Important context: this is US thing. EU capped interchange fees at 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit cards.
So in US card processing is x5-x10 more expensive.
59percentmore
Things that are more expensive in the US for no reason:
Healthcare
Internet access
College
sighs and adds "The very act of making a purchase"
At least we have cheap gas? farts
pjc50
Healthcare and college are "Baumol cost disease": because they depend on skilled workers, much of that is the same as "American salaries are higher than in the rest of the world", and unlike manufacturing or software (+) you can't outsource it to lower-wage countries.
(+) there still seems to be a massive wage premium for "being physically in a San Francisco office" even if most of the work is being done by an AI, which cannot be sustainable
sharts
I dunno, telehealth with foreign doctors while maybe in-person nurses could lower costs substantially.
avadodin
You can make all sort of excuses but we literally felt bad for 1:1 exchange students paying 2k a month while we paid 2k a year.
Their education was not 10x ours and their economy was only a few % over ours per capita.
sharemywin
because code is only a small part of software development. don't forget ping pong tables. lol. I'm both making a valid point and making fun of it too.
porkpieshoe
If it was this simple, then high costs would be limited to the labor-driven portion of the bills.
This is not the case.
joenot443
Bit for bit, internet access is cheaper in America than it is in Canada or Australia.
Canadians like myself have ~40% of our provincial taxes spent on healthcare, so in my case about ~8% of my gross income. Somewhere in the tune of $20k/yr. While I was living in Seattle and filing American, quite a bit less of my gross income went to healthcare. Just food for thought.
StrauXX
But that is not because it's less efficient. With the Canadian system being socialzed and 20k$ being just 8% of your income it is to be expected that you would pay moch more than the median person into the system.
59percentmore
"I make $250k CAD a year, my experiences must be representative of, and relevant to, the masses," is a wild thought to have.
Well, maybe I spoke too soon, because my private American healthcare turns out to also be about 8% of my gross income (of $60k)(before copays and my deductible)(and also it's crap). Twinsies!
But yes I agree that it would be awful to have my health needs taken care of and a mere ~160k USD left to spend on everything else.
joenot443
Oh I certainly don’t think it’s representative to that of the masses, I was sharing an anecdote.
I think either way both of us are in really good shape. In my experience the quality of American care is better in nearly every regard (having experienced both pretty intimately), but the simplicity and the peace of mind of the Canadian system has its benefits too. In either case you end up paying.
> But yes I agree that it would be awful to have my health needs taken care of and a mere ~160k USD left to spend on everything else.
I’m confused - do you actually think it’s awful?
bluealienpie
I think the main issue that the NHS model of 10+ years ago worked when fully funded. The Canadian model is a mix match of US healthcare and Medicare. Some drugs aren’t covered, some procedures take forever, and you don’t get guaranteed doctor. Many European healthcare system have solved the issues we have, but Canada has refused to adopt any sensible system.
59percentmore
You're being disingenuous. You clearly meant your anecdote to be representative, at least for "Canadians like [yourself]". But I suspect that it was meant to be a broader statement, and you're only backtracking now because the ridiculousness of that notion is apparent.
>I think either way both of us are in really good shape.
I'm lying in bed with non-specific upper abdominal discomfort that I'm hoping isn't related to digestive issues (pancreatic) that I've had for years, but which I can't get treated for because my insurance-related circumstances have made it very difficult to get consistent access to, and then to be taken seriously by, relevant specialists. These issues have combined with chronic injuries that were poorly managed in their acute phase and poor access to quality nutrition to make it difficult for me to exercise consistently. Contrarily and consequently, I'm quite out-of-shape.
The best and most consistent care I've ever gotten was while I was on Medicaid (which was still yet hampered by the professional stigma against accepting Medicaid and treating Medicid patients well).
>In my experience the quality of American care is better in nearly every regard (having experienced both pretty intimately
You experienced the quality of care available to rich people. That quality of care is not widely available, not for lack of institutional capacity, but primarily due to lack of profit.
>I’m confused
I really don't think you are.
InsideOutSanta
> Canadians like myself have ~40% of our provincial taxes spent on healthcare
Worth noting that taxes in the US are a lot lower than they should be because a large portion of government expenses are financed with debt. Canada owns over 400B in US debt, so that's Canada "subsidizing" US taxes.
Also, yes, that's how healthcare works: when you're young and less sick, you tend to pay more than you get out of it, and then it reverses as you get older.
goalieca
Canada has a huge debt problem at the provincial and federal level. The provincial level even covers for the cities spending problems.
NewJazz
What do you mean "quite a bit less of my gross income went to healthcare"? Are you factoring in the insurance premiums paid by your employer? For many people that is both an invisible and significant health care cost.
corranh
That’s pretty comparable actually. The most recent quote I received for private healthcare in the US was just under $2,000 per month ($24,000 per year).
bvanheu
there is a big chunk of people who wouldn't afford healthcare in the USA but still have access to in Canada. I don't mind paying more taxes if this means everyone has healthcare access.
Gormo
Internet access isn't particularly expensive in the US.
Healthcare, education, and housing are expensive in the US for the same primary reason: political interventions that simultaneously subsidize demand and restrict supply.
red-iron-pine
it is for what you get. the US LEC and CLEC system sucks, and I had wayyyy more options in the EU, and in fairly upfront and straightforward ways.
The EU doesn’t have the challenging scope and geography of the US, no?
db48x
The problem in the US is less of a geography problem and more of a regulatory one. Many towns and cities in the US gave the cable companies local monopolies back in the 50s and 60s. There are technical reasons why this worked ok (not well but perhaps better than the alternatives) for television, but now that the same rules have stretched to apply to delivery of internet access they no longer have any technical basis. So at this point they’re just a barrier to competition and exist only to raise prices.
The good news is that modern fiber systems blow cable internet out of the water. It is far cheaper to supply symmetric gigabit internet to every customer over fiber than over cable. Fiber just has more bandwidth to go around. And because it’s a different technology it is not subject to the same local monopolies that cable is encumbered with. This means that the free market is correcting the problem and has been for a decade. In many parts of the country it is now possible to get internet that is faster and cheaper than what is available in the even the best built parts of Europe. The main obstacle to that build–out is probably local permitting. Many large cities require new permits, with public comment periods for each and every one of them, for every single block that an ISP lays fiber for. Cities like San Francisco have imposed a glacial pace on their ISPs.
toast0
> And because it’s a different technology it is not subject to the same local monopolies that cable is encumbered with.
Exclusive francise agreements between municipalities and cable operators have been outlawed since 1992. But it's generally uneconomic to overbuild a new network with the potential to touch every home unless a large portion will subscribe.
Fiber internet is typically much better than cable internet, but cable internet is good enough for most people, so they're unlikely to switch unless it's significantly cheaper, which it often isn't -- especially since local incumbents tend to lower prices or rollout better service when a new entrant is entering the market (or announces they will ... Google Fiber city selection announcements drove lots of competing rollouts even though Google didn't install anything in those cities).
Regulation requiring wholesale access / line sharing / or strict separation of first mile and service infrastructure would allow for competition in service and routing, without having to build a 3rd last mile network. Congress did this in 1996, but the FCC walked it back for cable, the courts said if it doesn't apply to cable, it doesn't apply to telephone, and the FCC said internet over power lines exists and provides competition despite the lack of providers. Congress never came back to make clear that it wanted line sharing, so it disappeared from the mainstream.
