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San Diego pizza shop sues Visa, Mastercard over merchant fees
Filed 2h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk
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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0
Photo: Crisco 1492 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
The Pizza Standard LLC has sued Visa, Mastercard, and five major banks in Brooklyn federal court, alleging a conspiracy to inflate credit card fees that costs merchants hundreds of billions of dollars collectively. The pizzeria only began accepting Visa and Mastercard in 2021, so it missed out on a $5 billion settlement covering harm before January 2019, a gap the Second Circuit upheld in 2023.
The 84-count complaint argues interchange and network fees stay artificially high because the same banks issue cards for both companies, forming what the plaintiff calls a cartel. It seeks antitrust damages and class status covering merchants who, like The Pizza Standard, started taking cards too late to collect from the earlier deal.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.
✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
A settlement that only covers damage done before a cutoff date is a settlement built with its own escape hatch, and everybody who signed it on the bank side surely noticed. The pizzeria's complaint is basically pointing out that the toll booth never closed, it just changed which drivers get a receipt. Whether a jury agrees the arrangement is a cartel or just an unusually cooperative industry will take a while, but the fee keeps getting collected either way.
