The Thai Restaurant Association petitioned the government to expand the "Thai Helps Thai Half-Price Plus" subsidy programme to include VAT-registered small restaurants and SMEs, arguing that using VAT registration status alone as an exclusion criterion penalizes compliant operators. They propose replacing this with composite criteria—annual revenue, firm size, and employee headcount—to ensure equitable support for grassroots businesses genuinely constrained by high operating costs and stagnant demand.