| Peer review: Merchants pay fees for sales that use plastic
A You have heard correctly: Merchants pay fees when you use your plastic for purchases. Those charges are called "interchange fees," although there may be some fees with other names built in as well. The system is fairly complicated, but the fact is that if you spend $100 using plastic when shopping, the merchant likely will see only $98 or $99 of it. Credit-card and debit signature transactions typically cost merchants between 1 percent and 2 percent of the purchase amount in fees, depending on the type of card and the banks involved. Debit transactions using a PIN cost the merchants much less, around 0.2 to 0.5 percent. These fees are divided among the bank that issued the card, the credit-card network (Visa, MasterCard, etc.), and the merchant's account provider. Some have called those fees an implicit tax, because merchants pass the costs on to customers in the form of higher prices.
Commuters get their say on Golden Gate Bridge toll hike
The proposed increase is unrelated to plans to charge drivers to use Doyle Drive to get on and off the bridge. "The board is committed to hearing the comments," said Mary Currie, the bridge district spokeswoman. "The board wants to know what people are saying and thinking before they make the decision." The toll proposal comes after years of budget deficits necessitating reductions in the workforce, wage freezes, benefit cuts, dropped bus routes and increases in transit fares. The district uses tolls to subsidize the cost of running its buses and ferries. Bridge district officials fear that fare increases or cuts in transit service would push more people into their cars and add to traffic congestion. Some 58,000 vehicles cross the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco on an average weekday.
How to protect your site against pricing errors
The IT press regularly reports on stories of websites whose sales system have failed, allowing customers to place orders for goods at unintentionally discounted prices. Unless the sellers in question get their contract formation processes right they could find themselves obliged to deliver the goods at these knock-down prices. In 2002, Kodak.com misstated the price of a digital camera on its site; the £329 camera went on sale for just £100. Word of the error spread rapidly across the internet, and it is rumoured that before Kodak were alerted to the problem around 2,000 orders had been placed. The company initially refused to fulfil the orders, and legal action was taken by disgruntled customers who argued that the company had entered into a contract from which it could not withdraw.
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