[hinkley]

My coffee shop has a sign: $0.50 fee for card transactions under $5. I’ve seen that sign over the years at a dozen places. The idea isn’t entirely novel.

And you’re right, in that perhaps they should send $3 every three months or. $6 every six if you’re only giving to one person.

[marshray]

The reason you don’t see that everywhere is it’s specifically against the merchant agreement to charge cc customers extra. The only places I’ve ever seen getting away with it are very small shops and government agencies (like the auto tag office) that legally cannot pay those costs out of ordinary revenue.

[brigade]

Not between 2013-2016; there was a federal settlement that included the provision that merchants can add a surcharge for credit payments, overriding any merchant agreement.

Which was recently thrown out on appeal, so that’s fun for any place that was relying on it.

[lysp]

> so that’s fun for any place that was relying on it.

Places can simply work out a monthly total the cost of CC fees and increase their prices overall (or on specific products) to recover that cost.

[slg]

Gas stations seem to still regularly have a credit card price that is different than their cash price.

[ceejayoz]

https://usa.visa.com/support/consumer/visa-rules.html

Q. Why are there different prices for paying with cash vs. with my Visa card?

A. A merchant is permitted to offer discounts for paying in cash, however, the discount must be given as a reduction from the standard price.

[steffan]

It's semantics: I believe the wording or the typical agreement states that you may not charge a customer more for using a card. It does not, however, prohibit providing a 'cash discount'.

[slg]

Which is why this whole debate seems a little silly from a practical perspective. It doesn't matter whether a fee is paid by the seller or the buyer or if a difference in price is a discount or a surcharge, it all washes out in the end. How Patreon or gas stations frame the difference is simply marketing. Patreon's mistake was just poor marketing.

[aeorgnoieang]

OT, but why don't programmers say or write "It's syntax". Different semantics, in the programming language sense, isn't what that phrase usually means.

[BillinghamJ]

I'd say they were quite the opposite!

"Semantics" is about the meaning you're trying to express.

"Syntax" is the way you've chosen to express that meaning in this particular case.

e.g.:

    def blah
      "a"
    end

versus

    function blah() {
      return 'a';
    }

Semantically identical, but unrelated syntax.

[marshray]

That's exactly what this whole discussion is about though.

The difference between "card surcharge" and "cash discount" is treated as 'semantic' in the merchant contract context, but is it a distinction without a difference from the customer's perspective?

[waterhouse]

Google gives two definitions for "semantics". The first one, "the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning", clearly matches the common usage of "It's semantics": it's primarily about words and definitions, and how they relate to the concepts they refer to. The second is "the meaning of a word, phrase, sentence, or text". I guess that makes sense as a microcosm of the whole field of study, in the same sense that people talk about "the physics of a situation" (say, involving two hard balls bouncing off each other) as how the general study of physics applies to that situation.

It happens that, with programming, explaining precisely how each part of a program corresponds to "meaning" (and there are different levels and dimensions of precision, e.g. "xs.append(x) means it'll add object x onto the list xs" vs "xs.append(x) means it'll look up the value of the symbol 'xs' in the lexical environment and then the global if necessary, and do the same for x, and then look for xs's attribute hash table for a key named 'append'..." vs "xs.append(x) means it'll check if the array backing the list has room for one more element, and, if not, look for a free block of the right size in its freelist, and, if not, use 'mmap' to grab more memory from the OS, and barf if that fails, and then copy the array data into a new array of twice the size, and free the old array...") also gives a precise description of the behavior of the program (assuming hardware perfectly obeys the abstractions it's meant to obey), which is all the programmer is interested in.

This is a field where machines reliably turn symbols into actions; hence, the meanings of symbols are the central object of study. Semantics are extremely important and are almost all we need to think about. This is not the case in most fields. (I guess one other profession that comes to mind where semantics is important is law.)

To bring it back to your original question... yes, semantics is important to us. If we want to call something unimportant in that way... "It's a matter of definition" or "We're arguing over definitions" strikes me as the best fit.

(One other distinction: Programming language terms have semantics for machines. They also have semantics for humans. Whether the computer recognizes something as a closure, or complains about a syntax error or executes something completely different, is very important. Whether human programmers call it a "closure", a "function", a "procedure", or some other term, is generally unimportant. Thus, the maximally correct dismissive comment might be something like, "It's human semantics".)

[geofft]

I think that's not corporate policy and is something individual franchisees do, hoping no credit card company compliance officer will refuel at their store and notice (or possibly not even knowing it's prohibited).

[DrJaws]

That's illegal on my country, they cannot change the price for different payment methods.

[vetinari]

Which country it is?

Payment cards are not a legal tender, so you can do whatever you want, provided you didn't sign a contract not to do.

[francoisfeugeas]

In France for instance if you accept credit cards, it is illegal to add a fee for accepting it.

You can impose a minimum purchase amount for accepting it though.

Certain professions (i.e., taxis) are even forced to accept credit cards.

[vetinari]

> In France for instance if you accept credit cards, it is illegal to add a fee for accepting it.

Are you sure, that it is by law, though? In most countries, it is a contractual obligation: when you make a contract with your bank or payment processor, one of those terms & conditions is not to discriminate against the card payers. The purpose is to force the processing fees on the merchant, otherwise the cards would be at a disadvantage and would not get popular. For a case study, see Southeast Asia (1. cash rules there; 2. you can pay with a card, but you will have to cover the fees too; 3. as a consequence, everyone uses cash, see also point 1).

In the case of taxis, I would understand if they voluntarily had terminals for their own protection (so they would not get mugged for few banknotes), but forcing them... that sounds wrong.

[ernesth]

>> In France for instance if you accept credit cards, it is illegal to add a fee for accepting it.

> Are you sure, that it is by law?

It is: Article L112-12 from the Code monétaire et financier. "Le bénéficiaire ne peut appliquer de frais pour l'utilisation d'un instrument de paiement donné." (The seller shouldn't charge any fee for the use of a given payment instrument).

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do;jsession...

More generally, the law requires that the total to pay is to be presented to the client before he choses how to pay.

[vetinari]

Interesting, thanks.

[DrJaws]

Spain, and its the same thing as the user from france. They cannot charge you any extra fee for using cards or any payment method.

[hinkley]

Could be. There are a lot of places with minimum orders for credit card too. That probably works easier for the business anyway.