I’m going to boycott them now
1 Like
Good idea. Remember, you pay 50p, and the restaurant pays a huge amount too. Card interchange is 0.2% for European-issued four-party consumer debit, 0.3% for European-issued consumer four-party credit. Higher for three-party, corporate and foreign cards, but still. Also, this is wholesale, but Just Eat is big enough I’d imagine they’ve negotiated pretty close to this.
I cannot comprehend why many takeaways don’t take cards directly or charge absurd (now soon to be illegal! yay!) fees, given that they can get Square and start taking cards for just 1.75% with no other fees other than a £39 reader. Or, if they’re willing to pay some fixed fees, they can get a traditional terminal for an even lower percentage shopping around.
Just Eat, however, they seem happy to use and it costs them an arm and a leg…
The 50p was never about being a card fee. It was simply a ‘people will pay it’ fee, and almost everyone paid by card so it seemed excusable.
1 Like
JustEat aren’t alone, though: GoPark, Indigo Parking, and a few others have had “convenience charges” (that phrase alone is enough to send me into a fit of rage!) for a while, when using their app/phone/website (in my experience between 20-50p).
Very convenient for them as well, as their machines usually don’t give change or accept cards.
I know, right? And it’s so much cheaper for them! Getting money out of parking ticket machines and maintaining the things costs far more than taking card payments on a website, far more! They pretend as if they’re doing something fair (a phrase that seems to come up on here a lot) and simply passing on a cost of doing business, but they’re completely ignoring that:
- Their overall cost of doing business is much cheaper this way (do the maths on the cost to hire someone to collect money out of a machine).
- Prices should, generally, include costs of doing business. Imagine if a restaurant charged you a cooking fee. Yes, I know, some charge a ‘service charge’ - trust me, that bothers me as much as credit card fees. If restaurants charge a service charge:
a. I don’t tip, and I usually tip more than this charge is if the service is good.
b. I don’t go back unless there is something exceptionally magical about the place, and even then it’s with hesitation.
c. It will hurt the Google/Yelp!/TripAdvisor reviews I leave by at least one star.
1 Like
Just to add fuel to the fire of the Just Eat 50p card charge that will be OUTLAWED in future
Thing is they’ll have data that suggests x number of people pay by card and have always had this fee which means x number of people don’t give a shit.
Yeah but now even people who always paid cash have to pay the fee as well.
Fairer for all, eh?
Not fair, just guess from a business point of view the data showed it won’t drive customers away to a detrimental effect.
And their competition Hungry House is the same company as JustEat just a different branding. Talk about cartel.
It’s very straightforward. Vote with your feet and pick it up yourself (see what I did there).
I don’t know why nobody mentions Deliveroo, they seem to be a different company, with better user interface and no card fees.
Here’s my referral link if you’d like to give it a try, or use the direct link 
1 Like
Because they have a very small area of operation. They’re not even available in Ilford, despite being advertised on the London buses that frequent the area.
They’re available nowhere near Barrow.
Liam
2 Likes
Companies that charge a PayPal / credit card fee are likely to do exactly the same.
Now those that used to pay less fees by paying with a debit card will likely pay more to cover the costs of those using a higher fee such as PayPal.
At work we’ll no doubt get loads of requests in the upcoming months to update checkout structures to dodge the rules 
That’s been studied and just… doesn’t seem likely. The prices a consumer will bear have little correlation to surcharge acceptance. And there’s people like me who boycott surcharging businesses, so they may realise the new business helps with volume and they do much better overall.
I hope that’s the case!
I generally don’t mind 50p charges, it’s the percentage based ones on larger transactions such as flights that bother me. Especially when there’s already thousands of ‘extras’ that all add up (priority boarding, cancellation protection etc)
It’s the with ‘priority tickets’ at places like Disneyland. If everyone buys one, the regular queue is then shorter than the ‘priority’ queue and the additional charge is completely pointless to the consumer.
1 Like
As a percentage, the 50p type charges are far worse though! And I think all those extras are nuts… the whole pricing model is absurd. Remember, you can’t really fly for £10. To offer that, they have to hit people with tons of absurd charges.
The market will take a few months to even out, but I genuinely believe everyone will be better off with card surcharges banned. A few places will quit taking cards. Good, good riddance. I’ll support a cash-only business in the unlikely event I have cash on me. I’ll do everything reasonable to avoid giving money to a surcharging business.
If they genuinely believe the value isn’t there to them and their customers by taking cards, then no need to. But if you do, don’t hit me with absurd and usually out of proportion to cost fees (unless you count one of your costs as it being harder to cook the books…).
The ones I hate most are where it’s outright blatant, this occurs most often in the US where taxes are added on top of the purchase most places - ‘no tax if you pay cash’.
I thought companies just did that to avoid putting it on the books and having to pay the tax man for it…
Yeah, exactly. They don’t charge you the sales tax, they avoid all the other costs of actually selling product (not just the card fees but income taxes, etc). It happens semi-often in the US.
Of course, sometimes you get odd things that are legitimate. This summer I got offered to pay the same price by card in USD at a market that the cash prices were in GBP. They were only here selling for the weekend, nowhere near where they’d have to submit VAT, they just really didn’t want to deal with ending up with a stack of GBP any bigger than needed. I can’t say I blame them!
Shockingly, even with a deal that good - the worst debit card in England would still be cheaper for all but the smallest purchase - tons of people were paying them cash!
1 Like
I know some smaller companies and small business sometimes use iZettle or Paypal, therefore they add their own charge to ALL card payments to cover the cost of the transaction which iZettle or PayPal take. Usually they’ll take something like 20p + 2.5% of the transaction, and the business will then ask for 50p to cover the transaction.
I’ve not had time to research, maybe someone else has
Question is: Does anyone know if this is being stopped entirely, is it that you can’t charge someone to pay by card, or you can’t charge someone based on provider, EG: Mastercard 50p Visa 20p?
Stopped entirely, thank goodness. It’s a cost of doing business, no different from if they added a surcharge to pay staff salaries (which… some places do. And I boycott them, too).
2 Likes