It’s bad enough that I now pay 60 cents for a slice of cheese at local McDonald’s, reports are now surfacing of customers being charged for ketchup packets. According to DNAinfo.com, several McDonald’s locations in Manhattan are charging a ketchup fee. Out of 35 McDonald’s south of Central Park, at least 15 were charging for extra packets.

“We want to control condiment cost,” Rocio Vazquez, manager of a McDonald’s at East 14th Street and First Avenue in the East Village, who has been implementing a ketchup fee since 2011, told DNAInfo, explaining she saw too many unopened packets end up in the trash. “Why should I be wasting money on that?”

Vazquez explained customers get between one and four ketchup packets with their meals, depending on the size of the orders. Any additional packets cost 25 cents per “handful.”

A McDonald’s spokesperson at the chain’s corporate headquarters in Chicago explained that since most of its 14,000 locations in the US are run by private owners, they are allowed to handle condiment requests in whatever manner they see fit. Some dispense ketchup in dispensers in front or behind the service counters, while others hand out individual packets. They can choose to assess fees for extra condiments as they like. But, she said, while most McDonald’s restaurant charge extra for containers of barbecue and honey mustard, she never heard of one charging extra for ketchup.

In DNAInfo’s assessments of 40 McDonald’s locations in New York’s outer boroughs, including Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island, it found no ketchup fees. Interestingly, however, the Manhattan locations pay the same price for ketchup packets as other New York City restaurants. They are all supplied by the Martin-Brower Company from upstate New York and all pay $21.68 for a case of 1,500 packets—just less than 1.5 cents per packet.

So ketchup costs McDonald’s 1.5 cents per pack, but the customer is paying a quarter? Does that extra “handful” consist of 16 packets? Doubtful, and if not, McDonald’s isn’t covering its ketchup costs, it’s profiting from customers’ condiment requests.

The ketchup fees aren’t isolated to New York, either. In 2011 a New Jersey McDonald’s patron complained about the practice on PissedConsumer.com. The customer said a New Jersey McDonald’s wanted to charge 60 cents apiece for additional packets. When the customer refused to pay $1.80 for three extra ketchup packets, he received a bag with no ketchup at all.

Likewise, in a 2010 post on a forum for Escapist Magazine, a McDonald’s customer revealed he was charged 15 cents each for ketchup.

“I told her, and subsequently, McDonalds, to go suck a fat one, I’ve got my own ketchup at home,” the customer wrote, although he didn’t state the location of the McDonald’s.