If I have understood this correctly, in the USA it would be considered a
restraint of free trade and a price-fixing collusion. Someone would go to
jail.
In the U.S. Credit Card surcharges are not done, not because it would be illegal, but because it would drive away a significant portion of your business. As a high percentage of the customers pay with debit or charge card, and those customers would be insulted at being asked to pay more, you'd lose too much busines to justify the cost.
There was a time when gas (petrol) stations gave a small discount to those paying cash. No, however, with automated "pay at the pump" machines, the labor reduction in having fewer people working registers, actually has gas stations strongly encouraging the use of credit and debit cards.
Finally, the risk of a fradulant check is much higher than with credit card. Companies that accept personal check, ususally have a % uncollectable, nealy as high as the fee they pay to credit card companies. Even with cash, there is cost involved in managing the cash, and risk of theft and counterfit, and many other problems.
For these reasons, most U.S. companies do not find the costs of accepting credit card much higher than the cost of accepting other forms of payment, and thus they do not add a surcharge.
For MEPBM however, there is no longer any other company to take our business to in protest over the surcharge. I'd imagine there is very little uncollectable check write off, as the players check is likely to process or bounce long before he has executed the turns he has paid for. Mailing cash is just stupid.
Hay, maybe that is what we could do in protest. Let's all start mailing MEPBM coins. Let them sort and count and exchange and deposit the vast assortmant of coins that we could come up with, and I'd imagine that soon the credit card surcharge would be no more.
P.S. That last was only a joke. At least within the U.S., mailing currency is illegal. Surely the cost of mailing coinage would far exceed the cost of the surcharge.
A more reasonable approach would simply be for all credit card payers to stop playing until the credi card surcharge is revoked. I'm sure it costs more to process a nation with 25 characters than a nation with 10. I'm sure it takes longer to process a nation with 14 MovArmy orders than a nation with 14 InfOthr orders. These costs are spread evenly among all players. Why would not the cost of getting payment from the U.S. to England be the same?
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