I have municipal fiber where the municipality handles last mile only and I have a choice of IP service providers. But installation was very expensive and monthly service is also expensive relative to the ILEC and the cable company, although the cable company service on my street ends before it reaches me.
The cable and telephone companies have a major cost advantage that they can rebuild their networks with a good expectation of customer uptake; and they're allowed to manage the finances of build out however they see fit. The muni fiber (in my state anyway) has to bill customers for the costs of install and even if it could self-finance a build out to service all homes, wouldn't see a lot of uptake because most people find their current service to be good enough.
59percentmore
The federal government subsidized a planned, massive fiber build-out almost 3 decades ago. The telcos pocketed the money and then refused to complete the build-out, complaining that the last mile was too expensive. Municipalities pull teeth and the telcos have slowly rolled out to-home fiber piecemeal in the intervening years, as the local capacity to handle their extortionate rates appears. Alternatively, they will lay cable to your unconnected house/neighborhood for payments in the six- and seven-figure range.
Where we are is very much not a function of the free market.
db48x
Oh, I agree. There are huge distortions that have delayed the roll out of fiber internet by decades. But money talks, and ISPs are now building huge fiber networks in some parts of the country in spite of the best efforts of our government. I subscribe to Ziply Fiber (<https://ziplyfiber.com/internet>) which is building a large network in the Pacific Northwest that provides superb service to millions. They’re not perfect, but they’ll provide up to 50Gbps (symmetric) service to residential customers across four states. Compared to Comcast/Xfinity, which tops out at 2Gbps × 300Mbs, Ziply is amazing. That’s the free market fixing the problem in spite of the distortions introduced by local monopolies.
And that competition is definitely a good thing. Xfinity’s offering was far worse before they had competition because there was no incentive to offer anything better. They’ve even introduced a new idea to the market in order to win people back away from fiber: guaranteed fixed prices for five years. No surprises when promotional rates expire, no price increases, no shenanigans at all for five whole years. That alone is a breath of fresh air compared to their own business practices of just a year or two ago. Ziply had to respond by lowering their prices and ending promotional rates because they were losing customers. You know the old saying: as iron sharpens iron, so too does man sharpen man.
It would be better, of course, if the government were not mismanaging things. Switzerland’s solution is the better way to go than what we have today. Their government paid to build a nation–wide fiber network, and any ISP can service any customer on that network. That allows ISPs to compete on price and features without worrying about having to build their own competing and overlapping network. This is already how electric service works in many states, so it’s not even like we can’t make it work.
59percentmore
It's not the government, and I'm calling bullshit on your narrative because there's no mention of municipal fiber, and the industry's successful lobbying to make it illegal in most of the country. THAT would have been REAL competition.
>Their government paid to build a nation–wide fiber network
So did we. The last step is nationalizing that network and finishing the build-out in-house.
db48x
Municipal fiber exists in some places, but not most. It’s actually fairly common up here in the Pacific Northwest. Dozens of towns dotted around the map have their own municipal fiber networks, but Ziply serves more customers than all of them combined. Thus I say that the free market is fixing the problem that the government created. Another good example is Starlink. They provide service to millions in very rural areas that are out of reach of other ISPs.
When we paid for national broadband access here in the US, it was not for fiber to the home. It was for DSL. Worse, the FCC measured coverage not by service address as it does today, but by census district. The phone companies merely had to assert that they could provide service to an address in the district and the FCC would count the whole district as covered. The districts aren’t very big, so in dense areas that was not a bad estimation. In less dense areas it was just a giant loophole. They could provide service to one house on the edge of the district and not bother with the hundreds of homes miles away out in the countryside. Officially we got exactly what we paid for.
As you say we could still nationalize these fiber networks and stitch them together into a real national network. Of course they don’t all use exactly the same technology, and it would be a huge political fight, but in principle I could see a government agency gradually buying networks from the ISPs and integrating them. Of course you know that if Trump proposes it then the Democrats will immediately oppose it on the general principle that Trump proposed it.
xyzelement
// subsidize demand and restrict supply
I have never seen anyone articulate this so crisply.
The government has created a situation with the student loans thing where basically anyone can borrow 500k to get an obviously useless degree.
Are the colleges going to ensure they collect that money? Obviously yes.
Gormo
> The government has created a situation with the student loans thing where basically anyone can borrow 500k to get an obviously useless degree.
The point applies even to the useful degrees, and more broadly to the universities irrespective of any particular degree program. Student loans and scholarships make demand almost completely inelastic -- totally insensitive to price increases. Universities compete to attract the best students, and a major mechanism for doing that is to invest in non-academic amenities, such that tuition prices are funding much more than literal tuition. Combine these two factors together, and you have a feedback loop of continuous price inflation.
Similar factors are at work in the healthcare and housing sectors, with the most important element being that external subsidies eliminate price elasticity on the demand side of the equation, and completely obliterate the dynamics that ensure downward price pressure in normal markets.
gnz11
You can add Pre-K education to that list. It's on par in terms of costs with sending your kids to college.
xyzelement
This is why people are moving out of the US in droves, the universities are empty and nobody goes to the doctor.
api
Internet access sort of has a reason: the US is geographically huge and more sprawled out. But that's not enough to explain all of the difference.
mrguyorama
Why was that not a problem in the mid 1800s when we crisscrossed the entire country with railroads and telegraph cables?
Sure is funny how FDR had us spend a little cash 100 years ago to ensure even the remotest farm gets electricity, and we already gave ISPs a shitload of cash to do the same, but now "We can't" build telephone poles to rural places. Even though those same places already have telephone poles for power and telephone.
AT&T was able to leverage it's monopoly position and defense industry relationship to basically invent everything that runs the modern world (and were compelled to license those advancements out) while modern monopolies can't even dig some holes.
Sounds like we need some more "Consent Decrees" and a DoJ that makes large companies scared.
We damned every single river in the nation. We built so much railroad that it crashed the industry. We built those railroads purposely in places where nobody lived and then willed towns into existence around them. We built the interstate highway system.
Why can we suddenly not build anything? Maybe it's because people keep insisting, against all historical evidence, that we can't, and they don't even try.
Ekaros
That really explains only small parts. Even the horrible suburbs have little real reason to be that expensive. In the end it is really about lacking actual free market and enabling corporate capture as voted by the voters.
stefanfisk
That’s not the reason. The required build out has actually already been been paid for: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5.... But the US is so politically broken that corporations could just pocket the money without actually providing the infrastructure.
> the US is geographically huge and more sprawled out.
There is ample historical evidence that this is a poor excuse.
Long ago, leaders in the US understood the value of universality. You'll likely recognize this as the Network Effect, Metcalfe's Law, etc. Back in the day, they called this "universal service." That thinking was central to the policies established for both electrification and phone service in the US: it wasn't then, and isn't now, truly universal, but what could be feasibly accommodated was, even when costs were/are quite high.
It wasn't lost on the people of those times that such policies inherently meant the cost of including sparsely populated, distant areas would be subsidized by concentrated areas. Before those systems appeared, the founders welded the same thinking into the US constitution in the form of the US postal service, with exactly the same knowledge and concerns.
