Or from another point of view you're now hit with the higher bill even if you choose to pay by a more efficient method. It's debatable whether the EU's rule actually helps cardholders or whether it just protects the card networks and their overpriced payment schemes.
In Australia they allowed merchants to pass on the payment network costs, and a good lot of them did - so you might pay x for cash, x + 0.5% for debit card or EFTPOS (equiv of European EC card) or x + 2.5% for credit card. I think it was partially responsible for a significant reduction in the use of credit cards in the country. But perhaps not the dominance of Visa/Mastercard in POS transactions, since most debit cards are in their network.
At first I hated the rule, but then I realised it was exactly a rule that put the decisions in the hands of the customer and the merchant and took power from the card networks.
(I don't live in Australia at the moment so maybe this is changed. I gather there is now also app-based credit payments which have eaten into Visa/Mastercard's market, both for credit payments and for POS transactions. But how significant, who knows)
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