Policy: spend $10 to use your credit card - not so much

This is news to me, but it makes cents (sense). Have you ever been to a store/restaurant and wanted to use your debit/credit card to make a purchase, only to find out that the store has a policy that you must spend $10 in order to use your credit card? Well, this is a violation with Visa and Mastercard. Visa's and MasterCard's regulations prohibit minimum charge amounts. This goes against everything the credit card is for - convenience and speed.

What happens is, that every time you make a credit card or debit card purchase as a credit card purchase, the store gets charged a portion/fee from the credit card company. Stores do not find it worthwhile to spend that fee on someone buying a single bag of chips. So either you end up buying more items to achieve the $10 or you use cash. What is worse are the ones that point you to their ATM machine and tell you that you can get cash there and then you get charged an extra $2.00 processing fee. Where do you think that 2.00 goes? Hmmmmmm.

American Express's regulations do not explicitly prohibit minimum charges, but its policy is to discourage any merchant practices that create a "barrier to acceptance." Amex does prohibit "discrimination" against the Amex card, however, so if a merchant has no minimum charge for Visa and MasterCard, the merchant may not discriminate against Amex by imposing a minimum charge.

Also, these places should not be imposing an additional charge to cover the credit card fee that the store will have to pay. Some stores actually have a fee if you use a credit card. This is not acceptable either. Visa and Mastercard prohibit surcharges and American Express prohibits discrimination, so if the rules of the store apply to Visa and Mastercard, then Amex follows.

One loophole in this is that stores can offer discounts if paying by cash. It needs to be worded as such to be legal.

What you can do when faced with this situation of a minimum purchase policy is to let the cashier know that it is a practice prohibited by Visa and Mastercard. Of course, you may have a cashier that does not know about this and is doing exactly what they are told and following the store policy. You may end up paying cash, but you can report these companies to Visa and Mastercard either by calling or writing to them.
Visa: 1-800-VISA-911
Mastercard: 1-800-627-8372