We've lost that. The change happened prior to the advent of the internet. You're free to attribute this to whatever you wish; I won't offer my view on that, except to say there are no innocents: every argument that fingers ebil capitalists can be countered by examples of urban leaders damning government policies that subsidize non-urbanites. What I know with certainty is, if packet switched networking was somehow a thing in the 19th century, availability would be a given for almost any structure more significant than a hunting cabin in the US today, complete with common carrier, service baselines and rates established with clarity.
alistairSH
That might explain internet pricing in North Dakota, but it doesn't explain it in NYC or DC or LA.
joenot443
I pay $40/mo for 500mbps in my Bushwick apartment - is that considered expensive?
alistairSH
By US standards? No, probably not.
But, a quick search indicates you can get similar broadband in Glasgow, Scotland for ~15 GBP/month. And Rome, Italy looks like ~25EUR/month.
stefanfisk
I’m in Stockholm, and our condo HOA (BRF) includes 1Gbps per unit in the fee for all units because billing individually would cost more in admin than the service itself. We have FTTP and then cat6 to each unit.
Symbiote
In Copenhagen mine is billed individually, and is 75kr for 1Gb/s. About $10.
Otherwise the same system.
joenot443
That sounds really convenient! Is it a new building? I know the odd American or Canadian build will have that, but only the newer and more expensive ones.
stefanfisk
The building is from the 1940s.
But this is a pretty common setup for condos in Swedish cities. Rentals usually have access to the same infrastructure but at higher prices due to kickbacks demanded by the landlords from the ISPs.
The backbone of it all is a state owned fiber connecting the cities together with municipal fiber.
But even outside of the cities FTTP is quite common. There are companies which specialize in finding rural areas where there’s enough interest to justify the cost of connecting them and then coordinating getting an economic association setup to own and manage the local infrastructure.
Hikikomori
I had that in Sweden 20 years ago. Typically our local municipality put fiber whenever they dug up anything, so fiber is everywhere.
whizzter
This is something to underscore, US people always talks about how "big and sprawling" the US is, but there's fiber at my fathers house in Northern Sweden that's in an area with similar population density to Wisconsin or whatever rural US state you want to pick.
Some kind of city(iirc) managed fiber and he can switch commercial operators (And speeds/prices) by contacting them to get new terms, that's an actually free market.
marcyb5st
Just did my internet contract for my apartment in rural Italy (a town of around 2k people in the Verona province). 1Gb symmetric is indeed 25EUR/month. I added a few stuff on top like static IPv4 and reached 32EUR/month.
dawnerd
I’m paying 100 bucks for 2.5gb fiber in socal. I don’t consider that expensive either. I’ve seen internet prices internationally and they kinda suck outside of some areas that have decent providers - but that goes for the US too.
tiffanyh
To be more specific, this is a US credit card topic.
Debit card fees are capped in the US, yet I’ve never received a discount from a merchant for paying with debit instead of credit.
As such, I just pay with credit and have never understood this argument.
post-it
That's what makes it a wealth transfer, from debit card users to you.
kevin_thibedeau
I stuck to a debit card for decades but got tired of the discrimination after it was rejected by the IRS as validation for COVID stimulus. Gas stations could be problematic. Canada could be problematic. Everything works with a credit card. If you are a responsible spender you may as well reap the benefit of the wealth transfer.
iso1631
In my country card fees are less than cash fees, so I guess that's a wealth transfer from card payers to cash payers?
tiffanyh
That’s a great point.
Managing cash for a merchant also brings real costs as well.
You have to take it to the bank or pay a service to pick up cash. You’re way more likely to have “leakage” when any cashier can pocket cash. Etc
SkiFire13
The costs of credit cards are higher in part because of the reward programs for using such cards. That's where the wealth transfer happens, and there's nothing like this for cash.
KolmogorovComp
> As such, I just pay with credit and have never understood this argument.
Because the merchant pass the higher processing cost to all customers.
rcxdude
And often the credit card companies try to enforce this by writing wording into their contracts that try to stop merchants offering different prices for different payment methods.
hunter-gatherer
This is true. In fact, if you come across a merchant that accepts credit with a minimum purchase amount or tacks an extra fee, you can take the receipt and call the terminal owner (visa/MasterCard) and report it. The receipt has a terminal ID, and it turns out the likes of Visa get really pissed if merchants do that.
I know this because I used to work on a US military base. There was a sole merchant on a particular installation that was doing this, but it was extreme. They'd force you to buy over 10 USD if you wanted to use a card, and it was the only place to grab a snack. One day there terminal was shut down, and for a period they only went to cash payments. Once they took credit again they removed the minimum purchase. Turns out somebody got pissed, and reported them.
Regarding the article, the ~390 USR sounds about right to me. I only use a credit card, pay it completely off at the end of the month. I've never once paid interest since in the 8 years I have used this card. Every few years I buy a plan ticket with the rewards.
adastra22
This was struck down. That's why you see so many cash/debit card discounts now.
ValentineC
> In fact, if you come across a merchant that accepts credit with a minimum purchase amount or tacks an extra fee, you can take the receipt and call the terminal owner (visa/MasterCard) and report it. The receipt has a terminal ID, and it turns out the likes of Visa get really pissed if merchants do that.
This also varies by country, but I think Visa/Mastercard relented on it in many jurisdictions.
In Australia, for example, merchants have been allowed to add on credit card fees everywhere, and their card readers automatically tack on the fee when they detect a credit card.
rcxdude
Yeah, it propagates the problem because the price signal never makes it to the consumer.
borski
That is not true. This hasn’t been the law for many years.
gcr
In NYC, most independent shops give a debit card discount / credit card surcharge.
rowls66
Card network rules in the US prohibit merchants from adding a surcharge for payment with a debit card. Most merchants are either unaware, or prefer not to care. If you are using a debit card at a business that assesses a card surcharge, point out that your card is a debit card when paying and refuse to pay the surcharge. If that does not help, there are online forms available from both Mastercard and Visa where you can submit a merchant complaint.
StrauXX
The card processors policies are anti-competetive (albeit legal) abuses of their oligopoly. Reporting small vendors to them does not seem right to me.
It used to be true, but this changed many years ago.
cpburns2009
Places around me have been starting to itemize the credit card fee. Only car dealerships so far have waived the fee for debit over credit in my experience.
ghaff
It's not unheard of. Gas sometimes. My car dealer for one. (Whether it's a credit surcharge or a debit discount is semantics.) Though with the cashback on my usual credit card I use for domestic credit card purchases, the difference is pretty much not worth worrying about.
sandmn
I think it's true for most businesses with single transaction being big enough - car dealerships, child care, rent. On the other hand many of them are not happy with cash either because processing cash also incur fees that are not nesessarily less than credit card fees. Most businesses that prefer to take cash are smaller ones because most likely they won't report it.
ipython
Until 2013, visa and Mastercard forbade merchants from charging more for credit card payments if they accept their credit cards.
lazide
And it wasn’t out of the goodness of their hearts that they changed - they finally lost enough big court cases over it, it was to avoid heavy handed legislation.
greenavocado
Once ever I was requested to either pay cash or via debit in a cafe in Montreal
fHr
Good for you as you're smart but less smart people don't do this and then get scammed legally.
gorgmah
It's partly true: this only applies to consumer cards. That's why many EU banks still offer corporate credit cards with huge cashback etc. For example, revolut offers no cashback in France on their metal cards if you have a consumer account, but up to 1% cashback on the same card if you have a "freelance" account. https://www.revolut.com/fr-FR/metal/
Second thing: interchange fees are not the only fees that your typical store has to pay, the total fees are much higher. I think the EU essentially capped Visa/Mastercard profit in the EU, more than they capped small business fees for card payment.
toast0
> That's why many EU banks still offer corporate credit cards with huge cashback etc. For example, revolut offers no cashback in France on their metal cards if you have a consumer account, but up to 1% cashback on the same card if you have a "freelance" account.
