Lemsta69

Yes, the soi you are referring to is called Thaniya. It's between Silom 2 and Silom 4 and is a short walk from Patpong. It is quite a nice little street, much nicer and cleaner than PP.

You're thinking of Thaniya. It's not part of Patpong but yes it is geared towards the Japanese customer. Golf shops, Izakayas, ramen joints and "snack bars" abound. Oh, and it's got a Don Don Donki.

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It's irrelevant if it's legal or not, it's what happens in practice that matters. "The law" doesn't put an invisible force-field around you when you step into the street at a zebra crossing. More fool you if you stand on principle in that situation. As for manners and politeness, I guess you must have lived in a bubble during your time in the LOS. Plenty of nasty people here for whom the politeness is a thin veneer that collapses very quickly when put to the test.

Computer tech and the taxman. Yeah right. I guess you've never looked too closely at a 7-Eleven receipt.

I first saw this in Indonesia on my first trip to Indonesia in the late 1990s. It was when we went to a "fancy" hotel in Surabaya for a bacon and egg breakfast instead of a local restaurant. That was ++. Then we went to Singapore and it was +++ FFS! Again, it was in more "fancy" places. Hawker centres etc didn't do that nonsense at that time. When I first came to Thailand in 1997 I went to places like Koh Samui, the "Koh San Road" and Pattaya and I rarely saw the ++ nonsense. That was both at local restaurants and foreign restaurants. I ate mostly at "budget" places and just assumed that the practice was exclusive to "higher end" places that I couldn't afford 😂 I don't know where the practice originated in SEA but I've always gotten the impression that it came from the American hotel industry. I've no evidence to back that up, it's just a gut feeling. Now that I have more funds than in my backpacking days I don't have to stick to "budget" restaurants. I've noticed that the ++ in Bangkok isn't limited to the fancy hotel chains, it has spread to lots of other places as you've noted. I wouldn't say that the vast majority of restaurants do this because Bangkok is a huge place and they don't do it in "normal" Thai restaurants. However it is quite common in places like Sukhumvit and Silom. I too despise the practice however there's sweet FA that I can do about it so you just have to suck it up and either pay the extra 17.7% or stick to restaurants that don't try to trick their customers.

The Thai way is to show the total price. "Plus plus" of 17.7% is a foreign concept. I don't know the history but I presume it came from the hotel industry.

It's actually higher than 17% because service charge is added to the base price and then VAT is added on top of the sub-total. The equation is x * 1.10 * 1.07 = x * 1.177. So it's closer to 18% than 17%. Took me a while to figure that out after I first got here and the numbers on the bill didn't add up.

Of course it's downloading a third-party script, that's the very purpose of the "irm" command in powershell 🤦