So much schadenfreude to watch Toast dunk on the restaurant industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The “smartest people in the world” are getting taking for a ride.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dunning and Kruger just look like absolute savants at this point. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Have to love it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most recently we’ve seen Toast payment contracts refer to Toast’s “cost” of payments, and not interchange.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A long time ago (i.e. 2017), there was class litigation levied against Mercury Payments and Global payments<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The litigation asserted that the aforementioned defendants misled merchants, as well as their sales partners, about the definition of interchange.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Interchange is a well-codified term promulgated by the card schemes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s not up for debate, although it can be optimized (i.e. reduced) with level 2 and level 3 data<\/a> for the benefit of the acquirer, who usually never passes these savings downstream to the merchant (or even their sales partners).<\/p>\n\n\n\n In their contracts, Mercury and Global payments represented that merchants would be paying interchange and some additional mark up, when in reality these processors were (“allegedly”, but we all know they do it in practicality) additionally<\/em> padding interchange.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Double-dipping, baby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hard enough to make George Castanza envious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n