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Comment by jkaplowitz | Hacker News Reader

Fully agreed about $100 bills - even $50 bills are often rejected at places with lots of counterfeiting risk and/or mostly small purchases.

Many people in the US basically don’t use cash, quite true - but in some parts of the country like NYC, many restaurants and convenience stores are cash-only or only accept cards with a higher price or a minimum purchase amount. So cash is still very commonly carried in NYC and similar cities. The pandemic made it rarer than before for cards not to be accepted at all, but it still happens, as do minimums and price differences.

In case you’re wondering about legality: the policies I describe above can be legal or illegal depending on the specifics, but both legal and illegal versions of them are commonly seen in practice.

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I believe it’s illegal to put a minimum sale price on credit card transactions in NY. Though I still see it frequently in NYC.

Minimums used to be forbidden by many merchant agreements, but due to the federal Dodd-Frank Act from 2010, merchants can set credit card minimums up to no more than $10, as long as they set the same minimum for all types of credit cards they accept. This applies nationwide including NYC. Higher minimums are indeed still illegal, though that doesn’t mean you won’t still see them sometimes.

This provision of the Dodd-Frank Act does not cover debit cards, and I believe merchant agreements still prohibit minimums for debit cards. This prohibition is widely violated. I have no idea whether this prohibition is officially applicable to debit cards when they are processed as credit cards (which usually means no PIN for most US cards) - I’ve heard people say it’s not - but it definitely covers debit cards when they are processed as debit cards (which again for most US cards is always the case if a PIN is input).

As for NY’s current rules on price differences for credit cards vs cash and debit cards vs cash and the required disclosures, those are a bit complex, so I’ll just link an official explanation here:

https://dos.ny.gov/news/consumer-alert-nys-division-consumer...

But the TL;DR is, yes different pricing is legal if worded and disclosed correctly. To nobody’s surprise, illegal implementations remain common as well.

Thanks for the response. I wonder what the intent is.

I can see a merchant not wanting to pay the credit card transaction fee if the purchase is so low as to make the sale a wash or worse.

I just wonder if the $10 limit is throwing the dog a bone and small merchants really want/need a higher minimum to protect their margins.

Seems like not allowing merchants to decide how they accept payments is an overreach by the government.

Maybe it's illegal or maybe it's against the store's merchant card agreement. In any case, in practice, retailers/restaurants/etc. can do pretty much whatever they want and probably get away with it so long as it's not too egregious.

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