The solution by the way is for federal legislatures to make illegal the terms about not charging fees for credit card use. If merchants can pass on part or all of credit card fees we get out of this dystopian situation where credit card companies pay users to use the credit cards and merchants are forced to raise prices for everyone regardless of whether they use a credit card.
> Your No annual fee credit card is costing you $700 a year<p>The title is inaccurate since it's not "your" card costing you $700/year. If you got rid of your card and switched to paying for everything in cash you'd still pay just as much, as the prices are the same and card fees aren't (usually) passed on to the customer, while losing the benefits you get from the card.<p>And of course going cash-only isn't a panacea, as cash is actually rather expensive for retailers to handle. Cash registers, counting & recounting, "shrinkage", secure storage on-site, transportation to & from a bank… it all adds up. Electronic payments are safer & cheaper to implement; we just need more competition to keep prices down.<p>The surprising thing to me is that the payment processors are blaming the prices increases on fraud control. Weren't the recent changes to chipped cards & contactless payments mostly aimed at making fraud more difficult by design and thus <i>reducing</i> the need for the more expensive anti-fraud measures?
This market is a natural monopoly and it’s no surprise it has few competitors. Imagine how frustrating credit cards would be if there were 40 competing companies and each merchant accepted a different 25 of them. Merchants benefit greatly from only having to deal with a small handful of credit card companies. Yes there are also costs but it seems a bit disingenuous to ignore all the benefits from the current situation.
Visiting family in Britain for the first time in a few years I was surprised to be presented with a card machine by default even when buying a pint in a pub.<p>Tap and pay in the U.K. is super fast in comparison with the glacially slow implementations in the US. I’ve had no reason to take out cash here whereas in the US I always carry it since it’s preferred in bars and small shops (which often have a $15 minimum.)
I agree that the fees charged to the merchants, and the policies they enforce on merchants are a bad thing. Though there continues to be competition who bring innovations. In the US I know Square is not the only option for point of sale transactions, just the quickest example that comes to my mind. MercadoPago POS in Latin America. Then all the many options for internet transactions which started with PayPal over 20 years ago.
You basically get all of that back with a decent rewards or cash-back card, plus you get the protections of buying with a credit card, and some of them are no fee.