That's so wild. Many small businesses in my area give you a discount for paying with cash. They pass the card fee onto the consumer, but it's baked into the menu prices.
The case studies in TFA are all places that deal with extremely high volume over very short time periods—amusement parks, zoos, and sporting events. Many of their points of sale are also mobile (food carts or someone walking around with a tray). Both the volume and the mobility make cash much more difficult to manage than a phone with a card reader, so they've likely done the math and determined that the interchange fees more than pay for the logistical improvements.
Remember when Chipotle got in trouble for rounding 24¢ and 26¢ to 25¢, to save time making change? [1] It was not unfair on average, and it surely sped things up, but they stopped because it's technically not correct.
I can see if being considered unfair if it's a single business, but I do think that it's at least a little funny, considering we have penny rounding (to the nearest nickel) here in Canada since geting rid of the penny. Now it's by default, everywhere. And as someone that uses cash for all in-person purchases, it's actually really, really nice
The typical reason for a business to give a discount for paying for cash is so they can then evade paying tax on that income (at least, here in Australia, but it was my direct experience in the UK as well at least sometimes).
The discount has to reflect the fact that the cost of dealing with the cash isn't too far off the actual cost of paying card fees now. To the point where cash is so rare in Australia that cash handling companies are in trouble [1].
Our Reserve Bank recently suggested that businesses might soon want to charge customers who want cash /more/ - it seems possible that at some point in the near future anyone offering discounts for cash will just be instantly flagged for tax investigation!
Yep, some restaurants added a cc surcharge during the pandemic, and none seem to have done away with them. I've watched customers pay at the POS, and pretty much no one seems to realize that the fee is assessed (and the employees don't mention it).
This also really annoys me. Sometimes that fee is up to 4%, and I've seen corner stores that literally only disclosed it on a tiny sticker at the front door – not near or on the POS, not on the receipt (which you usually don't get by default).
I think at one point I've even seen 4% cash discount and 4% card surcharge in the same place. And I doubt that even the most expensive payment service provider out there charges the merchant anything close to 4% for card processing.
And there is a subtle distinction between charging more for using a credit card (not a bank debt card) and a discount for cash that people argue about with respect to a particular card's merchant agreement.
