On 1 October, card surcharges were banned across Australia. Some Sydney businesses folded the cost into the menu — fair enough, the till still has to balance. Others raised prices further than the card cost explains. Paid cash? You never paid the surcharge — now check you're not paying for someone else's card bill. We track who raised what, compare it to what the card cost actually was, and publish the maths.
House rules: named only with a receipt · opinion always labelled · 72 hours to reply before any badge sticks.
Prototype edition. Two venues on the public record so far; the tip line is open and the index refreshes every Friday, starting 9 October. Nothing here is for sale — rankings can't be bought, buried, or sponsored. How we're funded is in the footer.
The shame list gets the clicks; this list gets our respect. Businesses that held their prices through the ban — absorbing the card cost instead of quietly moving it into the menu — belong here, at the top, in full.
The ban is one day old and menus are still being reprinted — so this list starts empty, and that's honest, not an accusation. Know a Sydney business that held every price? Send the before-and-after and they go here: above the fold, above the accused, permanently.
Hero criteria: no post-1-October price rise on any item, evidenced by dated menus or receipts. One verified hero outranks ten accused venues in our layout — permanently.
Each venue's observed price rise divided by the card cost it plausibly needed to recover. A score of 1.0 means the rise matches the cost. A score of 11 means the rise was eleven times the cost. The full maths is published here — argue with it, please. Day-one index: two venues on the public record. The ladder fills as sightings clear verification — nothing is scored on vibes.
THE INDEX REFRESHES EVERY FRIDAY. Next edition: Friday 9 October — movement arrows, new sightings, the first Milk Meter suburb cards. Get it in your inbox: The Weekly Till. LAST UPDATED 2 OCT 2026
| Venue | Price move | Index M | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rusty Rabbit CaféDarlinghurst · Cafés
“Raised prices for food and cold drinks by about $2 on average.”— Peter Semaan, owner, via Reuters, 1 Oct 2026 [verified]
EVIDENCE: on-record admission [verified] · receipt corroboration: pending · right-of-reply: invitation pending — no badge publishes before the venue gets 72h · receipt #001
|
~$18.00 → ~$20.00
observed +11.1% (assumes an $18 item — baseline receipt pending)
cost-recovery benchmark +1.0% [estimate]
|
WATCH illustrative: ≈11× on an assumed $18 baseline ($0.18 benchmark vs $2.00 observed) — baseline receipt pending |
Under review Illustrative maths only: ≈11× on an assumed $18 baseline (disclosed). No band moves past WATCH until dated receipts confirm the basket. The quote is verified; the $2 figure awaits a second receipt. |
| Old Mate's Place & Old Love'sSydney · Bars
“100% this will be passed on. I don't know how the government is saying it will result in cheaper prices. It will definitely be factored into prices.”— Dre Walters, owner, via Reuters, 1 Oct 2026 [verified]
EVIDENCE: on-record intent [verified] · menu before/after: requested, not yet received · receipt #002
|
No figure on record yet intent confirmed; amount TBC |
— unscored until evidenced |
Intent on record We don't score intentions. Photograph the menu and we'll do the maths in public. |
| Sample Café, NewtownEXAMPLE ROW — not a real venue
“Flat white $4.80 → $5.50, same week as the ban. Two receipts, dates visible.”— how a cleared community sighting reads
This row demonstrates the format. No real business is named until two evidences + 72h reply.
|
$4.80 → $5.50 observed +14.6% |
14.6× |
Example |
Community sightings stay venue-anonymised until they clear the bar: two independent evidences (dated receipts/menus) plus a 72-hour right-of-reply. Anonymous tips never move a badge. Competitor dob-ins are flagged as such. Why we're this strict →
Now tracking — the big end of town
Supermarkets, petrol stations, parking apps, airline ancillaries: same maths, same two-evidence bar, same 72 hours to reply. First big-merchant scores land in Edition 2. We don't only watch cafés.
One venue, one invoice. Screenshot it — it's built for that.
Not scored, not ranked — but worth remembering. The surcharge era's greatest hits, so nobody rewrites history.
An $18.50 sandwich became $21.27 after a $2.55 weekend surcharge and a 1.2% card fee — with, the customer said, no mention of either on the menu, the board, or at the till. It blew up on Reddit. Weekend and public-holiday surcharges were and still are legal if disclosed; the card fee died with the ban. Filed here as a reminder of what "just a small fee" compounded into.
