Justin Bachman
7 min read
In This Article:
This story was originally published on Payments Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Payments Dive newsletter.
A federal judge has postponed an antitrust trial for several national retailers suing Visa and Mastercard over card swipe fees to next year, prompted by concerns that the prior October trial date would spill into the holiday season.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein moved the previously scheduled Oct. 20 jury trial for several large merchants to April 20, 2026, after he raised a question during a recent pretrial status conference about how long the trial might last, potentially conflicting with the holidays.
In subsequent court filings, lawyers for the merchants asserted that Visa and Mastercard had seized on the judge’s question as the basis of their effort to push the trial into 2026.
Merchants suing the networks — about four dozen companies assembled into three groups of litigants — strongly opposed moving the first of what’s expected to be two trials into next year. Hellerstein’s order came the same week as a federal district judge in Chicago rescheduled a separate trial from May to September 2026 for a different group of merchants suing the networks.
The trials next year cover three groups of plaintiffs that have been litigating against Visa and Mastercard for more than a decade and opted out of a prior multi-billion dollar settlement with the networks over damages.
One group includes merchants such as Marathon Petroleum, apparel retailer Gap and restaurant company Panera Bread, with several of the plaintiffs’ original complaints filed 20 years ago. A second group covers nine merchants, including retailers Macy’s and TJX, the parent of TJ Maxx. While those two groups’ cases are pending in Hellerstein’s New York courtroom, a third case involves the plaintiffs’ group, led by the food delivery business Grubhub, that is pending in Chicago federal court.
Last year, Hellerstein decided that the trial in his court will involve five plaintiff companies from the two merchant groups assigned to his court. Four card-issuing banks are also defendants in the New York trial.
About 30 merchants in the three plaintiff groups have reached independent settlements, including tech giant Amazon, as well as the retailers Costco Wholesale and Lowe’s. Fashion retailer The Talbots was the most recent to settle, in June.
The long-running antitrust cases date to 2005 when merchants sued Visa and Mastercard over alleged violations with respect to setting the interchange rates that retailers, restaurateurs and other merchants pay when consumers use a Visa or Mastercard-branded card.
