Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Here's why the surcharge ban will fix nothing

The news of the day, politically, is that surcharges are gone, as the Government's just banned them.

You know what I'm talking about here, right? They're the little extra amount that you get pinged when you turn up at the dairy and you use your credit card, or you use your paywave - it's gone from May next year.

The big sell behind this is basically that it's to help you with the cost of living crisis.

Now, I hate to do this because I know you're thinking, "Oh, yay." And I'm totally gonna rain on that parade for you.

Don't get excited, this is gonna fix nothing. You are still gonna end up paying that cost somehow, probably just through the cost of the bottle of milk that you're buying. Or your haircut, or your sushi or whatever it is - it's gonna be built into the price because the business still has the cost.

Nothing is changing there. They've still got to pay that merchant fee.

Now, a merchant fee is a very complicated set of charges which the business gets lumped with. And most businesses actually have no bloody idea what makes up that merchant fee.

There's a fee from the credit card companies, there's a fee for moving money from the banks, there's the EFTPOS providers - the whole thing gets lumped into the merchant fee and that has not gone away.

What's only gone away is the business's ability to be able to recover the cost of some of that through the surcharge.

And by the way, the cost of that thing is actually quite big. I've read about one business - just one shop - that pays about $14,000 in a year just for that, just for the merchant fee, to be able to do business electronically.

Now, what's going to happen if you go to that shop is, because that guy can't now pass it on to you with a 2 percent, 0.7 percent, 1 percent surcharge or whatever, he's simply going to add it to the cost of his product so that across the year, he makes that $14,000 back.

Also, another reason why you shouldn't get excited about it is that this ban does not include anything that you buy online.

So you're buying your Air New Zealand tickets? You're still gonna be paying that little $6 handling fee.

You're buying some tickets for a concert from Ticketmaster? You're still paying that handling fee.

Maybe you want to head along to Banksy? Yep, you're still gonna be paying yourself a nice little $8 handling fee.

And the problem with that is that these are some of the most egregious examples, I would have thought, of surcharges just bearing no resemblance to reality - but they still slip through this.

So instead of actually sorting out the backroom problems and the real gnarly issues - what has been charged by the banks and the EFTPOS companies and the credit card companies and really excessive surcharges - the Government's just taken the easy option and brought in a ban on the little stuff you buy from the dairy.

Good headline. Unfortunately, though, just a charade.

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