Charged sugar tax at restaurant.

[alggomas]

Help please:
Had a meal with friends some ordered diet coke, one ordered standard coke.
when the bill came diet coke £3.00 but standard coke was £3.50! My daughter said it was sugar tax.
I browsed online and found that coke sugar tax was 8 pence a bottle. So who gets the 42 pence!
I wrote t HNRC and they said the tax w0aps on the manufacturers, not a peoples tax. It was up to the manufacturer whether to pass this tax to the consumer.
What's happening?

[R0b]

Hello

If you are thinking of going somewhere with this i.e. compensation or complaints, I wouldn't bother. HMRC is correct in that it is a tax on the manufacturer.

There are two bands for the tax: for every 5g of sugar in 100ml there is a charge of 18p per litre and for 8g or more in 100ml the charge is 24p per litre.

It was well advertised at the time that businesses were likely to pass on the tax to consumers. Irrespective of the tax, businesses can charge whatever they like and if they wanted to charge you £6 for a bottle of coke, so be it. You don't have to accept their prices but if you do, then you have to pay up.

If you have an issue with it, then you might want to ask or check the menu before ordering.

[alggomas]

Thanks for your reply.
still a bit confused. I'm not complaining about the drinks charge for the coke. As you say they can charge chfor a bottle of coke.
Why charge 50 extra for standard coke?

[des8]

'cos they are greedy!

[R0b]

How long is a piece of string?

The answer could be a number of reasons including the sugar tax, increase in prices from the supplier, business not doing so well financially so drinks are the easiest way to bring in more revenue, inflation, staff salary increases etc.

Unless you asked the business directly why they charge £3.50 for the standard coke I guess we won't know.

[ploddertom]

Cash & Carry prices for Coke & Diet Coke used to be the same and we all used to sell at the same price. With the introduction of the sugar tax Coke is now more expensive than Diet Coke and would suggest this is the real reason for the difference you were charged. For me I sell Coke for 25p more than Diet Coke for a 500ml bottle, there is also a similar price difference on cans - unless of course the product is price marked.