I dug around a bit in the public paper trail to find out who exactly bought and paid for this law to screw over everyday consumers.

The answer boils down to greedy monopolies with political connections being afraid of competition.

The corpos behind the mask.

The main driving force that pressured the European Commission to kill the de minimis threshold and forced you to pay 3 euros for a 2 euro pack of double adhesive stickers is a massive monopolistic corporate lobby group in Brussels called EuroCommerce.

They ran an aggressive, well funded lobbying campaign called the #Compliance4All. They did this because they were absolutely terrified of people buying affordable goods directly from global sellers instead of paying their bloated monopoly markups.

When you look at who actually sits on the governing body for this lobby, you will find Europe's biggest retail and grocery monopolies pulling the strings. According to their official website, this nasty group is packed with corporate lobbyists, including:

Parent Corporate Member	Key Retail Brands & Subsidiaries	Annual Revenue
Schwarz Group	Lidl, Kaufland, PreZero	€185.6 Billion
REWE Group	BILLA, REWE, Penny, Toom Baumarkt, BIPA	€100.4 Billion
Ahold Delhaize	Albert Heijn, Delhaize, Alfa Beta, Mega Image, Maxi, Albert	€92.35 Billion
Carrefour Group	Carrefour, Carrefour Market, Express, Atacadão, Cora, Match	€91.48 Billion
Tesco PLC	Tesco, Tesco Express, One Stop	€82 Billion
Inditex	Zara, Pull&Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius	€36 Billion
H&M Group	H&M, COS, Monki, Weekday, & Other Stories, ARKET	€21 Billion
Colruyt Group	Colruyt, Okay, Spar	€11.19 Billion

They successfully convinced the EU to pass this law to bully us back into their stores and buy their heavily marked up crap.

How We can legally fight back:

Don't let them force you back into their overpriced supermarkets and clothing stores. And share this with your friends. Use filters to buy products that are being shipped from Europe.

Boycott the likes of Schwartz and Zara and buy from local stores. Going to small so called "Mom-and-pop" stores for necessities keeps the money in your local community and puts it in your neighbors pockets, not those of some greedy corporation that does everything it can to skip taxes and stifle real competition. Many of these disgusting corporations already squeeze local farmers massively so they can make massive margins on dairy and other products. They are already in hot water with regulators for monopolistic practices.

Demand that these monopolies be hit with extra taxes, like a progressive retail tax, since many of them like Schwarz already have bad reputations for unfair competition and many national level politicians in the EU want to hit THEM with extra taxes you can support whoever wants to put such a law in place.

If you must shop there stay away from big ticket items like clothing and power tools and make sure you aggressively buy discounted necessities only.

Spread the word and tell everyone what disgusting lobbying these corrupt, monopolistic thieves and middlemen are up to. While you are at it, remind everyone how this cartel squeezes small farmers and shops constantly.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, so make sure you spread this message far and wide!

Starve them out and punish them.

So yesterday my wife and I boarded 759 Flughafen Zürich - Wangen Dorfplatz. There were few seats left, so we were far from the only ones. (If it matters to some, I swiped the FairTiq before entering the bus, and wife did swipe the SBB Easy ride comfortably before the bus started.)

Then, after a some stops (people going on and off), there were like 15 persons on the bus. Two of them turned to be ticket controllers.

They engaged us and checked our tickets and found them ok.

So far so good.

But, for some reason (which I am looking for), we were the only one they checked. Then they joked with few other passengers and left on the next stop.

Now I am sure that legally (incl. SBB/ZVV internal acts) they have right to pick up some passengers but would really want to know what triggered them.

• That we were the only ones with suitcases?
• That we were speaking (quietly enough, I had problems hearing my wife) in another language?

(And most of the other passengers promptly produced their phones when the control was announced, and the two of them could easily check some 4 additional passengers before their stop.)