PORDENONE – “Good morning, a pack of cigarettes, I’ll pay with my debit card, please.” Having a POS – the device for reading credit and debit cards – and accepting any payment in electronic format is a certified legal requirement. Even when it comes to selling tobacco. This has been a proven truth for at least a year, when a specific case involving the world of tobacconists and related products was clarified at a national level. Yet in Pordenone it happens that the opening question of the article is followed by this answer: “No, if you buy a pack of cigarettes you can’t pay with your debit card. To do so you have to buy something else too.” It happens in a well-known shop in the neighborhood that gravitates around Largo San Giovanni.
THE FACTS
The request, which is legitimate, is in line with the payment formulas that are now the most used throughout Europe: electronic ones, without the use of cash. And the trader in question would only have two options in front of him: accept the debit card as a means of paying for the pack of cigarettes (as for any other product) or not sell the selected item at all. Instead, the surprise arrives: the sales assistant, with a decisive and slightly regretful (but still firm) tone, announces that «the commission for paying with a debit card for the pack of cigarettes is too high for us traders, so if you want to proceed you have to buy in combination with another product subject to VAT”.
In essence, more money should be added to the five or so euros of the pack of cigarettes in order to complete the purchase. Otherwise, in that specific resale, the operation cannot be completed. The alternative? Only cash. What emerges, despite the fact that it is an isolated case in a city that has adapted – sometimes grumbling – to new international norms and trends, is practically a kind of “tax” entirely paid by the customer.
THE KNOT
At that point we leave, without having completed the purchase. And we try to go deeper. It is also the other tobacconists in the city, who mostly accept payments with debit cards, who explain to us how it is not possible to make the customer pay for another product in addition. The point, highlighted by many, is that relating to commissions. We must start from a given fact: a tobacconist, for example, earns something like 75 cents on a single pack of cigarettes. Frankly, very little. If you then use a standard POS, another 20 euro cents in commission arrives on the merchant’s head. And the profit then drops to just 55 cents.
However, there are tools that for payments below 15 euros – for example – allow you to reduce the very commissions that disturb traders so much. And there are quite a few Pordenone merchants who have relied on that formula to stay within it.
«Now it’s time to adapt to the new standards – explains Fabio Cadamuro, provincial manager of Fipe for merchants -: many people pay with ATMs. It’s obvious that this can only make people turn up their noses over a coffee, but we all have to get used to it. We traders first and foremost.”
