In this video, I talk about a consumer experience I had while shopping at Gas Go Express Food Mart Gas Station, located at 237 Lake Avenue, Elyria, Ohio. On November 24, 2021, I made a purchase for 4 taxable items at the location. Each item was $0.99 per. With taxes, it came up to $4.26.
As I got ready to place my debit card into the card reader, the Gas Go Express Food Mart clerk immediately added a $.50 debit card surcharge fee. As a common practice, some merchants/stores add a surcharge to your total purchase amount when you spend less than $5 or $10 when using a credit/debit card to process the payment.
Being a merchant myself, I know that Master Card, Visa, Discover, and some of the other financial institutions have a strict policy that states that us merchants, including the merchants at Gas Go Express Food Mart, cannot apply surcharge fees to Bank issued debit cards and/or prepaid debit cards that are branded with their trademarked logos. Just as I had to agree to this in my merchant agreement, so did the owners at Gas Go Express Food Mart.
So before I processed the payment, I pulled out my debit card and advised the Gas Go merchant that they are only able to apply the merchant surcharge fees to credit cards according to their merchant agreement. I told the merchant he couldn’t do that. He snidely responded in an Arab accent: “I just did it.”. Therefore, I decided to publish this public consumer complaint to inform and educate the people on how to resolve the issue.
