The lawsuit was filed September 30 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York by The Pizza Standard LLC, the company behind The Pizza Standard at 10462 Clairemont Mesa Boulevard in San Diego's Tierrasanta neighborhood. The 84-count antitrust complaint names Visa and Mastercard entities alongside entities affiliated with Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and Wells Fargo.
"This case challenges a massive, ongoing conspiracy between Visa, Mastercard, and the nation's largest banks to artificially inflate the fees that merchants pay on every credit card transaction," the complaint states.
The lawsuit characterizes the allegedly inflated fees as a "deadweight toll on virtually every credit card purchase in America" and contends that the scale of the alleged scheme is "staggering." According to the complaint, merchants now collectively spend more than $100 billion each year simply to accept Visa and Mastercard credit cards.
The allegations have not been proven, and the lawsuit is in its earliest stages. Representatives for Visa, Mastercard and the banks did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Courthouse News, which first reported on the San Diego pizzeria's lawsuit.
The Pizza Standard opened in 2021 and has developed a loyal local following with a deliberately tiny menu centered around one size of crispy, foldable Brooklyn-style pizza. The neighborhood shop also offers a couple of salads and house-made tiramisu while maintaining relatively limited operating hours.
That 2021 opening date turns out to be particularly significant.
The credit card industry has already faced years of litigation over interchange fees, including a sprawling case that began in 2005 and eventually produced a multibillion-dollar settlement. A roughly $5 billion settlement was approved by a federal judge in 2019 and subsequently affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 2023.
But that settlement covered transactions only through January 24, 2019. The Pizza Standard did not begin accepting Visa and Mastercard until 2021, meaning the San Diego restaurant received no compensation from the earlier settlement.
The new lawsuit is aimed squarely at that gap.
The Pizza Standard contends that millions of businesses that began accepting Visa and Mastercard after the previous settlement's cutoff date, or otherwise paid allegedly inflated fees after that period, have been left without compensation for subsequent charges. A newer proposed settlement in the original litigation would provide certain prospective changes to merchant fees and rules, but the Pizza Standard complaint argues that it would not compensate merchants for the post-2019 fees at issue in the new case.
Despite originating with a neighborhood San Diego pizza shop, the case is being handled by Cohen Milstein, a prominent plaintiffs' class-action law firm with a national antitrust practice. The firm says The Pizza Standard seeks to represent potentially millions of merchants that were not compensated through the earlier settlement.
At the center of the dispute are interchange fees, commonly referred to as swipe fees, that merchants pay when customers use credit cards. While consumers generally never see those charges directly on their receipts, merchants pay fees associated with processing card transactions, expenses that can become substantial for restaurants and other businesses operating on relatively thin margins.
The Pizza Standard alleges that Visa, Mastercard and major banks have unlawfully worked together to maintain artificially inflated interchange and network fees rather than allowing genuine competition to drive those costs down. The defendants have not been found liable for those allegations, and the companies will have an opportunity to challenge the claims as the litigation moves forward.
The pizzeria is asking the federal court to find the defendants liable for alleged violations of federal antitrust law and award damages to the proposed class. The case, The Pizza Standard LLC v. Visa Inc. et al., was assigned Case No. 1:26-cv-06087 and includes a demand for a jury trial.
The sheer disparity between the parties makes the case particularly remarkable from a San Diego perspective. On one side is a neighborhood Tierrasanta restaurant built around a single size of New York-style pizza, and on the other are two of the world's dominant payment networks and some of America's largest financial institutions.
Whether The Pizza Standard ultimately succeeds remains to be determined, and the court has not yet decided whether the case may proceed as a class action. But if the San Diego pizzeria succeeds in pursuing claims on behalf of similarly situated merchants, the dispute could ultimately extend far beyond its modest Clairemont Mesa Boulevard storefront and potentially affect businesses across the country.
For more information about The Pizza Standard, visit thepizzastandard.com.
Originally published on October 7, 2026.
