Two euros demanded at the counter to collect an Amazon parcel — for a service the customer had already paid for, and which the contract with Amazon stipulates should be free. Someone asked about it publicly in a Facebook group, someone else reported it, and the result is that the pickup point will no longer receive parcels. From that moment on, for days, the country didn’t discuss who was pocketing the surcharge: it discussed who had dared to speak up — and decided, by a wide margin, that he was the guilty party.
The mechanism is simple and leaves no grey areas.
A shopkeeper chooses to become a pickup point. Amazon pays them for every parcel delivered.
The customer, who has already paid for shipping, chooses that location because pickup is listed as free. If a two-euro request lands at the counter, that’s a second charge on the same parcel — one the customer never agreed to and couldn’t have foreseen when placing the order.
The technical term for this isn’t “service fee.” It’s a payment demanded outside any agreement.
And here comes the part that deserves an editorial.
“Don’t want to pay two euros? Go to Cerasolo.” “And now they’re even quibbling over the price of the service.” “San Marino residents are so used to getting everything free from the state that they can’t stand paying for anything from a private business.”
And the masterstroke that followed: congratulations to the two-euro heroes, mission accomplished — now go rack up the miles and the fuel, what a flawless saving.
All very witty. All perfectly on the wrong side of the argument.
Because the point was never the amount.
Someone in the comments put it better than any columnist could: it could have been thirty cents, and the principle wouldn’t change by an inch.
Two euros is a laughably small sum, and that’s exactly what makes the whole affair instructive: when the stakes are trivial, the defense can’t hide behind necessity. It stands exposed for what it is.
A community debating whether it’s acceptable to charge outside the terms of an agreement — and concluding that, sure, why not, what’s the harm.
Then comes the reversal, which is the truly astonishing part. The pickup point closed.
Who caused the closure? According to half the group, the people who complained.
Not whoever applied the surcharge: whoever mentioned it. The blame lands on the witness, never on the perpetrator. It’s a logical pattern we know all too well in San Marino, one that resurfaces with striking regularity every time something comes to light: the problem isn’t the conduct, the problem is that people talked about it. Flagging an issue becomes an act of spite.
Asking for a rule to be honored becomes a hostile act against the community.
On one point, though, a firm hand is needed in the other direction too.
Far heavier accusations than the surcharge circulated in the comments: goods imported without paying the monofase tax, undeclared cash earnings, VAT rates. No one produced a document, an audit, a single piece of paper.
We won’t take these at face value, nor will we amplify them, because the instant tribunal of a Facebook group — the one that condemns by comment fourteen and acquits by comment fifteen — is the exact same affliction seen from the other side: deciding based on mood rather than on facts.
An unwarranted surcharge is a documented fact, backed by the contract and the order. An accusation of tax evasion is an accusation, and must be treated as such.
What remains, stripping everything else away, is a community that spent three days establishing that bending a rule is fine as long as it’s cheap and convenient. That honoring a commercial agreement is a fussy obsession for people with nothing better to do.
And that the real troublemaker is the one who raises a hand.
Then, in the middle of that very same discussion, someone wrote that they can’t wait for the agreement with the European Union to be signed, so that people here will finally learn how the world works.
Well, here’s how the world works: when you sign something, you then honor it.
That holds true for a two-thousand-page association treaty, and it holds true for the contract governing a parcel pickup point. Anyone who can’t manage the second one is hard to picture handling the first.
Two euros. It was never about two euros.
