Someone wrote into Consumerist complaining that a local ice cream shop had a minimum for using a credit card, a clear violation of both Visa and Mastercard’s TOS for merchants.

Well, co-owners Amy and Steve caught wind of a customer being unhappy with their policies and wrote an e-mail to Consumerist defending (and very poorly, I might add) their contract violating policy:

Dear Mike,

First, we are a small mom and pop, we still answer the emails, there isn’t a PR department or marketing wing to answer you complaint. I am sorry that this sigjn upset you. We are trying to keep costs down, so we don’t have to raise prices. Do you realize that your $8.88 transaction can cost up to 10% to process? Do you want us to raise prices to $9.76 for you?

Stop right there. That is complete, total, and utter bullshit. No credit card processor charges 10% to anyone and if someone is charging these fine folks that much, they’re getting ripped off. Secondly, the idea that they have to raise prices to cover that cost is ridiculous. The only way that even makes the slightest bit of sense is if they’re selling the ice cream at cost, otherwise the only thing the processing fee cuts into is their profit. Either they need to work out a deal closer to the industry standard 2-5% or they need to figure out a better pricing scheme because if they can’t eat 10% they’re not making enough of a profit, especially for a small mom and pop operation which one would expect a lower number of sales in.

The credit card companies charge us a transaction fee, a % of sales fee, a fee if the credit card is not read and has to be hand entered, a fee if we don’t have the billing address zip codes… Are you following me? Tiger Woods is not getting $14 million dollars a year from annual fees. We are facing ever increasing costs for gas, insurance, workers comp etc… None of which you care about, but need to know because I am sure you don’t want us to increase our prices.

Credit card processors DO NOT charge fees for any of those things. Well, legitimate ones don’t, anyway, unless the charge is disputed and charges back. Zip codes? Are you kidding? There isn’t a retail store on the planet that asks your zip code at the register. Are you even remotely expecting us to believe that all of them are paying an extra percentage because of it? Starbucks doesn’t even take your signature when you use a card. Are they eating a percentage on every sale because of it?

Secondly, who cares about increasing costs? Every business faces that situation at some point, but none of them has anything to do with credit card acceptance. Again, we find a reference to raising prices, and again I’ll say that if your profit can’t cover a credit card processing charge, you aren’t selling your stuff for enough money.

As for the Visa cards coming to get our account… that would be our lucky day, we spent close to $50,000.00 last year on credit cards. Do our customers spend more because we except credit cards? No, you can only eat so much ice cream.

Of course they don’t! They have to spend $10 to use one! It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that $10 is a lot of ice cream and most people aren’t spending that much on it. Hell the guy who wrote the letter didn’t even spend $9!

I appreciate you listening to our side, please try to understand. Thanks for the feedback,

Amy and Steve

You’re either lying or getting robbed blind. I understand perfectly.

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