Latest / Best of Business / Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Here's why the surcharge ban will fix nothing

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Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Here's why the surcharge ban will fix nothing · Best of Business

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: You're listening to a podcast from News Talk set B.
• 0:12
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  Speaker 2: Well, the news of the day politically is that surcharges
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  Speaker 2: are gone. The government's just banned them. And you know
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  Speaker 2: what I'm talking about here, right They are the little
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  Speaker 2: extra amount that you get pinged when you turn up
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  Speaker 2: at the dairy and you use your credit card or
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  Speaker 2: you use your payWave. Gone from May next year. And
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  Speaker 2: the big cell behind this basically is that it's to
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  Speaker 2: help you with the cost of living crisis. Now, I
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  Speaker 2: hate to do this because I know you're thinking, oh yay, yeah,
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  Speaker 2: and I'm totally going to rain on that parade for you.
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  Speaker 2: Don't get excited. This is going to fix nothing. You
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  Speaker 2: are still going to end up paying that cost somehow,
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  Speaker 2: probably just through the cost of the bottle of milk
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  Speaker 2: that you're buying. It'll be in there now, or your
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  Speaker 2: haircut or your sushi or whatever it is. It's going
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  Speaker 2: to be built into the price because the business still
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  Speaker 2: has the cost. Nothing is changing there. They've still got
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: to pay that merchant fee. Now, a merchant fee is
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  Speaker 2: a very complicated set of charges which the business gets
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  Speaker 2: lumped with and most business actually have bloody no idea.
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  Speaker 2: What makes up that merchant fee. There's a fee from
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  Speaker 2: the credit card companies, there's a feed fee for moving
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  Speaker 2: money from the banks, there's the f poss providers. The
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  Speaker 2: whole thing gets lumped into the merchant fee. That has
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  Speaker 2: not gone away. What's only gone away is the business's
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  Speaker 2: ability to be able to recover the cost of some
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  Speaker 2: of that through the surcharge. And by the way, the
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  Speaker 2: cost of that thing is actually quite big. I mean,
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  Speaker 2: I've read about one business, just one shop, that pays
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  Speaker 2: about fourteen thousand dollars in a year just for that,
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  Speaker 2: just for the merchant fee, just to be able to
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  Speaker 2: do business electronically. Now that what's going to happen if
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  Speaker 2: you go to that shop is because that guy can't
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  Speaker 2: now pass it on to you with a two percent,
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  Speaker 2: zero point seven percent, one percent surcharge or whatever. He's
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  Speaker 2: simply going to add it to the cost of his product,
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  Speaker 2: so that across the year he makes that fourteen thousand
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  Speaker 2: dollars back. Also, why you shouldn't get excited about it
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  Speaker 2: is that this ban does not include anything that you
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  Speaker 2: buy onlines. So you're buying your air new Zealand tickets. Yep,
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  Speaker 2: you're still going to be paying that little six dollar
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  Speaker 2: handling fee. You're buying some tickets for a from ticket Master.
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  Speaker 2: Maybe you want to head along to banksy go check
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  Speaker 2: that out. Yep, you're still gonna be paying yourself a
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  Speaker 2: little a nice, little eight dollar handling fee. And the
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  Speaker 2: problem with that is that these are some of the
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  Speaker 2: most egregious examples I would have thought of sur charges
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  Speaker 2: just bearing no resemblance to reality, but they still slip
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  Speaker 2: through this. So instead of actually sorting out the back
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  Speaker 2: room problems and the real gnarly issues and what has
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  Speaker 2: been charged by the banks and the FPOs companies and
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  Speaker 2: the credit card companies and really excessive surcharges, the government's
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  Speaker 2: just taken the easy option and brought in a ban
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  Speaker 2: on the little stuff you buy from the dairy good headline. Unfortunately, though,
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  Speaker 2: just a charade.
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