A local diner recently walked into Uni Pizza on Polk Street — between Bush and Sutter — placed a to-go order, and discovered a "to go box fee" tacked onto the bill. Let that sink in. A to-go order… with a fee… for the container that makes the to-go order possible. What's next — a "plate rental fee" for dine-in? A "napkin access surcharge"? A "door opening convenience charge"?

To their credit, the customer pushed back, pointing out the blindingly obvious: if you're ordering food to go, the box is part of the deal. The restaurant removed the fee. But the fact that it was there at all tells you everything you need to know about the state of dining costs in this city.

Look, we get it. Running a restaurant in San Francisco is brutally expensive. Between sky-high commercial rents, the city's mandatory health surcharges, and a regulatory environment that treats small business owners like ATMs, margins are razor-thin. We've written about this before — the cost of doing business here is punishing, and someone always ends up paying for it.

But the answer isn't death by a thousand junk fees. Customers aren't stupid. They notice when a $15 pizza quietly becomes $18.50 after the surcharge, the service fee, the SF mandate fee, and now apparently the box fee. If your costs are higher, raise your prices transparently. People respect honesty. They do not respect feeling like they're being scammed at checkout.

This is a microcosm of a bigger problem in San Francisco's economy: instead of addressing the root causes that make everything expensive — the taxes, the regulations, the bureaucratic overhead — businesses and the city alike just keep layering on opaque fees and hoping nobody reads the receipt.

We're reading the receipt. And so are your customers.