not net an additional 3% across all of your customers, instead of just covering costs for those who pay with a card. Just a weird strategy overall. You can also bet I am not going out of my way to get cash for a 3% savings. Even on a $300 bill that's all of 9 bucks that would require me to take a trip to an ATM.

Rori's, which I love….. also charges $1.00 extra on Hand Packed pints. Weird, because some flavors don’t come in pre-packed pints.

It is starting to be a new trend where many places don't take cash at all (Glen Annie for example). I know a lot of people who don't carry cash around only credit cards. Many not these credit cards have "cash back" on things like dining. So, I guess it can be a wash sometimes.

Maybe the banks should stop passing this “fee” to their customers (restaurants)? Banks make plenty of money simply banking. The fees are ridiculous.

Here’s a different perspective for you. Many restaurants are beginning to convert and add a processing fee to the final bill. This is happening to cover inflationary food costs of over 30% and it’s happening everywhere. This is a thing that is getting a lot of momentum here in town especially. If you logically look at credit cards, they are used to carry debt. As a business owner let’s say you sell $100 in food, the credit card companies take 3% on average, so that’s $3 that they’re paying because a customer wants to take on debt. Why should the business owner have to pay for someone else assuming debt. If you extrapolate the $3 over tens of thousands of dollars over the month, it’s a big number over the span of a year. The state of California recently started allowing business to tack this processing fee into the bill and recoup it from the customer. So you make the point to raise prices across the board. This just passes the processing fee costs onto everyone whether you pay cash or credit, then your customers who pay cash are covering the debt cost of the credit card users, doesn’t seem fair. Passing the credit card fee onto people who use debt as a form of payment is a fair way to allow the cash paying customers to pay the fair price as well as not gouge the business operator the debt credit fee over the span of a year.

The funding depends on the project. Some are funded by the transportation department, some local government … and may have of the trails around SB are funded by the generosity of the community and people who live here. It’s not too difficult to look online to find out where you can personally donate to support projects you want to see funded.

The one that bugs me is the new sign for El Sueño. The new one has no tilde (n instead of ñ).

Love your newsletter and the writing style—a breath of fresh air amidst the all the puffery of other online publications.

The new multi-use paths are designed for walkers, runners, ebikes (if they qualify) as well as kids on bikes, bike commuters and serious cyclists. It’s important to build the infrastructure for alternate transportation, especially as our roads become over crowded with cars and gas prices continue to rise.

I couldn't begin to tell who you might have a total accounting, as some of these are overseen by the city and others by the county. And the money comes from many sources (local, state, federal...). The theory is presumably that the more people ride bikes, the less they drive cars.