A Minnesota restaurant is passing along the cost of the state’s minimum wage hike to customers

Ben Brody For Cnn:

It’s pancakes with a side of politics.

A Minnesota restaurant is passing along the cost of the state’s minimum wage hike to customers, and the move has sparked outrage.

Diners at the Oasis Cafe in Stillwater, Minn., recently noticed a “MIN WAGE FEE” tacked on to the bottom of their receipts, beneath more mundane items like burgers and fries.

The increase hiked the minimum wage to as high as $8 an hour. The restaurant’s fee appears to be a response to the increase, but the owners did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

At least one diner, Jean Murra, noticed the fee on her check on August 1.

“I was shocked,” Murra wrote in an email. She said that she wouldn’t mind if the restaurant raised prices a bit, but felt that the owners put the fee on the receipt “to make a political statement.”

“We will not go back there,” she wrote. Hundreds of other commenters on the restaurant’s Facebook and Yelp pages in the past few days felt similarly. Most of the comments are negative — even unprintable — and assume that the owners added the fee as a protest against the law.

“We are coming to Minnesota next week and this was going to be a stop. No More,” one Facebook user wrote on the page.

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http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/07/news/minimum-wage-fee-diner/index.html?sr=fb080814minimumwagefee10aVODtopLInk