I don’t know if the rules are different in Canada, but this whole credit card surcharge business is pretty alien to me. With the exception of a cluster of computer parts stores that I consider rather sketchy and who’ve been doing this for years even when it was clearly a violation of the merchant agreement, I’ve never encountered a business that applied a credit card surcharge (or “cash discount” which is the same thing). I once asked my mechanic, who was also the owner of his own repair shop, if he preferred I pay by debit instead of credit. He said he didn’t care. And IIRC it was a rather large amount, like $800.
Several posters mentioned surcharges when buying gas. For me it’s actually the opposite. When using a certain premium credit card in conjunction with a particular reward card, some gas stations whose brands have signed up for the deal will apply a small per-liter discount. It’s actually a good way to promote business.
Maybe this surcharge stuff is a curse that will spread to Canada, but I really haven’t seen it. My understanding is that the credit card issuers have always been keen on promoting the idea of credit cards being exactly like cash.
Because he’s a storefront as most cleaners are. Running an actual cleaning plant is expensive in states with strong environmental laws and enforcement.
The plant gets laundry from many storefronts and they are tracked by the labels attached to the clothes. My shirts don’t go the the plant with a label that says “Mighty Mouse, Light Starch” it goes with a label that says “194-6635”
He has to enter the orders into the system to generate the tracking tabs to put on the garments. That’s how the plant keeps track of which store and which customer order a garment belongs to, and what to charge the storefront operator.
In the example I’m aware of the plant is in a much poorer locale. The storefront is in a very affluent area. That’s where the customers are. If he does ANY cleaning on location he’s probably in violation of his lease.
my bad, I should have said robbery, not theft; of course, the downside of no-cash is that the robbers will be mad/frustrated and take it out on the clerk
I remember back in the day (1980’s) there were gas stations that offered cheaper gas for cash. To get around the merchant agreement, they had the one set of pumps for anything, and another set of “cash-only” pumps. I suppose that arrangement did not violate the terms, because you could not buy gas from those pumps with a credit card.
(and at one gas station, I bought gas with a credit card, and instead of checking my card number against this big thick book, or dialing for verbal authorization, they had a nifty new gizmo where they swiped the card, it dialed a number made some funny noises, and got the data authorization over the phone line. First time I saw that.)
You can always imagine a downside once you get in the habit of assuming violent crooks are everywhere.
Lotta signs on storefronts: “No cash, card only.” That’s there to notify both customers and would-be robbers. Heck, most grocery stores have signs at the door “Management cannot open safe”. And we don’t commonly hear of robbers showing up, then discovering they can’t get the cash, so the shoot the staff.
It’s one of those ideas that’s very easy to think of yet very, very rarely happens as a percentage of attempted store robberies. And it’s an even smaller percentage of the far greater number of robbery attempts that don’t even happen because the would-be robber is smart enough to read the sign and go elsewhere.
I usually pay cash when buying something from the small, locally-owned businesses around here, simply because I don’t want them being hit with a CC fee. And they appreciate it when I do this.
That’s all very business specific. At my store, the only person counting and double checking the cash is me. At most small businesses it’s just one person. We also don’t use an armored truck, we use my, very unarmored, car. At many banks there’s some type of fee for depositing cash (and buying change) while other banks, like the one we’re currently at, there isn’t. We do have insurance coverage based on the amount of cash we keep on hand, but we’re not Kroger or Best Buy, we don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars on hand so it’s not some huge premium.
Interestingly, something I’ve heard from time to time is that one of the reasons big box stores offer you the option to get cash back on your debit card is because it’s a good way for them to get rid of some of their cash without having to transport it to and deposit it into the bank and pay whatever fees are associated with all of that.
Now, what was expensive was checks. The bank charged something like 50¢ to deposit each one, but the real expense was bounced checks. If someone bounces a $100 check, between the check and the $25 fee we’d pay, that $125 of lost revenue makes for a pretty significant cost if we couldn’t recover it. And, more often than not, even when we did recover it, it took a lot of legwork on our part to get the person to actually bring us the money. Between the phone calls, the registered mail, getting the police involved when it came to that etc. It’s why we stopped taking them.
We did use Telecheck for a while, but that was really expensive and came with it’s own set of problems.
Twice in the last week I was at different restaurants that had on the receipt something like, “the 3% credit card surcharge is no more than the credit card processing fee we pay.” For some psychological reason I find that much less offensive than the “cost adjustment surcharge” some restaurants have been doing for awhile; just raise your prices.
One of the places also had, “100% of tips go to hourly employees. The owners and managers do not keep any of the tipped amount.”
All of that is printed on the receipts, so it must be true.
As I understand, some states (California?) make that the law. There’s a tricky problem when the manager is also working the front line - some rule like they are entitled to a per-hour share of the tip jar for how long they worked the front line, but not for manager duties.
My wife managed a mid-scale restaurant a (long) while back. Canada does not make a business track the servers’ tips or report them on income statements. (It’s an honor system for the servers to report to Revenue Canada, for various definitions of “honor”). As a result, they had a “tip pool” method of each server putting a portion of their tip into a pool for the kitchen staff. However, she made sure one of the (more mature) servers ran that, because if the management was in charge of the pool and distributing money to the staff it could be considered wages and need reporting. This way, it was all outside of managment’s control.
