Originally Posted by
kebosabi
Of course, this is if you consider most mom-and-pop stores or front-line employees who do not have an MBA to figure this out as well.
Have you tried explaining the intricate details of DCC and how credit card processing works to a 75 year old youth hostel inn keeper in the Chung King Mansions or the minimum wage earning cashier in a major Portuguese supermarket chain in Lisbon, Portugal to be adept at these things? You usually get blank stares.
It's faster and less stress to:
Originally Posted by
kebosabi
You are a Starbucks employee in Manhattan. A Japanese tourist asks for a latte and whips out his/her Mizuho Financial/ANA VISA card issued in Japan. You get the card and swipe it like any other card. The swipe process realizes it's a Japan issued card and for "convenience" the bank has defaulted non-US issued cards to be charged in their home currency. So the receipt defaults to JPY and spills out a receipt for her to sign. He/she then asks for it to be re-processed again in USD instead of the default JPY DCC option.
What's the likely outcome?
Blank stares from the clerk who is just following the screen prompts and have no idea what to do because all he did is swipe the card just like any other credit card and long lines of agitated customers thinking "oh for crying out loud, nobody f--ing cares about your problems about few dollars and cents more, DCC or whatever brainy-a$$ technical mumbo jumbo, would you hurry up and get going and stop bothering the others in the line, or if you have problem just pay cash! Sheesh!"
I don't have such a sympathetic view of staff as you. "Just following orders" and "minimum wage earning cashier" doesn't justify overcharging customers, or at least an obligation to help customers try to get out of the overcharging when it occurs.
That minimum wage earning cashier is still the primary agent of the overcharging merchant. If he feels wronged having to do all this for a customer who stand his ground, this employee should not work in the front office of any shop.
Of course this employee is limited by what the card terminal or POS will let him do. Other
FTers in the PRC make Chinese employees go to extraordinary lengths to disable DCC and charge them in RMB. I merely ask the transaction be voided so I can present alternate payment (Amex or Unionpay), and I don't think it's too much to ask the employee to ask his manager to help him if he's not been trained to do this before.
I rather not go file Reason Code 76 disputes with my bank - if only I want to save postage (chargeback disputes in HK must be initiated using paper forms) and two months of back and fro phone calls and letters to and from my bank which is perfectly innocent in all of this (they really don't money when their cards are DCCed overseas). Void and reprocess is still my preferred way.
And whilst most DCC is nickel and diming
consider the RMB30,000 (US$4,770) golf coupon my parents and one of their friends purchased in Sep 2011 with a 2.64% (US$250) scalp