By Larissa Hoppe
An Italian restaurant in Neukölln. We just ordered. That reminds me: Can you pay with an EC card here? Because that’s not always possible in Berlin. In late night shops, taxis, bars. How can that be?
I rarely have more than five euros in cash with me. Pay, transfer, check your account – I do everything via the app or with a card. Why should I regularly walk to a vending machine if I can also have it easily?
But that often doesn’t work in the capital either.
A late night on Friedrichstrasse. Here the card is only available from a purchase value of ten euros. “Why?” “It’s too expensive with the fees otherwise.” I hear the same thing from another shop a few meters away.
Do shopkeepers really have to shoot that much?
Inquiry at Payone, a service provider for card payments. According to spokeswoman Susanne Grupp, there are different models. A small café has to pay an average of ten to 20 euros in rent per month and per reader. In addition, there are the fees per transaction:
Giro card: 0.2 percent of the turnover to the card-issuing bank plus – depending on the monthly turnover – a flat rate of five to twelve cents to the payment service provider.
So yes it costs. On the other hand, I’ve often walked out of a store without buying anything at all. That cannot be intentional either.
Susanne Grupp: “In general, one can say that the number of transactions rose extremely when the corona pandemic began. The expectation of being able to make cashless payments has increased accordingly since then. A trend that will never reverse.”
It would be great if the last Berlin shops could react to this. There are also lamps and not just candlelight.
Like we did in the Italian? My escort is to the next machine. After 15 minutes she was back. The pizza was already there. And only lukewarm.