Re: FN-FORUM: Charging for payments

date posted 9th January 2006 14:29

On Mon, Jan 09, 2006 at 02:52:34PM -0000, Richard Quick wrote:
>
> I can't think of a single national retailer that charges individual
> customers more for credit cards. What they do instead is build
> credit card costs into their overall pricing.
>
> Tesco, M&S etc are merely pointing out that some of your bill will go
> to their credit card arm - it doesn't cost you extra.

For this scam to work they had to get your agreement to 'buy' a financial
service from them. 'pointing out' was not good enough - since the decision
on how they spent the money of the sale is up to them but they would
still need to pay VAT on the full amount.

It is basically a con, fraud, a VAT scam.

> It's not illegal to charge more for credit cards, but it's probably
> not good business sense. My local chippy accepts credit cards, but
> there's a 40p surcharge. Personally speaking I'd be outraged it
> Tesco did this, but I don't mind a small business doing it.

I don't mind a surcharge if I choose to use a CC on a small transaction,
on a large one ( > 10 quid) I would expect anyone to absorb the cost.

--
Alain Williams
Parliament Hill Computers Ltd.
Linux Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256 http://www.phcomp.co.uk/

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