So. These additional charges are bullshit.

The thing is, restaurants incur expenses all the time. It’s the price of running a business in a civilization: we demand that eating places follow worker safety and food safety guidelines, for instance, so nobody gets hurt. We demand that they follow labor standards because we don’t want children to work when they should be in school.

And we insist that businesses follow certain standards that we agree on as a community. These standards can and do change over time. Seattle voted to eliminate smoking in restaurants, for instance, because it was a public health concern. Believe it or not, some bar owners argued against the smoking ban because they thought it would hurt their business, but we had to proceed with the ban despite the cries of a few regressive voices.

So picture a hypothetical situation for a moment: Based on a regulation from the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, a restaurant with a steep staircase leading to its front door is required to add a ramp to its entrance. Now imagine that business added an “ADA surcharge” to the bottom of its checks, along with a passive-aggressive note explaining that the fee is to pay for the installation of the ramp.

Customers would understandably lose their minds. There would be a very real, very loud—and very deserved—furor over the owner’s business decision. Instead of the above example, you can imagine any number of moronic surcharges added to a bill: the Water Sprinkler Installation Surcharge, the Compost Handling Fee, the Indoor Plumbing Charge. And that’s what is happening here.

Look: businesses raise their fees all the time. It’s why hamburgers don’t cost 15 cents anymore. They never advertise these increases—you don’t see signs on the front of a pancake house advertising “NOW WITH 1.7% HIGHER PRICES!”—but they happen on a regular basis.

Rather than just raising prices naturally, these restaurant managers are making an overtly political statement when they add minimum wage surcharges to their menus. They are protesting the fact that they have to pay their workers a living wage. As Working Washington pointed out on Twitter, the Garage’s owner donated $500 toward an attempt to repeal the $15 minimum wage, which would pay the surcharge on over $25,000 worth of food at the Garage.

(As an aside: it’s interesting that restaurants are the only business that feels as though they can get away with this kind of fee structure — you don’t see minimum-wage retailers adding a baseline to the bottom of your checks, for instance. I’m not sure exactly why this is; perhaps tipping culture makes owners feel more emboldened to get away with this kind of action?)

Whether they intend to or not when they put those itemized fees on menus, managers and owners are publicly stating that they don’t believe their workers are worth the minimum wage that they pay them. I have a hard time imagining what other purpose the public announcement of these charges could be, other than to turn the public against the minimum wage.