Attorney General Brenna Bird announced today she is suing Toast, a popular restaurant management and software company, for deceptive and fraudulent practices that hurt Iowa small business restaurants.
“Small business restaurants in Iowa expected support from Toast for everything from online ordering to marketing because that’s what they were promised,” said Attorney General Bird. “Instead, they got lies, deception, unexplained fees, and no customer support. Toast needs to be held accountable, and Iowa small businesses need to be made whole.”
Toast markets and sells point-of-sale hardware, software, and payment processing services to small businesses in the restaurant industry. Toast sells its software as a subscription service which renews automatically and charges consumers on a recurring basis. Toast also markets and sells financing products, called Toast Capital Loans, to existing Toast customers.
Toast has used false claims to convince businesses to enroll in its subscription services. Specifically, Toast promises that Toast customers pay “$0” for Toast products under certain pricing plans and that Toast provides customer support “24/7/365.” However, none of Toast’s hardware is $0, and Toast customers frequently claim that they cannot get customer support at all, at any hour of the day.
Additionally, Toast has failed to provide a simple method for customers to cancel their subscription services, instead imposing a series of difficult hurdles, which keep customers from stopping recurring charges. Even when customers have managed to navigate Toast’s difficult cancellation process and canceled their accounts, in many instances, Toast has hit them with unexpected high dollar “early termination fees” or continued to charge them for subscription services without their consent. Toast has also hidden order processing fees from restaurants and their customers.
Thousands of people have complained about these issues to the FTC, online, and directly to Toast.
Read the full complaint here.