The annex is a museum, not a courtroom. Nothing here is scored, and nothing pre-ban is held against any venue under the new rules.
Our legal and intellectual shield. Every number on this page is reproducible from what's printed here. If you can break the formula, the tip line takes corrections too.
O is the observed basket rise: the mean price change across a venue's three most-reported items, baseline window 1 Aug – 30 Sep 2026. J is the cost-recovery benchmark: the card cost the venue plausibly needed to recover, per category below. M is the pass-through multiple. We show the dollar comparison beside every multiple, because a ratio looks brutal on a $4.80 coffee and punters think in dollars.
| Desk | J |
|---|---|
| Cafés & takeaway | 1.0% |
| Bars & pubs | 0.8% |
| Retail | 0.5% |
[unverified] estimates from gross card cost minus interchange offset, times card share. Footnoted as ours, never presented as RBA figures. Calibrated against small-merchant total acceptance costs of 0.85–2.00% [RBA/ACCC 2023–24] and the ACCC's $60 → $60.60 ≈ 1% safe harbour. The RBA's 0.1% is the aggregate price effect across the economy — the index deliberately measures venue-level outliers against total card cost, not wholesale interchange. Only outliers get flagged.
| Band | M |
|---|---|
| Hero — price held | ≤ 0.2 |
| Fair — within card cost | ≤ 1.25 |
| Watch — above card cost | 1.25 – 3 |
| Flagged — far above card cost | > 3 |
Bands apply to Tier A/B evidence only: on-record admissions and receipt-corroborated sightings. Intent alone is never scored. Community reports never move a badge while venue-anonymised. "Never surcharged" venues are excluded from scoring — scoring them would be the index's most embarrassing error.
A price rise is not evidence of motive. We report the observed gap between the rise and the card cost — never that a venue "stole" anything or that the ban caused the rise. Rent, wages, beans and power all move too. Venues can publish their own breakdown and we'll re-run the numbers in public.
72 hours' notice before any WATCH or MILKED badge. Replies published word-for-word, unedited, within 48 hours. Corrections appended at equal prominence, never edited away. The log below is empty — we'd like to keep it honest, not empty.
CORRECTIONS LOG: none yet. · RIGHT-OF-REPLY LOG: Rusty Rabbit Café — invitation pending as of 2 Oct 2026. Old Mate's Place / Old Love's — menu evidence requested 2 Oct 2026.
Seen a price creep since the ban? The index runs on your receipts. Five steps, and step four is where we earn your trust.
Before-and-after: menu, receipt, or price board. Dates visible.
Venue, suburb, what changed, and when you noticed.
The form below. No account, no name required.
Two independent evidences, metadata checks, then the venue gets 72 hours to reply.
Cleared venues get a public all-clear. That's the deal.
THIS WEEK: 2 venues on the public record · community sightings awaiting evidence: queue opens with the live tip line · 100% of cleared sightings must be photo-backed. No sighting moves a badge without two dated evidences — why we're this strict.
Report prices and dates only — don't allege dishonesty or motives.
Every Friday: the index moves, new heroes, one milked menu, and where your sightings sit in the 72-hour queue. Free. No paywall, ever — rankings stay free; sponsors pay for the send, never for a score.
Every claim on this page, traced to its source. If a link rots, tell us — that's a correction too.
Two things on offer. Neither buys you a better score — that's the whole point.
An independent audit of your pre- and post-ban pricing. Pass it and you get the badge, the hero listing, and a public audit PDF you can frame.
One venue, ten items, receipt-checked, badge + listing.
Full menu, supplier-cost context, published methodology appendix.
Annual re-check. Lose the badge the year you stop deserving it.
The wall: audits and the index are run on the same public data and the same published maths. Paying for an audit cannot move your score, suppress a sighting, or buy a hero slot you didn't earn. If fewer than ~20 audits a year clear the bar honestly, we shut the program down rather than rubber-stamp it. Delisting is free and automatic the moment evidence shows a rise didn't happen — no business ever pays to leave the index. Audits are fixed-fee and assessed blind: the assessor never sees the venue's index score.
Prototype pricing — invoiced on real letterhead; no payment taken at this stage. Sample audit report (PDF, watermarked) ships with the first edition — the exact deliverable you'd frame.
Interchange got cheaper; your provider's margin might not have. A plain-English comparison of what Sydney venues actually pay now. Free for merchants; providers pay us only if you switch and activate — never for placement.