If 1% is huge, that's a lot better. 2% cashback is my baseline for normal in the US and I currently use a 4% on everything card (no longer available for new customers).
I don't like the cashback system, but the economics insist I use it while it's available.
Steve44
> That's why many EU banks still offer corporate credit cards with huge cashback et
We're a business in the UK and the charges for accepting Business credit cards is much higher.
I don't have current charges to hand, but in 2023 Personal Credit Cards were 1.97% whilst for Business Credit Cards we were charged 3.43%. That's probably how they afford such high cashback/loyalty schemes.
I think we're paying about half those rates now. I know Amex is somewhere between Personal and Business charges.
gorgolo
Never heard about this before but it sounds crazy. Are you able to control this somehow, like reject business cards?
Steve44
I don't think we can selectively reject them, it's not anything I've looked into though so not certain about that.
Although we are a B2B business, most of our card transactions are from business owners personal cards so it's not really an issue. We occasionally monitor the split and if it became significant we'd need to look at addressing it, probably by increasing prices for those customers.
Symbiote
In Denmark many retailers pass on the charge for business cards. For example it's often printed on the bottom of a restaurant menu.
arpinum
EU only capped fees for 4 party systems, and only for consumer credit cards. business credit cards and 3 party systems (American Express for example) are not part of the cap and you can get more rewards with these card types.
foepys
Quite a few places do not accept Amex and many that do probably don't know they do or they would disable it.
JKCalhoun
In Germany I saw they charged extra for using my credit card. A U.S. retailer told me the credit card companies won't allow that in the U.S.?
wookmaster
They charge you extra, they just make it invisible. The store has to pay the fees and it causes prices to go up for everyone to cover them.
toast0
> A U.S. retailer told me the credit card companies won't allow that in the U.S.?
That used to be the case, but it's not current. Merchants can charge a credit card fee, and many do. Many merchants near me (washington state) don't, but those that do add a fixed fee of 1-3% for credit.
hypeatei
They can't make it an explicit line item of "3% surcharge" or whatever. Instead, the business will raise prices across the board and offer a "cash discount" of 3%
Torkel
How does it work if I have a US credit card and use it abroad? Do I still get the kickback even though the merchant fee is capped?
This feels like a potential arbitrage opportunity... I live in Sweden, but if I can use a US credit card I can get high rewards?
tiffanyh
Issuing banks typically add an FX fee to the cardholder for cross border transactions. Not always, but many times they do.
tialaramex
Even if the FX is notionally "free" they pick the rates. So they can set those rates to generate exactly the same profit for them as with fees.
You will probably not see rates that are even competitive with a dodgy FX cash place at an airport, let alone with the numbers you've seen on financial networks for what FX transactions by banks cost, but you feel happy because there was "no fee".
gruez
>they pick the rates. So they can set those rates to generate exactly the same profit for them as with fees.
>> Your bank may or may not use the rate indicated by this calculator to bill you
---
(As a side note: the fine print follows up with this:
>> If your transaction is converted by the merchant or ATM operator, the exchange rate indicated by this calculator will not apply.
Don't ever let a merchant or ATM do foreign currency conversion for you. They charge astronomically high fees without exception. Pay in the foreign currency and let your card do the conversion.)
tialaramex
Huh. I wonder how long that's been true. I guess I haven't been to America since last century, but I could have sworn I had zero fee but unreasonable FX rates when I was in Poland which can't have been more than 25 years ago.
brainwad
The issuer can opt out of the card network Forex and do it themselves. That's how Revolut and Wise work.
ValentineC
I think there are some regulations around this, because many card-issuing banks would love to use their crappy rates if they could.
thaumasiotes
> You will probably not see rates that are even competitive with a dodgy FX cash place at an airport
You're crazy.
I have a Capital One account because they advertised "no foreign transaction fees". I checked on my foreign-currency payments and was always charged an amount that looked eerily similar to "1% more than you would have paid at the published exchange rate", so it's not clear to me why they say "no fee" and not "1% fee".
But the 1% fee that they actually have is very reasonable. An airport stall is in an entirely different league.
decimalenough
This is flat out incorrect. It's actually quite difficult to get a cash FX rate that's even close to as good as the standard credit card FX rate, which is also set by Visa/MC and not the banks.
Where the banks do get their pound of flesh, though, is the foreign transaction surcharge, which is often around 3%. No-fee cards exist but you need to look for them. And a whole new set of charges applies to doing a foreign cash advance on a credit card.
nutjob2
This is misleading. Banks put a fee on foreign transactions, many do this even if the transaction is in the card's native currency.
The card companies always add a margin to FX conversions, usually in the 0.5% range. This is fairly benign since the market rate can move between the transaction and the settlement, so sometimes you save money.
the__alchemist
I think this is generally mitigated: When traveling, people use the card that doesn't have this fee. You have cards A and B. Has a fee; B doesn't. At home you use either. When traveling, you use B.
Symbiote
In Denmark most retailers will pass on the surcharge they get from accepting a foreign (non-EU) card with higher fees.
You see at the bottom of restaurant menus a note stating this.
It also applies to Danish business credit cards, as those aren't covered by the consumer credit card fee limits.
decimalenough
Most credit cards charge fat fees for foreign transactions (3% is common) and make some extra money on the exchange rate as well.
evandijk70
A lot of places in the Netherlands (particularly the low margin ones like supermarkets) don't accept credit cards.
AnssiH
At least in Finland merchant contracts often specify higher rates for non-EU cards.
LastTrain
Yes, you have outsmarted the entire US credit card industry and all of their actuaries!
criddell
How generous are credit card rewards in the EU?
skeletal88
There are basically none, because the fees are low and card issuers are not allowed to rob retailers with insane fees. If you have a cafe or restaurant where margins are already low then it would be crazy to pay additional 2-3% tax on every payment.
No one wants to accept amex here.
amarcheschi
With sumup I get 0.5% cashback up to a whopping 10€/ month lol. There are other cards giving cashback, I think Amex blu has a 1% with no upper bound of monetary cashback
LeonidasXIV
Amex has very spotty acceptance rate in Europe.
AnssiH
My understanding is that they are much less generous on average compared to U.S.
E.g. for now I have the most premium card offered by my bank (50€/mo), and it gets me extra product insurance, rental car insurance, travel insurance, free lounge access, and some other things like that, but no cashback or similar.
I think some premium cards do offer cashback nowadays, but they are in the minority. Some cards also offer airline reward points. My experience is limited to Finland, though.
