Yeah, I’d say the same about any “fees” that get tacked on above any advertised prices. The only time it shouldn’t be included in an advertised price is when it doesn’t scale with number of things purchased. So a % fee would always be included, but flat fees can be separated (like if they had a table charge or something that didn’t change based on how much food was ordered).
Online shop “convenience” fees are at the top of my mind for this. Especially because there’s even more convenience on the merchant’s side due to how websites scale vs brick and mortar shops. They might have to pay large salaries to developers and IT people (emphasis on “might”), but that’ll be much less than the leases and staffing costs to open physical stores to serve the same size of market.
Agreed. The only fee I can swallow is mom-and-pop stores and governments charging a small fee for credit card processing.
In the government’s case, law only provides for them to charge $X and they must gather $X. They can’t make up for the provider fees. Legislation should roll that into consideration moving forward.
Or even better, create a public payment infrastructure that isn’t predatory to both merchants and consumers. Finance being a private industry instead of a public service is a part of the problem.
But I agree that that is an example of a good use of fees. “Oh, if you do this thing, it costs more money to service you, so rather than pricing it in for everyone regardless of whether they do it, just charge the difference when it is done.”
Yeah, I’d say the same about any “fees” that get tacked on above any advertised prices. The only time it shouldn’t be included in an advertised price is when it doesn’t scale with number of things purchased. So a % fee would always be included, but flat fees can be separated (like if they had a table charge or something that didn’t change based on how much food was ordered).
Online shop “convenience” fees are at the top of my mind for this. Especially because there’s even more convenience on the merchant’s side due to how websites scale vs brick and mortar shops. They might have to pay large salaries to developers and IT people (emphasis on “might”), but that’ll be much less than the leases and staffing costs to open physical stores to serve the same size of market.
Agreed. The only fee I can swallow is mom-and-pop stores and governments charging a small fee for credit card processing.
In the government’s case, law only provides for them to charge $X and they must gather $X. They can’t make up for the provider fees. Legislation should roll that into consideration moving forward.
Or even better, create a public payment infrastructure that isn’t predatory to both merchants and consumers. Finance being a private industry instead of a public service is a part of the problem.
But I agree that that is an example of a good use of fees. “Oh, if you do this thing, it costs more money to service you, so rather than pricing it in for everyone regardless of whether they do it, just charge the difference when it is done.”