Saturday, April 18, 2015

Unintended free publicity and collateral damage from GST


Grand Imperial Restaurant gets free publicity from this notice to their customers, as a result of it being shared all over the internet. But judging from comments in social network sites, most are unfavourable, most of them described it as arrogant and should be boycotted.

But we had been charged service tax at 10% for more than 30 years, despite it not sanctioned by law! Now, the public seems unwilling to pay such arbitrary service charge after it was highlighted as a result of GST, which is going to affect management and employees. The public would not know what happened to the service charges collected for all these years: ranging from some collecting under the name of employees but not distributing to them at all, to different sharing percentages between employer and employees under collective agreements.

The Malay Mail reported on it:
http://m.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/no-service-charge-no-service

My comment in Facebook:

This notice appears to be from an arrogant management, but basically, it is just informing the public that they have a choice whether to patronise the place. Like other similar establishments, they had been charging ST at the same rate without problem for years. GST caused this service charge to be an issue with customers. Before this, we seemed oblivious and acceptable to this 10% service charge (not required by law like GST) imposed by expensive restaurants and fast food outlets, for over 30 years! With the public outcry, minister softened it by declaring it as optional (unless there are collective agreements between management and staff) which in turn created ugly scenes at restaurants. Now it is back to the drawing board to come out with something acceptable.
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