Hikikomori
US are not generous either. Merchant increase prices by 5% to cover costs, you get 2.5% cashback and visa/your bank pockets the other 2.5% you're paying.
bluebarbet
Presumably not very, because the large majority of Europeans do not use credit cards.
SXX
I'd say it heavily depend on country. In some of them they are popular, but in others even debit cards is something only few people have.
SXX
Normal cards not very generous. Fintech can sometimes give 1% cashback capped at 30-50-100 EUR.
Some weird crypto stuff can give more cashback, but it mostly for scheming nerds.
edent
In the UK (which broadly follows the same rules), I get 0.25% with a Visa and 1.25% with Amex. Sometimes there are introductory offers for a few months.
Symbiote
And as a result of that, Amex is often not accepted.
rsynnott
And is largely dying out as far as I can see; it’s only even still issued in a couple of European countries.
edent
Looking at my spending in the UK, about 90% goes through Amex. Even the small corner shop takes it.
Steve44
I only get cashback on my Amex, nothing with Visa or Mastercard; perhaps I could shop around but over 90% goes on my Amex so haven't bothered to.
SXX
At least in the UK Amex interchange fees are not capped like Visa and Mastercard.
throwaway_20357
Usually ~1%. Some direct cashback, some via rewards points (e.g. 1.5 AMEX MRP earned per EUR are roughly worth 1ct).
graemep
There are similar caps in the UK and most credit card rewards seem to be low after an initial offer period.
There are some specific discounts and benefits but not cash rewards.
It is illegal (not banks will not let you, actual legislation) here to charge more for card payments or discount for cash or bank transfer.
account42
Still affects us as sticker prices are not set independently. Even if you exclusively buy locally, $ = € is extremely common for MSRP.
dtech
That's because the $ prices are without VAT
xyzelement
Credit cards and cash have their place but the story being told doesn't track with experience.
First, businesses are increasingly differentiating pricing between cash and credit card - this is most obvious in gas stations where the price you see on the big sign is the cash price and not what you practically end up paying. Or the various restaurants and other businesses that offer cash discounts. While this is relatively new, the earlier manifestation of this is the credit card fee - eg try paying your tuition or utilities using a CC and you'll immediately find this option costs more.
Interestingly all the above usually hover around 3% so it's tellingly the rate the merchants themselves perceived CC use and infrastructure cost them.
Second, credit cards are clearly good for business volume. Most people have had the experience of wanting to buy something unplanned and not having the cash on them, but buying it anyway via credit card. On a larger scale, hard to imagine on-line shopping without a credit card.
Third, I don't find cash-only businesses cheaper. In my town there's a cash-only barber, pizza place, and ice cream shop and they cost just as much as the credit card taking ones. In every case the dynamic is there are long running businesses with sufficient clientele that they never bothered, but they don't use absence off CC fees/infrastructure to generate a consumer savings.
Fourth, poor people can play the point game too. As a broke college student I was very fond of my Exxon Mobil card that gave me cheaper gas. Now I don't really care about an extra ten cents on a gallon as much.
GPerson
“Most people have had the experience of wanting to buy something unplanned and not having the cash on them, but buying it anyway via credit card.”
I believe you, but this experience is totally alien to me and I don’t know of anybody who has done this. I wonder if it’s a generational thing.
HeyLaughingBoy
I was confused by this (because I rarely carry cash) until I saw your response below. I think OP might be using credit/debit card interchangeably? I don't use my credit cards unless I have to, but my debit card is used daily.
dcrazy
Are you in the U.S.? As an American I use a credit card for nearly 100% of my purchases, on a daily basis. I pay my bill in full each month. I might pay a 2–3% surcharge on a subset of those purchases, but I am reasonably sure I get more than that back in rebates. My Amex offers 2% back on groceries and the grocery store doesn’t charge extra for credit card purchases.
I basically never use my debit card for anything but ATM transactions, and the only time I have any cash in my wallet is when I have recently gone to a cash-only bar or to Las Vegas.
porkpieshoe
I default to credit/charge cards over debit cards because, in my country, debit cards offer far less consumer protection than credit cards.
xyzelement
Literally between posting the above and now, I went to a rural bike ride with my family. Didn't bother to bring cash. Ended up riding past an antique shop and bought my son an old school tractor toy via Google Wallet.
ramblurr
But with a debit or credit card?
xyzelement
Credit card. I never understood the point of debit cards. It's like for people who don't want points? :)
red369
Also I've often heard, and now seen one example myself, that it's easier to dispute a credit card transaction than a debit card transaction.
HappMacDonald
I am almost 50 years old and I struggle to imagine anyone younger than I am being any more familiar with what cash is than with what a landline is
liveoneggs
how much cash do you walk around with?
GPerson
I just use debit cards and Venmo for everything. I’ve never understood why I’d use a credit card when I can just use the debit card and pay no fee. I’ll never afford a house anyways so the credit score argument is meaningless to me.
davidcollantes
Our family uses credit cards for everything. We don’t pay fees, the merchants do. We get the benefit of being able to settle disputes easily, getting cash backs, having extra insurance on certain goods, and not having to carry any easy-to-lose cash. We don’t spend more than we can afford, and we pay in full at the end of the billing cycle.
ianburrell
One big reason to use credit card is that it gives window to settle problems. You have month to charge back before have to pay bank. If hotel places hold, it comes out of the credit limit not your bank balance. If someone makes fraudulent transactions, it isn’t your money and you can still pay rent.
If you pay the balance on time, you are getting free liquidity from the bank. But they get if you don’t pay off the balance.
xyzelement
it is trivial to find a credit card with no fee and 1%-3% percent cash back.
Imagine everything you bought in the past 3 decades from grocery to hotel room and air travel. Now imagine having 2% of it in your pocket.
that's eaey to understand right?
additional benetit like purchase protection, vendor disputes, etc.
GPerson
Okay I can understand that. I thought credit cards had fees. What’s the point of the free money credit card?
plant-ian
As I understand it the cc company takes the fee money from the buyer and it's usually more than the cash back and gambles with it until they give some cash back to the buyer and then pockets the rest. If you have millions of those transactions taking place then you have a huge pool of gambling money available. They also hold the sellers money for a while usually longer than necessary to also boost that pool. Edit: a less cynical view is that you are essentially loaning that money to the credit card company and then it pays you back but it keeps the interest
xyzelement
//Edit: a less cynical view is that you are essentially loaning that money to the credit card company and then it pays you back but it keeps the interest
It's literally the opposite. The credit card lends you money for free - if you pay your bill every month.
That's the "credit" in "credit card" - they are extending a line of credit to you, not the other way around.
sandmn
There are plenty of credit cards in US with 2% cashback on any transaction and no fees if you pay bills on time (usually 20-30 days after statement closes). Some of them even throw in small sign in bonus.
liveoneggs
So we're on topic: as the article points out - I use cash back cards so other people (like you) subsidize my spending. There are other major benefits to using a CC but anyway..
You are, apparently, well-off enough to have enough money in your venmo/checking where you don't think about it too much but I think the OP was referring to the less well-off but common situation where you are spending a little over your current ability - be it physical cash on hand (not your situation) or the amount available in your account.
