Most customers will not notice and just pay this hidden fee, but that doesn’t make the practice palatable. There have to be other ways for Toast to achieve profitability.
I’m fairly okay with calling this an acceptable trade for having (by modern standards) very independent and well-funded local governments, but I still feel I should point out this’d be more or less impossible in most of the first world.
(Assuming it's a physical store frequented by consumers) every price label on every shelf shows the price including VAT.
Your EU/GB store's receipt will indeed break out the subtotal net of all VAT, the subtotal amount of VAT charged (shown broken down by different rates if that's applicable), and of course the overall total.
Note that 99.9% of EU consumers only care about the price of an item including taxes, so those prices are what consumer shops display, and are the only numbers consumers look at.
But a physical store - everything is the same price no matter who buys it. Paper towels are never cheaper or more expensive at the grocery store unless the paper towels themselves change price.
And it's not like receipts don't already divide things up - unprepared food (in MA) is untaxed, but prepared food and some other things are so grocery store receipts already divide food up into categories and indicate where the taxed items are.
If I remember I’m generally paying 20% VAT on my purchases and suddenly I’m seeing $3 of “tax and fees” on my $10 pre-VAT bill, I’ll probably know somebody’s doing something funny. If a store receipt (online or offline) is furthermore legally required to put the pre-VAT price, VAT rate, and post-VAT price for each item separately, there’s no way to sneak in a sudden $1 fee except for putting an item for SUDDEN FEE: $1 somewhere in the list. Presumably such an item would have annoyed quite a few people more quickly and efficiently than the current situation where they need to read about it in the Boston Globe, which might have made the vendor more reluctant to impose the fee to begin with.
Again, I’m not saying this situation doesn’t have its own merits, just pointing out that it only exists because there’s an opaque “tax and fees” item to sneak things into to begin with.
Different products in supermarkets also have different tax rates, most "good" food will have a 7% tax rate while it's 19% for everything else (with many exceptions).
But the pre-tax price is only shown in fine-print, you as the consumer don't need care what taxes are now on the product while shopping.
Wolt charges money from the restaurants on all orders, so a 11€ sandwich from Subway becomes 12.10€ when ordered through Wolt, then they charge you 4.99€ for delivery and then charge you 0.80€ for a "service fee". So a 11€ sandwich becomes 17.89€ with delivery and fees.
It'll depend on what they're buying. When I go to my local bar with friends and am cashing out my tab? Yeah, not noticing that. Eating dinner? Also not noticing.
Buying a $3 coffee? You bet I'm noticing an extra dollar.
My Toast purchases are pretty bimodal. Most of them are either $100+ or less than $20. Sans hyperbole, my point was that I'll notice in one mode but not the other.