Buying petrol or diesel at your local supermarket car could cause money issues as a chunk of your money is ‘frozen’.
Living near a supermarket can come with an additional benefit for drivers, beyond having somewhere convenient to pick up your groceries.
Supermarkets are often pretty competitive when it comes to the prices they charge for their petrol and diesel, while they also occasionally offer drivers money off at the pump when they spend a certain amount in store (you can get more tips to save on your fuel here).
Supermarket forecourts are also often pretty convenient in that they regularly offer pay-at-the-pump facilities, making your trip to fill up that much quicker.
However, it has emerged that these trips to the forecourt are coming with a potentially costly sting in the tail for drivers, leading some to be frozen out of spending their own money.
Ringfencing your money
When you opt for a pay-at-the-pump service at your local forecourt, things work a little back to front.
The first thing that you do after pulling up to the pump is put in the card you’re going to be paying with and enter your PIN. You are then authorised to fill up your car and head off on your way once more.
After you enter your card’s PIN, you undergo a pre-authorisation. Essentially the forecourt wants to ensure you have enough money to cover the cost of your fuel ‒ even though you haven’t filled up yet ‒ and puts aside a certain amount of cash from your account.
Once you’ve finished, the idea is that the money that was ringfenced is then used to cover your bill, with any remaining money handed back, should you have spent less.
Sounds simple, right?
I want my money!
Unfortunately, in practice, it’s proving rather troubling at the moment. A host of motorists have come forward with issues after filling up at their local supermarket using a pay-at-the-pump facility.
It appears that rather than ringfencing up to £30, as has tended to happen in the past, instead up to £100 is being taken by the payment firms in that pre-authorisation stage.
That wouldn’t be so bad if the authorisation then went through promptly. But instead we’ve seen a host of drivers having to wait days for the payment to proceed properly.
And that can cause them financial issues. The money is ringfenced ‒ they can’t spend it elsewhere until the payment goes through, meaning their cash is effectively frozen. That could be a big problem if you’re working to a tight budget and really need every penny at your disposal to cover your various day-to-day costs.
Of course, if you can’t get your hands on your own money but there’s an unavoidable expense on the horizon, then you may have little choice but to turn to some form of expensive credit, like a payday loan, to tide you over, which only leads to further money worries down the line.
This is madness
I’m someone that likes to make use of pay-at-the-pump facilities.
They were my preference even before Covid arrived, and have only become more attractive in the current climate. I can pop in my card details, fill up and be on my way without needing to queue up or remember my pump number. Lovely.
I can understand why there needs to be a pre-authorisation check when making use of pay-at-the-pump too. Understandably, the garage wants to be sure that it will be paid for the fuel it’s selling.
But clearly, things have gone wrong with the current setup.
It’s crackers that people are being locked out of spending their own money because it is taking days on end for this authorisation to go through properly.
How on earth can it be fair that if I put £30 into my car, it to all intents and purposes ‘costs’ me £100 until the authorisation concludes? That other £70 is mine and should be at my disposal to spend as I see fit.
It’s not just the potential delays that are an issue here either, but the sum that is being set aside. How many of us put £100 into our cars when filling up?
Yes, there will be some for whom it’s the regular cost, but I struggle to believe that for most drivers it’s the standard amount needed for filling up a motor.
The delays in the authorisation going through wouldn’t be quite so punishing for families, particularly those who are already having to make their money go further as a result of the pandemic if the sums being taken weren’t quite so excessive.
It’s worth emphasising that this isn’t the fault of individual supermarkets, since they aren’t the ones setting the authorisation sums.
Instead, it’s down to Mastercard and Visa, which have said they are working with banks to ensure that the payments are updated in real-time so that drivers aren’t locked out of their cash.
Attempts to introduce higher pre-authorisation sums a few years ago faltered following uproar among drivers.
Going by the line-up of furious drivers coming forward with their own issues this time around, it’s clear that there is plenty of work still to be done by the payments firms if they don’t want to have the ditch the higher figures once more.