GPerson
I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m juggling a few hundred dollars in my checking account all the time. Is that well off? I don’t think so.
maerF0x0
fwiw there is still a fee involved, usually just much lower so the merchant eats it
cjenkins
In the US debit card fees are capped (https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/regii-average-...). The cap is low enough that there isn't enough to fund rewards like we see on credit cards. IIRC there were debit card rewards when they first came out but those went away with the fee caps.
roland35
Patrick McKenzie (patio11 fame) had a great blog post in credit card rewards
There is a lot that goes into it, and it is interesting how customers like me who literally never have carried interest and have to made thousands of $ in rewards over the years still make the banks money....
It's a mess, much like tip culture[1], because it just real equalized like this:
1. Merchant sells for price X
2. Credit card is invented
3. Merchant has to sell for price > X (say, 1.02 X) to cover some buyers using CC
4. Credit card offers 2-3% rewards on some goods
5. Merchant has to sell for prices even > X (say 1.04 X) to cover nearly all customers using cards. Customers who do not use the cards pay 1.04X and do not get rewards to compensate.
6. Merchant loses because they're beholden to processors, Customers lose because they're getting 2-3% of semi-currency for the cost of ~4% cash currency.
7. Processors get their profit
[1] - Employees deserve good wages for good work, tipping is just a bad algorithm to accomplish that
steveBK123
Credit card points/miles are an interesting topic, and I have found them to be kind of useful cyclically myself over last 20 years.
They are a way for airlines to create value out of thin air with their own fiat currency. For the average consumer the miles create less of a pure economic efficient benefit and more of a psychic benefit - funny money bucket that accumulates to defray some trip expenses. Economically they'd be best off with an outright 2% back card.
For the minority of customers who are flexible on dates/locations and willing to plan in advance - most airline/hotel programs have sweet spots at the more premium level.
I use them to fly overseas business class refundable fares at discount. It's not free, but the taxes paid + foregone $ I could have gotten with a cash-back card ends up being 2-3x economy non-refundable fare instead of the 5-7x listed cash price if I bought the business class ticket outright.
It's generally a time-vs-money thing though in that to maximize airline/hotel programs you need to pay attention to various limited time offers for signup bonuses, spending bonuses, conversion bonuses, redemption bonuses, etc. Without those it's a very uphill battle.
nickjj
> It's generally a time-vs-money thing though in that to maximize airline/hotel programs
Credit card hotel booking portals are often much worse than what's available too.
For example, you might end up paying 30-100% more for a hotel booked through Chase Travel. At the very least you'll have way less selection. Even if price matching exists, you could still end up paying more.
I am traveling to Mexico next month and I do have a Chase Sapphire Preferred card (the one with the $95 annual fee). You get $100 in hotel credits per year if you book through Chase Travel.
In one of the spots I'll be at, there was (1) selection. It was $92 for 2 nights in a pretty low populated town that I'll be passing through. That hotel was rated 3.2 stars on Google.
If I use Google search or any hotel aggregator site, there were over 10 hotels available for half the price with much better ratings.
In this case it cost me about $50 extra to use the card's benefits.
Many people don't understand how rewards work when it's marketed towards your annual fee. The $100 credit doesn't offset the $95 annual fee. You pay $95 out of pocket for the fee. As soon as you book that hotel for $100 you've now paid $195 total out of pocket of which $100 gets credited back, so you're still out $95. If you instead didn't have the card and got the hotel at the cheaper rate, you'd only be out $45 or whatever you paid.
I mainly got the card because it had a really good sign up bonus, 0% international exchange fees and reasonable rental car coverage. Other cards can cover these benefits without an annual fee.
sjhatfield
Have the same card solely for the rental car cover. And to be fair it works, had an issue and they refunded the full expense without too many hoops to jump through.
nickjj
That is good to hear.
Supposedly the free Chase cards have comparable rental insurance. The main difference is Sapphire is always primary insurance, but Flex and Unlimited become primary when traveling internationally and if you happen to live in a place that requires no car in the US and you don't have insurance, it becomes primary in the US too.
Not sure what the differences are when filing claims though.
I will say this, it seems like more and more countries are starting to require Third-Party Liability (TPL) insurance and the Chase cards don't cover that so you still end up having to pay out of pocket for partial coverage (Chase for CDW, TPL from the rental agency). Some rental places don't make it easy to split these out.
quickthrowman
> They are a way for airlines to create value out of thin air with their own fiat currency. For the average consumer the miles create less of a pure economic efficient benefit and more of a psychic benefit - funny money bucket that accumulates to defray some trip expenses. Economically they'd be best off with an outright 2% back card.
“Saving” airline miles is definitely suboptimal, like you said, getting 2% cash back and redeeming it immediately is the optimal strategy. Money is fungible and cash depreciates.
Plus, the “deals” you have access to with airline miles are not slanted in your favor.
ValentineC
> Money is fungible and cash depreciates.
At least cash has the option of earning interest in a bank account, or getting invested in other instruments.
Miles can always be devalued by the airline. Some airlines like Singapore, Qatar, and United, even practise stealth devaluation by controlling the number of cheap "saver" seats released.
ethersteeds
> For the minority of customers who are flexible on dates/locations and willing to plan in advance - most airline/hotel programs have sweet spots at the more premium level.
What does this mean? I'm not clear what the sweet spot is - are you talking about buying points/miles/etc outright with cash rather than earning them as credit card rewards? Everything I've read is that these are almost always bad deals.
steveBK123
It means that the vast majority of redemptions are a bad deal, but every program has gaps in their earn/burn charts that lead to good values.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer.
If you do not have time to look into it, plan trips 6-12 months in advance, or have flexibility (will go anywhere thats a deal), then they aren't worth it.
jimbob45
Economically they'd be best off with an outright 2% back card.
Robin hood is pushing a 3% card right now. Not holding my breath for the rate to last more than a year though.
This ignores the aspect of consumer data.
Credit issuers generate profit through issuing rewards programs in part due to the sale of their customer’s behavioral spending data. Cash and debit users largely retain their data privacy here.
It’s hard to put a real world number on what the cost to the consumer is for losing this data ownership, but it is not zero: these data are increasingly used for targeted pricing practices which extort additional margins from the consumer at a later date.
rkuodys
Is't the fact that data is valuable for somebody, does not mean that it has a cost (price) for me? Spending data is definitely valuable for seller / corporation to know what to produce. I, on the other hand, cannot get money by saving information.
It's not zero sum game, that either I have it or seller have value out of it. Just like with garbage - for me old broken furniture might be a garbage, while for other it's a burning fuel.
ownagefool
I think the OP is right in that spending data is valuable as a mechanism to figure out how extract more profit, which in the end will have customers paying that price.
However, it doesn't need to be exclusively negative. The data will both show where you can price gouge but also simply where demand is.
Put your coffee shop near a metro stop and sell sourdough bread and people will buy that because they want it isn't exactly negative.
kevin_thibedeau
That data is used in some alarmingly manipulative ways that directly affect your life.
sfn42
I personally don't really see the problem. I'm not going to buy something I don't want/need. If they use the data to show me ads for something I want that then leads me to making a purchase, to me that seems like a win/win.
I'm generally a pretty frugal person, I have a good handle on my personal finances and I don't really buy much stuff at all. Maybe for someone else, shopping can be similar to an addiction where they see an ad and they know they shouldn't buy it but they can't resist. Women with a closet full of shoes come to mind. For those people I can see how this might be problematic but personally I largely ignore ads altogether. If I need a small thing I just go to the nearest store and buy the first best thing I find, if I'm making a more significant purchase I generally do some research and look at tests, user reviews etc. Sure there's some opportunity for manipulating me with fake/biased tests and reviews etc but I'm not really seeing how my spending info helps with that.
