The French titre-restaurant turns 40 this year.
Like hallway lights on a timer or doorknobs that aren’t round, French people seem to take titres-restaurant as a matter of course; but they puzzle outsiders.
The titre-restaurant sprang from paternalistic reflexes. French law required employers to provide for meal arrangements for their employees. In the case of factory workers, this usually meant a canteen. Many factories and offices had canteens, but others did not. The titre-restaurant was meant to fill this cap.
The principle is simple: an employer issues an employee a titre-restaurant (I’ll call it a lunch voucher), which the employee uses to buy lunch. Restaurants and cafés and vendors accept a lunch voucher, which they redeem from a voucher issuer.
The lunch voucher system offers incentives to employers in the form of tax breaks, and to employees through a discount system, where an employee pays about 50% of the voucher’s face value.
This being France, the actual scheme is complicated, as illustrated by this charming diagram (which I’d like to call “Vouchers make the world go round”) from the national lunch voucher commission (French acronym: CNTR, here pictured as the equal of the French state):
The fortieth anniversary of the lunch voucher is more solemn than celebratory. New rules came into effect on 1 March to regulate lunch voucher use. Most of the new rules are intended to discipline an overly lax or relaxed use of the vouchers. Among the changes:
- Lunch vouchers are to be used for lunch only, not for dinner or on the weekend.
- An employee may use a lunch voucher only in the area where he works. Employees who travel are supposed to have special lunch vouchers.
- An employee is supposed to use only one lunch voucher at a time. A past tolerance for using two vouchers may be on the decline.
- An employee may now use a lunch voucher to buy fresh fruits and vegetables.
- Supermarkets and hypermarkets have reined in lunch voucher use. Henceforth, they will accept a lunch voucher only for salads (with lettuce or fruit), sandwiches, or prepared dishes (fresh, frozen, canned, or vacuum-packed); special bar codes will help police the system.
I confess to having used multiple vouchers for a weekend dinner (at which wine was served) far from home, during what was apparently an anything-goes high time for lunch vouchers. I’m not eligible for lunch vouchers today; given the glorious proliferation of rules around their use, I hardly miss this privilege.
