Rules are made to be broken

I was having coffee this morning with a wonderful person who works at Visa who I worked with on a project when I was at CyberSource. We were talking about some of the "funny" ( you have to be a payment geek ) things about the payment biz. It always made me chuckle when I ate at a Chinese restaurant that was just down the hill from Visa's offices in San Mateo, where a lot of Visa people ate, and they had a sign like the one in this post about the minimum purchase when paying with a card. Of course, Visa's rules clearly state that merchants are not allowed to have a minimum. I doubt if anyone ever called the merchant on it. Over the years as I have conversed with industry outsiders they viewed these rules as absolutes. I would refer to this story to set them straight.