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Comment by White_Wolf | Hacker News Reader

I remember going to a restaurant in Belgium-Bruges(in 2015) that had the fees listed at every table. They were charging you the table cost + whatever fees were listed for your card. While I can't remember the fees I do remember that is was enough to make me decide I want to pay cash.

I don't know if it's legal or not to do that but I found it an interesting quirk of the times we're in (and maybe the owner was pissed off).

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Afaik it's not legal anymore to do this in Germany (and probably Belgium/EU?), or rather: It's illegal for the businesses to have different prices for different payment methods (a workaround are coupons for using certain payments, but probably only for special offers). As far as I remember PayPal was usually the most expensive payment method (compared to CC, bank transfer etc.).

Interesting Australia went in the opposite direction: per-type fees are A-ok, but they have the be the true fees.

The problem was that vendors tended to make arbitrary minimum fees for using cards which in no way reflected the actual fees they were paying. Smaller stores were steering customers to cash as it was easier to under-declare earnings with cash. In response Amex in Australia reduced their fees to stores while simultaneously reducing the value of their awards points programmes (since those were ultimately funded by the fees being charged.)

This also plays into application stores - since developers often don’t pass on fee reductions (such as the subscription fee reduction of 30%->15% after 1 year.)

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