Are shops allowed to add a fee for paying by credit card instead of cash?
The merchant is not getting robbed: the merchant may simply decide not to take Visa, or Mastercard, or whatever. The merchant is paying a fee for the added business they get by accepting the card that they would not get otherwise. If the merchant would get the same business regardless… they wouldn’t need to accept the card. There’s no “victim” here. It’s a business decision. The merchant has decided that processing Visa or Mastercard or whatever is worth the fees. If, as in the OP’s example, it’s only worth it if they charge a premium, then they’re calculating that they will lose less business this way than by simply stopping support for the card. I know that I have aborted a purchase at the last moment because the store did not take the card I wished to use. But I have also said “What? Oh, no thanks then.” at the register when an extra fee was added. So they’re all cost-benefit decisions. There are probably consumer protection laws about hiding the fee from you, of course.
As has been covered, it’s against their agreement with the credit card company. However, for tiny little mom-and-pops like the ancient bodega in my old neighborhood, I don’t mind. I considered the fee they charged a convenience fee for not having to go get cash out of a machine. I wasn’t going to shoot myself in the foot and have the extremely close store with the delicious Lebanese food no longer take credit cards and have to continually scrounge up cash to use there. As for vito90: Land sakes! In this day and age siding with the credit card company over your local merchant. You must have rooted for the lions over the Christians in a previous life. I would root for the lions now, too.
I believe I have also seen on Consumerist that it goes against their agreements to post a sign that says “no credit cards for orders below x amount.” I’ve had one pizza place try to pull this on my friend when I was with her and I told them it goes against their merchant agreement, and they let us pay with a card. It was a pretty high amount – like $35 – and just 2 of us eating would never be able to spend that much at that restaurant. My favorite Chinese restaurant, where I’ve been going for so long that I can walk in the door and they can serve me without asking for my order, has a sign to this effect. I once had to put an amount less than the minimum on a credit card and they never said a word. I guess it pays to be a regular and a generous tipper (since it is my favorite place). Consumerist definitely has a lot of posts on this issue, including the “cash discount” especially taking place at gas stations.
I simply refuse to do business with businesses that charge a fee for me to use my credit/debit card. Same goes for businesses that have a “minimum charge amount” fee. Why? It’s bad for business. It’s never good to alienate and/or abuse your customer base. If you as a business owner decide to accept credit/debit cards, you also agree to accept the terms laid out by the companies for those cards. It seems a good number of merchants think it is totally acceptable to violate the TOS of their agreements with the CC companies. So they go ahead and charge their fees. But they want it both ways – lots of customers (many with credit/debit cards) plus no responsibility to pay for the service they are getting from the CC companies. They’re effectively passing the “cost of doing business” on to the customer, which, in this case, is explicitly forbidden (though, admittedly, laxly enforced) by the CC companies. Again, bad business. If businesses aren’t interested in paying the CC companie processing
