One recent bit of nutmeggy goodness in my home state is a push in the legislature to again allow gas stations to offer a cash discount. I’m annoyed by the rhetoric of this, so I thought I’d bring my venting here.
\n
Why call it a cash discount? Why not call it a credit surcharge? That’s what’s going on, isn’t it? The gas is one price, and if you pay that price, fine, but if you put it on a card, it incurs an extra cost for the station, and they want to pass that cost (or some portion of it) back to you. That seems reasonable to me; allowing them to discount for cash seems less so.
\n
Of course, I don’t really see why they should be allowed to pass the surcharge for gas on to you, and not be allowed to pass on the surcharge for, f’r’ex, a gallon of milk purchased in the little convenience store attached to the station. Or, for that matter, why gas stations should be allowed to add that surcharge, but grocery stores and clothiers and restaurants should not. I would be OK with allowing everybody to do that, if they wanted. I can see arguments against it, and if I had to vote on such a bill, I don’t really know which way I’d lean. But only allowing such a surcharge at gas stations doesn’t make much sense to me. Why is gas different from milk? I mean, other than the obvious, which has nothing to do with credit charges?
\n
I also wouldn’t mind some better regulation on the credit card industry on how much they are allowed to charge vendors, and how much they are allowed to squeeze. That would be swell, and would probably do more to ease inflationary pressure than allowing a credit surcharge.
\n
Which is where the rhetoric comes in. It’s not that it’s inaccurate<\/I>, exactly, to call it a cash discount. It’s not as if there is some normative price, below which is a discount and above which is a surcharge, and we can tell which is which and apply the appropriate name. It’s that calling it a cash discount<\/I> puts the focus on the discount<\/I>, where calling it a credit surcharge<\/I> puts the focus on the credit<\/I>, and from a public policy point of view (and the legislature is presumably taking it up as public policy, not as a deputy sales force for the gas stations), the focus should be on the credit.
\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger is against discounts, except for the part where things are cheaper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rhetoric"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11274"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18417,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11274\/revisions\/18417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}