Hacker News Reader

Comment by jobigoud | Hacker News Reader

How do you pay for things that are just one or two euros? In my local boulangerie they don't accept cards for less than 5€, so if I just want a baguette I need to have cash.

View on HN

That was a thing in Sweden as well, but it's illegal to charge an extra fee when using cards since 2010. So to answer the question, everyone just uses cards even for small purchases, and often those "cards" aren't physical cards but Apple or Google Pay on the phone.

https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/sven...

If you ignore supermarkets, basically no place sells stuff in that low of an amount. Using Stripe as an example, transaction fees are 1.5%+1.8kr. I’m hard pressed to find a place that sells items with a price below 20kr, and even cheap crap from china costs at least that when buying online. So unless your business has an unexpectedly large amount of low price transactions, it’s not a big issue.

In the UK most small shops had this same 'minimum spend' requirement for card. It disappeared a few years ago (maybe during Covid) and now I haven't come across minimum spend in a long time. That was one of the last things that made me always keep some cash on hand. Now, I genuinely cannot remember the last time I used cash - it's been at least 2-3 years, probably longer.

You're not going to find a baguette for less than 5 euros anyway

Not sure what you are talking about. A baguette is ~1€, same for a croissant or a chocolatine. Maybe 1.10 or 1.20 depending on the place. I do it all the time. It forces me to have the cash otherwise I need to take another random item I don't really need.

At least in Denmark, people are fine paying and shops are fine receiving 10DKK (cheap loaf of bread) or whatever on a card.

I have paid 0.5DKK on a card when I've forgotten to ask beforehand for a plastic bag, and the shopkeeper cares to make me pay after.

I assume there's no minimum there (as I haven't encountered such a requirement in Hungary for some time, nor in Spain)

We just use our cards.

Oh it's easy: they don't use Visa / Mastercard, but their own domestic system called Swish, which is much cheaper for businesses and of course completely free for individuals.

Similar instant payment systems have really blossomed across the world, especially in recent years. One by one, countries are finally figuring out that there's no reason to rely on American brands for all of the payment processing.

> Oh it's easy

Can you use it without local ID/phone and with foreign bank account?

No because you need BankID which is issued by your bank and to get BankID you need a Swedish bank and a personnummer. You can use a foreign phone number with Swish but some banks don't allow it (or only allow some countries, e.g. finland).

A lot of stores have minimums if you want to pay with Swish, the more common answer to how we pay for small amounts like that is... we just use our cards like any other purchase.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com