A car dealership in the land down under has taken a page out of the American dealership playbook by charging customers transaction fees on cash.
As reported by the New York Post, an MG dealer —of all things— in the Sydney suburb of Alexandria has customers up in arms over the charges. They were first discovered by a local shopper who shared them with the media. The charges are as follows:
- Visa/Mastercard Debit: 0.50% surcharge
- Visa/Mastercard Credit: 1.25% surcharge
- AMEX: 1.75% surcharge
- Union Pay: 2% surcharge
- Cash/Check $55
Keep in mind this is all in Australian Dollars. The dealership also made note that the max cash transaction that can be done at the dealership was $5,000, which at current exchange rates works out to $3,192. It gets worse when you dig into the numbers as The Post explained.
The maximum cash transaction allowed at the dealership was $3174, which worked out to be a 1.1 percent surcharge — a worse deal than the 0.5 percent charged for paying with a MasterCard debit card.
Further Sydney City MG charges $143 on average for a basic car service, according to car insurer Canstar.
That means a basic service would rack up a 24.3 percent surcharge if it were paid for in cash.
Customers are pissed of course. But mere hours after the fees made the rounds on the media and the resulting backlash, the dealership walked back the $55 cash fee. Yahoo Finance reached out to the dealership to get an explanation of some of the fees, and the explanations didn’t help things. For instance the dealer’s general manager Ian Zammit explained that the fee was originally supposed to be a “handling fee” but was mislabeled as a surcharge.
Zammit explained to Yahoo Finance that the handling fee was in place to cover the internal costs of managing cash, which include ensuring two people are present on site at the time of counting cash, and “safely” transporting it to the safe and the bank.
Its just as ridiculous as you were probably expecting. Hopefully this is a lesson for other Australian dealerships that this kind of behavior won’t be tolerated.