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Originally Posted by RichardCoulter
I don't know why shops impose minimum payments for card payments. Shops pay a %, usually based on turnover, so it doesn't matter if one customer spends £100 on their card or 100 spend £1 on their cards.
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Although that's true now, it is the case that the fees used to be per transaction, so it's possible that some retailer agreements are still based on that.
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Perhaps there's evidence that supports the view that imposing a minimum charge increases average customer spend??
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I always thought it was a combination of the per-transaction fee (same reason why Amex acceptance is so spotty due to their higher fees), and the floor limit for cards that trigger a 'full auth' transaction, rather than an offline one.
Now that pretty much all card machines are always connected then the full auth thing is less of a problem but again that may depend on the setup.
As a related observation, my local pharmacy is still cash only (or was when I went last year). So I generally end up using others.