Imagine you walk up to a shelf and all the prices reconfigure based on a model of the most you would be willing to spend for each item, including putting fake "normal" prices so that the "sale" price you are shown is whatever percentage markdown makes you likely enough to buy.
There's no advertising here, there's just aggressively trying to drain each person's wallet as much as possible and seeing how far you can get before they change behaviour.
One example: my friend and I both requested rides using the same app, standing next to each other to the same street in the same neighborhood 3-4 miles away. He owns a car and rarely uses car services, I do not and it's my primary transportation. The quoted cost of his ride was half mine. It was shocking.
sfn42
That's pretty unrealistic, but I'd visit occasionally just to browse and not buy anything, making the algorithm lower the prices for me. Could build an app where people could register their prices for stuff so everyone could see what the price floor is for a given product. Good luck making a system people won't abuse the shit out of.
And I'm sure there would be competitors simply not doing this where I could shop instead.
If Uber does this and you don't like it then don't use Uber. Regular taxis still exist and I'm sure they'd love to have your business back. Or you could get a car, low-end used EVs are quite affordable and fuel is almost literally free. They seem to hold good resale value too.
Brian_K_White
The only reason it's valuable is because of it's utility to extract value from you. Not just money either but for instance the power to manipulate.
It's not a scientific discovery.
rkuodys
But something can be valuable to somebody without hurting you. For example if you participate in study as a member of control group. There is no impact to your life and huge benefit to whoever is producing the research. Similarly waste collection businesses take something that has no value to you and generate profit by modifying your waste into something valuable. That is to say - the fact that somebody gains value does not equate that you are loosing the same value.
Brian_K_White
A scientific discovéy is innately valuable.
THIS data has no value to the people collecting it except for the power it gives them to predict and/or manipulate you.
hedora
In the UK, google extracts one average lifetime retirement savings per person in revenue, on average. You could argue that Google’s customers, like advertisers, propaganda firms, etc, all overpay for the data.
That seems unlikely, since I don’t see how many of them could be profitable if they were paying Google more than their own revenue.
lurk2
> In the UK, google extracts one average lifetime retirement savings per person in revenue, on average.
Those numbers don’t make any sense. Alphabet had 403 billion in revenue in 2025. The UK’s population is around 69,000,000. This amounts to $5,840.57 per person, which is nowhere near a lifetime of retirement savings.
ragnese
Why wouldn't a bank sell debit data just the same as credit data? For that matter, I would expect them to be selling everything they can: credit, debit, written checks, ACH transfers, etc.
What incentive is there for them to not do that? Laws? I'm asking sincerely, not rhetorically.
hedora
There are laws, even for credit card data. They used to be enforced and largely obeyed.
NooneAtAll3
I think one factor missing in such discussions is that consumer data can be used for political means
And I don't mean "politicians can use it" - but instead, as corporations are more and more involved in the politics, you get targetted and directed based on their needs
hedora
It can also be weaponized. Israel uses these sorts of datasets to systematically murder the families and neighbors of their targets. The operation name is something like “Where’s daddy?” They use commercial datasets to figure out where the kids are, then wait for the parent (generally a civilian) to return home, then level the apartment block when it is most likely their are children and neighbors present.
Presumably, the same is being done in Ukraine and Russia too.
phyzix5761
Debit card usage is also used for data brokering.
CircuitSeuss
Yes, but typically only on the retailer/ Point of Sales side. Your bank is not selling that information. Of course, things get weird when you have additional intermediaries like Apple or Google pay.
In principle at least, there should be some measurable difference vs credit.
Would be very curious to see studies on this if anyone finds one!
rozenmd
> Your bank is not selling that information
Oh it very much is, (at least in Australia the major 4 banks have agreements with data brokers)
petesergeant
I don’t think the credit/debit privacy split you’re imagining works like you think.
semiquaver
Do you have evidence to support your claim of targeted pricing practices? In what areas?
Frankly, it’s everywhere— if a company is large enough, they will leverage consumer data to increase profits as much as the consumer will bear.
There are many other examples, but I’ll just link you this as a jumping off point if you want to go further:
https://epic.org/krogers-surveillance-pricing-harms-consumer...
With respect, not one of those links supports what you actually said:
> these data are increasingly used for targeted pricing practices
I personally think that “pricing” an insurance policy based on information obtained from data brokers shouldn’t be particularly controversial: individual pricing based on risk is exactly the point of insurance policies! Without personalized risk evaluation half of the insured population would heavily subsidize the other half, and you create serious adverse incentives.
The others are all about companies that seem to want to use this technique. And of course they want to. But several states either outlaw this outright or will do so soon. The Trump FTC has a draft rule which would prohibit it nationwide: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/08/...
This is such a toxic idea that I’m not particularly worried about it happening much in the real world.
w10-1
The study methods are closer to advocacy than science or policy.
Sure, take any slice of a vast number, and you get a big number.
It's not a "wealth transfer" when everyone gets what they bargained for and can opt in or out.
Most importantly, the transaction value of using credit cards or rewards systems - what the user actually gets - is not enumerated.
Beyond what others have noted (mainly deferred payment), credit cards offer legal transaction protections: my legal liability for fraud is limited (unlike debit or Zelle transfers), and I can challenge any transaction even later, which gives the vendor an incentive to ensure I'm happy even after they have my money. While reputation provides some incentive for repeat customers, the ability to retract a transaction governs even non-repeats. I would submit this alone has improves quality of service for everyone anywhere credit cards are accepted.
Rewards vary by type. Cash-back rewards reflect the fact that interchange fees were set to recapture initial investments, but servicing costs have plummeting (thanks to computing); governance-wise, it's almost impossible for a "representative" political system to extract a large cost from a small number of powerful agents with vested interests to provide a tiny amount of benefit to a very large numbers of other people. But that's a much more extensive governance issue.
So where does the benefit go? To competition between credit providers, initially as cash-back, and then to tying rebates to future purchases within controlled channels. For airline point systems that give free flights or upgrades, it improves retention, but other forms of rewards would seem to verge on tying, where power in one market is extended into another.
Politically-mediated wealth transfers are a political issue. Economically-mediated wealth transfers should raise market-regulation policy issues, in particular whether the law is inducing or protecting them, and then whether they are good or bad. Tallying that requires not just seeing the money flow, but seeing all the value received or cost exported.
B1FF_PSUVM
It's a bullshit guilt-trip piece, already paraded here last month. Might as well be talking about supermarket coupons.
Just the 150 billion from "interchange" (merchant fees) would be enough reason to fund the 15 billion (estimated) rewards.
puelocesar
And those same American companies want the US government to intervene in other countries to try to kill their local alternatives
janpeuker
As others have mentioned this is particularly prevalent in the US. I always liked that Australia's vision for a peer-to-peer payment system (note cards are mainly for merchants, hence the rewards) has inclusivity [1] as one of its core tenets "continue to transact ... without disproportionate burden or risk ... those experiencing financial hardship". They also just stopped surcharging [2] and have capped interchange fees since a long time.
