When you sit down at a restaurant, you’re often engaging in a tug-of-war with the establishment to get you to fork over more money than you originally planned. Owners employ clever little tricks to get you to up the amount of your final check.

PlantingMoneySeeds identifies a few ways restaurants try to pull fast ones on you. Wait staff are trained to aim for the upsell, coaxing you into appetizers, drinks and desserts. Menus are also designed to direct your eyes to the more expensive items, sometimes marked with “special” or “new.”

Even a detail as seemingly inconsequential as straw size can be geared to suck you dry. Alcoholic drinks are sometimes served with wider straws to get you to slurp down your expensive drinks quicker. Refillable soft drinks, meanwhile, can sport smaller straws that make you take longer to finish each glass. That’s also a reason servers will often bring you new ice-filled cups of soda rather than refilling your glass with a pitcher.

4 Tricks Restaurants Use to Make More Money [PlantingMoneySeeds]

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