(NEXSTAR) – In case your $20 salad and $15 cocktail weren’t expensive enough, your restaurant tab might have a few more line items tacked on. Diners are more frequently encountering service charges, a fee added to their bill that doesn’t always count as tip.

Sometimes it’s called a “living wage” charge or “kitchen fee,” and is used to better pay back-of-house staff like cooks and dishwashers. Other times it’s a fee the restaurant says it uses to cover employees’ health care. Sometimes it’s a mandatory minimum gratuity that gets split by all restaurant employees.

For many restaurants, service charges started as a way to cover the sudden added costs of operating during the pandemic, such as purchasing PPE and setting up new safe workspaces, explained Denise Mickelsen, communication director at the Colorado Restaurant Association and Foundation. But even if the era of social distancing is basically over, running a restaurant hasn’t gotten cheaper, she said.

“The restaurant industry continues to face a widespread labor shortage and ever-increasing costs that make it nearly impossible to operate profitably,” Mickelsen said. She cited a National Restaurant Association survey that found more than half of restaurants in Colorado believed 2023 would be a less profitable year than 2022 — “and that’s scary for an industry that hopes for 3% to 5% profit margins in a good year.”

Services charges are often disclosed somewhere on the menu, but many diners look over the fine print, only to feel caught off guard when the check comes. Why not just include these added costs to the prices on the menu? It turns out diners don’t really like that either.

Over the past few years, several high-profile and trendy restaurants have tried to switch to an “it’s all included” menu pricing model. No service charges, no tip — just the price you see on the menu. But many of those businesses have switched back.

“There is just a psychological subconscious approach when guests look at your menu prices, whether they’re shopping around for where to eat online or just seeing the menu that we post in the window,” said David Stockwell, co-owner of the New York restaurant Faun, in an interview on a CNN podcast with Audie Cornish.

“Yes, that entree is $32 but we’re not asking you for a tip at the end of the night, so it’s not actually outside of the local market for this kind of ambitious restaurant,” he continued. “We’re asking them to process that information. Some do, some don’t … but as a restaurant you need all of them to come into the door, not half of them. So you’re losing some people that just wouldn’t come in because $32 entrees may be outside of when they think of when they want to go out to eat.”

Diners aren’t the only ones who get upset with no-tipping policies. Some servers don’t like it either, and they might leave to work in another restaurant where their tips could be larger, and where they won’t be forced to share them.

That leaves restaurants in a tight spot: How do they pay their workers enough to keep them, but not raise prices so much that diners don’t want to come in?

Enter service charges.

“Restaurants have been increasing menu prices to offset skyrocketing operational costs, but they can only do that so often and by so much before guests complain. We’ve seen spending in restaurants remain relatively flat over the past year, which doesn’t help operators recoup the revenue losses and debt they’ve incurred since 2020,” Mickelsen said.

Without major changes in our economy, Mickelsen predicted service charges are here to stay. If the fees leave a bad taste in your mouth, she asks customers to consider this:

“Restaurants are not money-makers and the people who run them are doing so because they love to serve and care about hospitality. When guests see a service charge on their bill, they should know that the cost of doing business right now is higher than ever before and those service charges are a means of staying in business.”