(The pool was 2% of total bill, also honor system, so the server still got to keep most of big tips, and there was no incentive to lie about tips. My wife did occasionally comp stuff on the bill to create a tip when there was a big bill and a miserly tip. Some of the servers made more than she did.)
If you say so, at any business except a sole proprietor I worked at there was always two people counting the cash- D.Daltons, Borders, several hobby stores, etc. But sure if there is a sole owner, they can count all by themselves.
But yeah, not every business needs an armored car service, but still, not matter how small your business is- if you have employees, there is always a risk of them stealing cash- often by not ringing up a cash sale.
It very likely is more, they likely pay no more than 2%.
In California that is the law, iirc. and perhaps other states.
Re the percentage that fees represent, remember that there’s typically (though not always) a flat transaction fee plus a percentage. So if your average sale is $5 and the transaction fee is 50 cents, it’s a lot more than 3%. You can do the math. This is why businesses like Starbucks typically have a different fee structure, like a flat percentage, with little or no fraud protection to make the issuers happier. A bodega is less likely to get such a deal, but also has lots of small transactions, so the fees HURT.
I had some trouble at an LIRR ticket machine. I’d bought tickets using my dollar-denominated Wise card in Jamaica, but all three were rejected at the station I was at. No ATM’s around. I spent all my USA cash on the last trip. So I get on board. Conductor comes by, “I have three cards, all of which were rejected by the machine. These two are both dollar and pound-denominated; this one just pounds…” Enough said, he silently & wisely draws the Wise card and swipes it (my only swipes in the last 12 years have been in the USA) and I get my ticket (and nice of him not to charge the on-board ticket charge). use the chip on the Air Train and get to JFK.
ETA: Not a surprise that there’s a “convenience fee” attached to technology that costs them less to use than chip+pin. (ETA: Or I read that wrong if using mag stripes is the extra fee. They should have been long gone when America was being made better). Same as when dial phones were around. The upkeep of those analog devices was much higher than DTMF (push button). Yet till the dials were gone, the higher price was push button.
Chip&PIN v swipe is irrelevant, the convenience fee is to cover the bank charge for card transactions. I don’t know the exact figures, but my understanding is that the progression (smallest to largest) is Debit → Credit (MC/VISA) → AMEX.
I knew the owners of a pub, and they explained why they’d not accept AMEX: The fees were very high (like $5, 30 years ago, compared to a $1 or $2 for the others).
And companies were not allowed to charge for using a card, yet they got around that by giving discounts for cash. Maybe they still do that - I’ve only had a couple weeks back in the USA and didn’t sense any grief over using a card (except feeling like a moron when I was trying to find a spot on an old machine where to tap, only to be told I needed to swipe it. “swipe” - that’s a word I remember, oh yeah, “mag swipe”, I didn’t look at my receipt for a “swipe fee” any more than tapping my card (up to £100 no PIN required).
So look out for the “convenience tap” charge.
In the UK, I only handle the plastic money with pictures of the (ex) Queen for haircuts. I suspect, yet am not asking, that it has to do with taxes.
It’s good to have some plastic bills on hand. I only carry my credit cards with me when going out (except for a haircut).
There is no “swipe fee.” Some merchants of small independent businesses will include a credit card processing fee. You’re still paying that fee even if you tap with your phone. But you’ll only encounter it at small bodegas and the like. Not major retailers.
When I moved to Ireland in 2005, their cards had chips. My Chase card did not. Before self-check-out, so always people behind me. I’d turn to people behind me and say, “Using my credit card will take a while,” and being always merry folk, they had no issue with waiting. I had no choice. Here closing time is 11 PM. There are mainly 7, perhaps 8, for the Tesco (this is well outside Dublin)
As they are cheery folk, I didn’t hear “Fucking Americans, can’t have a chip on major credit cards”. I said it to myself and dreaded the inevitable time to pay for my stuff (I’d tell the cashier we’ll need a manager right off). I believe he either did some manager magic with the register or perhaps had an antique mag swipe reader (cashiers no longer did)
I got a consulting job, directly across the street from a Bank of Ireland, where the VP and my CEO were on a first-name basis, and my company was their largest customer. I cheerfully apply for a card.
Till I got a Bank of Ireland card their KYC (know your customer) is
You probably are who you say you are, and look like the person on your Irish Passport
We’re unsure if you are a money launderer
What do you plan to do with this money?
You say you work for the company across the street?
Denied
I had to go to the CEO and use his mighty pull to get an interview with the VP at BOI. Along with a signed document from him of all of the above, except no idea if he’s a money launderer. I must have looked honest enough not to be a money launderer.
So I got a card with a “big boy’s” chip on it.
2 years later in the UK, everything above was almost entirely repeated. Except I could pay with my BOI card, yet lost on the conversion from Euros to pounds. Letter from CEO. Letter from my landlord and NatWest stamped “Not a money launderer” on my head
AmEx dropped their fees a decade or so ago. I think they’re still on the high side but more competitive. Places like Trader Joe’s started taking amex as a result.
It’s interesting how long they got away with their higher fees: as both the brand and the issuer, you’d think their costs would be lower. Otoh as the issuer they get to deal with fraud, so maybe their net costs really are higher.