Does anybody care about public holiday surcharges?

Other than run things here at 3Bit, I also own Tuihana Cafe with my better half Leslie.  It seems pertinent to do a blog post now about public holiday surcharges since Easter has just been, and Anzac Day is a couple days away.

As a punter, I don’t like any surcharges, and a quick search of Twitter seems I’m not alone:

I just don't understand cafe surcharges. Just at Rosie in Parnell and the place is full. Is that not enough? #surcharge #Auckland
— Aidan Cunningham (@aidocunn) April 17, 2014

The bottom line is that being open on a public holiday is more expensive.  All your staff that are working on one of their normal days not only get time and a half but also a day in lieu (if it’s not one of the days they normally work, they don’t get the day in lieu).  The decision for a business owner is whether to pass this directly onto customers through a surcharge.

At Tuihana Cafe we don’t.  While I haven’t done any hard research to see if this resonates well with our customers, a quick look at the Google Analytics for our website, it seems it is a popular search term on a public holiday:

We experienced five times our normal traffic volumes on Good Friday (Apr 18), with another slight increase on Easter Sunday – Sunday isn’t a public holiday, however most people think it is (the actual holiday is the Monday).

The biggest referrer of traffic to our cafe website over the weekend? No Surcharge, a site that lists all the businesses that are surcharge free on public holidays.

It seems the cafes in nearby Kingsland have already got the message:

Almost every cafe in Kingsland has "No Surcharge" in their window today. A victory for the free market?
— JeremyGreenbrookHeld (@JGreenbrookHeld) April 21, 2014

From a tech perspective it does seem that having no surcharge is a big drawcard for customers.

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