Passenger Forced To Pay ‘Employee Retention Fee’ For JFK Airport Self-Checkout Machines

A traveler buying a $21.99 book at New York JFK used self-checkout but was still forced to pay an employee retention surcharge. Hudson’s Bryant Park Market in terminal 5 added the mandatory 3% fee, then sales tax on the fee. Does the machine’s employee wellness program cover maintenance on the cooling fan, or maybe paid time off to install Windows updates? The passenger bought John U. Bacon’s The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and shared the self-checkout receipt. A 3% surcharge has been applied to your purchase. This charge is for employee and retention programs and is not a gratuity. Mandatory employee fee at bookstore when I used self checkout.by u/alternativo- in EndTipping The tax on the surcharge annoyed the shopper, too. But New York calculates sales tax on the full taxable purchase price. And the surcharge is just a hidden part of the price. I’ve written about airports allowing surcharges as an end-run around their own pricing rules. The Port Authority of New York New Jersey is clear on this. Its regulation generally caps prices at 15% above comparable street prices, but expressly allows an additional employee wage and benefit fee of up to 3%. The regulation also excludes the employee fee from gross receipts under agreements where the Port Authority collects a share of concession revenue. I covered the same 3% employee benefit and retention charge at a Newark self-checkout last year. The Port Authority tells merchants to add the fee, and incentivize them to do it – moving part of the price into fees means they get to keep more of the money. Philadelphia authorized a similar 3% add-on while retaining its street price cap. There it was expressly a way to let merchants charge passengers more and circumvent the cap. Minneapolis prefers a 4.5% hospitality charge with signage explaining it wasn’t a tip and didn’t go to the people providing the hospitality. The employee fee on this book isn’t a tip, but airport machines have been demanding those, too. In Austin, I couldn’t pay for a bottle of water without entering a tip. The terminal rejected $0.00. Staff confirmed it, and the transaction only went through when I entered a penny. Earlier this year I also flagged an Austin airport self-checkout that defaulted to an 18% tip while adding a card processing surcharge. One commenter asked about the JFK airport charge, “Since I would be paying the employee retention fee, do i get a say which employees stay or go?” I’d retain the scanner, but put whomever programmed the surcharge on a performance improvement plan. Topics on this page