Comment by amiga386
1 day ago
On the other hand, almost every merchant and waiter in Spain told me, when handing me the card terminal, to select "local currency" (decline the first swindle attempt) then "don't convert" (decline the second swindle attempt). There's obviously some required workflow where they must pass the terminal to the customer, but they are wise to the payment gateway's trick to extract additional value from the transaction. They don't want their customer bilked, or to take the reputational damage when the customer leaves an angry review.
So if your Mexican merchants "don't know" what their terminal says? Either you were their first foreigner, or they're useful idiots, or they know.
I just think they genuinely don't know. I was years into travelling before I learned about this 'trick'.
For my part, I'd just always assumed the charge would be ultimately converted by my bank in any case. Seems obvious now I look back, but I honestly just didn't think about the trick.
Just as an example that gives evidence for this, sometimes you'll go to the same place multiple times and the norm is they ask but occasionally someone won't. So it's not a policy.
I presume the people who don't just don't know about it, don't want to bother me and aren't aware it will make a difference.
> Either you were their first foreigner
He could have merely been the first to do the math and bring it up. I could easily see most tourists overlooking this sort of thing, or not mentioning it because they're already accustomed to it.