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Food

This Restaurant Charged Its Customers for the Air They Were Breathing

A restaurant in the Jiangsu Province of China has been criticised after charging its customers one yuan ($0.15 or 10p) each to cover the cost of purifying the building’s air.
Phoebe Hurst
London, GB
Photo via Flickr user Lea Latumahina

Eating out can be expensive. As well as whatever Bolivian-tapas-fusion-cuisine you're paying for the momentary pleasure of putting in your mouth, there's corkage, the bread bowl you filled up on within ten minutes of being seated, sparkling water for the table—and that's before you've even decided how much to tip your kinda unremarkable waiter.

While some of those unexpected extras are pretty fair (that waiter did manage not to sneer when you asked for gluten free gnocchi, after all), even the most profit margin-obsessed budget eatery wouldn't charge its diners for the air they breathe, right?

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Wrong. Get ready to reevaluate your opinion of stingy business owners: a restaurant in eastern China is being slammed after charging patrons an "air cleaning fee."

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According to Chinese news agency Xinhua, a restaurant in Zhangjiagang city in the country's Jiangsu Province charged its customers one yuan ($0.15 or 10p) each to cover the cost of purifying the air inside the building.

As the BBC reports, the restaurant installed an air filtration system after the region was enveloped in high levels of smog that saw some areas experience visibility of less than 100 metres. The owners attempted to pass on some of this cost to their oblivious, filtered air-huffing customers.

After complaints from a number of angry patrons—including one who posted a photo of his restaurant bill to Chinese social media site Weibo saying "they definitely should have asked us first whether we wanted to pay the one yuan per-person clean air fee—it's pretty hard to return that at the end of a meal!"—the local government intervened, informing the restaurant that the practice constituted an illegal charge. A city official explained to Xinhua that because it wasn't the diners' choice to breathe filtered air, it could not be sold as a commodity.

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Fair enough. It's pretty hard to enjoy a spaghetti carbonara while holding your breath—or do anything, for that matter.

But as an increasing number of Jiangsu Province homes and businesses install air purifiers in an attempt to tackle the region's extreme smog problem, some social media users have supported the restaurant's filtration charge. Also reported by the BBC, one Weibo user wrote "I'd agree to the fee!" while another suggested that the government should step in with similar practices as a way to establish better air purification levels.

If Chinese restaurant customers can get down with paying for the pleasure of breathing, let's hope this doesn't open the door to other establishments charging diners for innate bodily functions: blinking, sneezing, scratching …

That could be an expensive meal out.