"It's just what the banks charge"

Picture this, it's a late November Saturday morning and you've been taken furniture shopping to find that overdue replacement lounge suite, something you've been putting off for as long as possible. But time has run out and you find yourself being led around from one furniture store to the next, in search of that 'perfect' replacement.

Now, if you are anything like me and like to get value out of things, there is usually a considerable amount of time between purchases of these kinds of large home furnishings, so things like prices and delivery times tend to change dramatically. Unfortunately not in your favour.

So after a good day on the hunt for said lounge suite, visiting multiple of the known furniture store brands, speaking with a swag of on the floor, eager to get their commission, sales staff, we finally agreed on that 'perfect' suite.

Now time for all the fun stuff. Payment & Delivery!

"OK, we can have this out to you by February"

Yep, just in case you missed it, that's just over three months for delivery, or as I like to interpret it, we'll take your money now, have your lounge suite made and ship it to you at a time profitable to us.

Now I'm all good with them making a profit and understand that this pay now, then make and deliver later is apparently now the norm, having heard these delivery lead times from other salespeople along the journey.

But what came next was a bit of a shock.

Firstly, for some pricing context.

It had been about seventeen years between this lounge suite purchase and the last one. The replacement had to be a similarly large, leather lounge with a chaise.

As such, pricing-wise, we were up in the $6,000 range, even after the screamingly disingenuous, on-sale 40% off, bargain offering.

Now time to sign off and pay for all this first-world pain and suffering!

I hand over our Visa Debit card, to the smugly smiling furniture sales assassin, who processes it through his 'cash register' aka the swipe machine, only to hand me back the payment slip to sign with a credit card fee of $245 staring up at me from the docket.

Shocked at the approximate 4% fee, I questioned the sales guy only to be told that this was out of their control that it was just what the banks charge them and that they had to pass these charges onto the customer.

It was at this time I asked him where the charges were for the lighting and the air conditioning of the showroom on such a hot summers day.

He looked at me with a bit of confusion, "what do you mean?"

Well, I replied, if credit card fees are a cost you just have to pass onto customers as they are an unavoidable cost to your business, surely the electricity bill to light and cool this enormous showroom is also a cost to the business and also should be passed onto the customers.

To which he smugly replied, almost expectedly, "Oh, all that, no that's just included in our pricing, as part of the costs of running the business"

Bingo!

So why are credit card fees just not another cost of running the business?

Now for those ready to jump on me as it being my fault as I elected to pay by Visa-Debit, I did offer to just go to the bank and get cash to settle this transaction, only to be advised they don't accept good old cash any longer.

Something we all better get used to, I guess.

In the end, the problem was solved, he finally offered their banking details and we conducted the payment through a direct debit transfer.

I thought it strange that we had to go through that whole credit card fee dance when he could have offered the direct debit details from the outset.

The sceptical person in me might think these fees are not necessarily all actual bank fees but instead another profit line for the business and possibly another level of commission for the sales folk there.

Who knows?

Now just for the three-month delivery wait.

But the fact I really enjoy relaxing on my new couch in front of the latest Netflix or Amazon Prime production, where you can binge $200m worth of production in a single afternoon, the experience of the exorbitant credit card fee and the smug salesman is the story I share more often.

In my humble opinion, it seems like a big opportunity for businesses to take the lead and deal with these types of fees like all other costs to their business. In that, they are all taken into consideration when establishing the prices of your goods or services.

Why have the very last, or if you are booking travel or accommodation, the very first, part of the buyer's journey tainted with these additional costs that could be so easily absorbed into your pricing model?

I mention the travel and accommodation experience as that is part two of my gripe on credit card fees, stay tuned.