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Comment by slowmotiony | Hacker News Reader

I sure have, I live here! Tried to pay for my croissant and juice in Penny Markt just this morning, i trid to test paying with my credit card and got the usual "Keine ausländische Karte!" :-)

And dont even try using a card in a restaurant or a bar, the terminal always, and i mean always just happens to be "broken" at this particular time.

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Restaurants, donerbuden and the like which don't accept electronic payments or "ze terminal is broken" are literally all just committing tax fraud and don't want any paper trail documenting transactions for this reason. Meanwhile legit businesses want you to use electronic payments even for small stuff nowadays because, as a bakery owner explained to me, the fees are so low nowadays that it's overall more expensive for her to handle cash.

> Restaurants, donerbuden and the like which don't accept electronic payments or "ze terminal is broken" are literally all just committing tax fraud and don't want any paper trail documenting transactions for this reason.

The solution is that you pay any of your disposable income to the government to compensate for this.

An anti-tax advocate on HN, what a surprise. The solution is that they pay their goddamn taxes. Those taxes pay for services that companies avail of as well.

Who believes in that anymore? We're in the information age and people can see where their tax money actually goes. Merchants refusing taxes are just as legit as those who chose to pay taxes. Why should the customer spend his life worrying about if the government gets more money? If that is the case, he should first pay all of his money to the government.

But to the point: Many merchants just want to skip the fees, it usually has nothing to do with taxes. Small business owners get riled up about CC fees sometimes.

> Who believes in that anymore?

Plenty of people in countries with functioning public services and social safety nets.

> Merchants refusing taxes are just as legit as those who chose to pay taxes

As a point of pedantry, they’re in fact illegitimate in the literal sense. (I don’t intend this point as serious argument, just thought your phrasing was bit funny in the context)

> Many merchants just want to skip the fees

I completely agree with you here, it can make sense for a small business to prefer cash for that reason (and it’s equally okay for a customer to choose whether to do business with them).

If I recall correctly, if you have a valid payment method, they have to accept it. So, if the terminal is "broken", thought luck for them, it's free. That has been my experience, the few times that happened to me (and the terminal was truly broken, it wasn't an excuse).

In my experience when the terminal is 'broken' I say "ah shucks I don't have any cash" and they turn back to the terminal which is suddenly working again and, perhaps begrudgingly, accept my contactless payment. I live in a big city and routinely visit a restaurant that does this every time. You'd think they would recognize a regular and quit with the bullshit but nope.

This is exactly my experience every time. My wife is always annoyed at me when we eat out and I insist on using a card, but it's too amusing for me to watch the entire staff struggle around - as if a client with a credit card is some crazy situation they've never encountered before in the center of Munich.

Which is why many places actually assert that they don't take cards before taking any requests.

At least it is common in NRW to do so.

That wasn’t my experience in Munich recently, although I could see it being the case outside of larger cities.

Well yeah, paying with a credit card in physical stores is rare in Europe (and usually considered very strange). People use debit cards or cash (the distribution between these varies per country). I've seen Americans try to pay with a credit card in a supermarket in the Netherlands and have it fail. It probably works more often now, but don't expect it to work everywhere.

People in Europe tend to only use a credit card for online purchases outside of their own country; most people don't have a credit card at all. Online purchases tend to be done with national systems like the Dutch IDeal (this even works with large international shops like Amazon and Steam).

paying with a credit card in physical stores is rare in Europe (and usually considered very strange).

There is no difference between the mechanics of paying with credit card and paying with a debit card, at least none that I've ever noticed. I hold up my card to the reader and sometimes enter my PIN. I'm not even sure if there is a way for the person accepting the payment to tell if it's a credit or debit card I'm using.

I've seen Americans try to pay with a credit card in a supermarket in the Netherlands and have it fail.

I've had places fail to accept my Swedish debit card in the Netherlands. It's more to do with some places only accepting local cards or not accepting, for example, Master Card, rather than debit vs credit cards.

> Well yeah, paying with a credit card in physical stores

Maestro and Visa Electron are already or soon will be full discontinued. How can you even tell a debit and a credit card a part nowadays? The only distinction between my credit and debit Visa cards is a single word sign in a tiny font at the back (I live in a EU country).

So unless those Americans are trying to with Amex/Discovery/smth similar cards I'd find this really surprising.

Even a decade or two ago Germany was the only country I've been to where it was only possible to pay with these regional debit cards in some places. I really don't think this was an "Europe" wide thing for a quite a while now.

There must be a way for card processors to know if the payment is debit or credit because there are stores in the US that only accept debit.

Yeah, I think US is somewhat different, the fees for credit cards seem to be much higher there while in the EU they are caped at 0.3% for credit and 0.2% for debit cards + bank fees .

Even in The Netherlands where, I was told by a local debit cards were the norm, I paid for things all last week with a credit card without anyone giving it a second look or having the slightest problem. I was prepared to use my debit card begrudgingly as it doesn't cover foreign exchange fees like one of my credit cards do. But I never needed to.

The distinction between debit and credit card is not really what is at play here, but rather, whether Visa or MasterCard is accepted. A Visa credit card or a US Visa debit are both Visa, so if a place doesn't accept Visa it won't accept either, but if it does accept Visa (increasingly the norm) then both credit and debit work. It's just that in Netherlands none of the debit cards are Visa/Mastercard so people might be mistakenly attributing the card acceptance as being about a debit/crédit distinction.

I wish iDeal was accepted more widely. Stripe/Mollie/Adyen et al support it but it has enabled explicitly. This is especially annoying for Shopify stores.

I don't know what the hangup is (maybe it needs to be reported to the Dutch government since it's obviously coming from a NL national?).

Until then, we'll have to keep using a low limit credit card or Paypal for many online purchases.

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