Im really surprised the number of comments here who think the rewards are free money they're getting. The stores are paying 3-5% transaction fees for you to use credit cards then they give you 2-3% back and force you to spend it on things they deem can be redeemed. You're paying for that 2-3% back in higher prices for everything. The whole thing is a giant scam and should be shut down.
kzrdude
Anyone who likes economics or money should see it for what it is, a tax on every transaction. Of course you don't want anyone to lodge themselves into your market and get 3% skimmed off on every transaction. This, for the good of the free market, the fees must be limited to sub 1%, preferably zero.
sandmn
The cost of accepting cash is not necessarily lower - you have take into account higher theft risk, miscounts and cost of delivering it to the bank. Also there is no incentive for businesses to pass saved fees to customers.
toast0
> force you to spend it on things they deem can be redeemed.
Cards that redeem to cash or payment credit are readily available. You only get miles or flooz if that's what you want.
The system is bad, but if I'm buying stuff within the system, a rewards card is usually the least cost out of pocket.
gblargg
At an individual level it is. I could use cash or debit card and get 0% back, or use a rewards card and get 5% back. Easy choice.
hnburnsy
From the study...
>When merchants raise prices for all consumers in response to these costs, users of low-cost payment methods (e.g., cash and debit) cross-subsidize high-reward credit card users who shop at the same merchant"
Cash handling is not a low-cost payment method, Cash handling can cost businesses between 4% and 15% of each transaction, when factoring in labor, security, bank fees, and risks like theft and counterfeit bills.
One could argue that credit card users have been lowering prices for cash payers as business avoid cash handling pitfalls and get their funds safer and faster.
aurareturn
I always wondered why people in America would ever pay by cash or credit card - unless they are laundering that cash.
Otherwise, you're giving up 1-3% discount.
Set auto-pay on your credit card to pay in full every month. I've never once paid for credit card interest. I think there's a term inside credit card companies for people like me: leeches or something like that.
ndiddy
> I think there's a term inside credit card companies for people like me: leeches or something like that.
They genuinely don't care because they offer different products for different groups of people.
Poorer people typically use credit cards to borrow money. The amount they spend in a month is typically much lower than the balance on the card. This means that the company makes most of their money from interest payments. Cards meant for this audience typically have few or no rewards, and instead use the interchange fees to allow for a lower APR.
Meanwhile, wealthier people typically use credit cards as a payment instrument. They pay off the balance in full each month like you do. This group of people is responsible for the majority of credit card spending, and the credit card company makes most of their money from interchange fees. Cards meant for this market have higher APRs, and use some of the interchange to pay for the rewards. The cards meant for the top end of the market with the best rewards (i.e. Chase Sapphire) even charge retailers more in interchange, with the argument being that it's worth it because you get to bring in wealthy people who will buy more stuff.
cfiggers
When I and my (still fairly young) family needed to move cross-country, my wife and I accepted a credit card offer with 0% APR for the first year and put all our moving expenses on it. Then once we settled, we paid it down a bit at a time each month, and then right before it would have started charging interest we paid the rest as a lump sum.
Really helped us float the moving company and also some DIY renovations on our house that we didn't have all the cash on hand to pay for outright. And we didn't pay a thin dime for the privilege.
dml2135
Well, one reason is the one described in TFA —- credit card rewards amount to a regressive wealth transfer, and if you think that is bad, you may not want to participate in it.
Another reason is that credit card companies sell your purchase data to aggregators and advertisers, and cash affords more privacy.
strix_varius
This presupposes the ability to get a credit card and the confidence of sufficient funds when that auto payment hits.
sokoloff
If the alternative was paying cash, cash has an even more demanding level of confidence of sufficient funds required and it applies earlier with no flexibility.
strix_varius
No it applies at whatever time you choose - it's the most flexible option for a person whose wealth fluctuates frequently around a low baseline.
sokoloff
I don’t think I understand.
If I pay cash for everything and my cash level fluctuates down to $0 temporarily, how do I buy something right then?
aurareturn
confidence of sufficient funds when that auto payment hits
How is this different than paying with cash or debit?
strix_varius
Because cash and debit allow you to pick the time in the month when you happen to have the ability to pay for something.
Frankly these questions astound me, do y'all really know no low income folks?
brainwad
You can always use a credit card as a debit card. Pay it off to zero every day. Indeed with the very low limit cards people with bad credit can get, you kind of have to pay it down faster than the bill comes if you want to keep using it.
gblargg
With cash: you must have the money when you make the purchase.
With card: you can set the cash aside at the time of purchase to pay when the card bill is due.
How does the card give you less flexibility or make it harder to pay for?
brainwad
With cash you can't overcommit - you can only spend what you have - with card you can. If you are poor, overcommitting is very tempting as otherwise you will be going without things you need/want. But that temptation leads to debt.
gblargg
True, cash is good if you lack discipline. For such a person, more flexibility leads to less because they misuse it in a way that reduces flexibility. It's a footgun for these people.
onion2k
Credit card companies are still charging merchants a transaction fee for your purchases though. The fact they're only charging one side of the transaction is probably annoying for them, but you still make them plenty of money.
MattGaiser
Most people can’t optimize for 1-3%. Life is flooded with 1-3% choices.
Even as someone who is a credit card optimizer, I also ignore numerous 1-3% choices a day.
Many people also spend more than they can cover on it.
ChrisMarshallNY
I paid a lot of credit card interest, as a yute, but, since getting married, I have paid in full. Been over 30 years. Leeches rule!
At one time, credit card companies forced vendors to charge the same, whether cash or credit, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside.
The problem is, is that cash is becoming less and less acceptable.
In a nearby town, you can't pay for parking, with cash. I have seen credit-card-only vending machines. A lot of restaurants have iPads at the table, and you never see anyone but the bus[boy|girl|whatever], bringing you your food.
bluGill
Credit cards are cheaper than cash for most merchants. Most people forget about all the costs of cash because they are hidden, but they add up to more than the couple % credit cards cost.
ChrisMarshallNY
> Credit cards are cheaper than cash for most merchants.
Huh. I always thought it was the opposite. I know several restaurants that refuse to accept credit cards. They are great places to eat, but I won't go there. I don't think they miss my custom, though. Refusing to accept credit seems to be a signal of excellence, around here.
OptionOfT
In Belgium it is common knowledge that cash-only places don't report everything to the feds.
For the same reason those food establishments had to get a government approved White Cash Register, because there was so much money disappearing.
bluGill
If you don't do the accounting, it appears that the fees on a credit card are greater than the cost of cash and so restaurants that haven't done their accounting closely often think they're getting themselves something by not accepting credit cards.
The cost of a credit card is very obvious. The cost of cash is many small things that are very hard to see and thus very hard to account for correctly.
ssl-3
Small cash-only businesses sometimes have other motivations to stay that way, like: The books can say whatever the owner wants them to say.
quickthrowman
If you only accept cash, you can report whatever you feel like as income* and avoid paying taxes on the rest.
* As long as you don’t raise any red flags in your accounting, which can be difficult.
OptionOfT
> At one time, credit card companies forced vendors to charge the same, whether cash or credit, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside.
I miss that. I really dislike that it is allowed to charge extra for a credit card. It shows that the company doesn't understand the cost of cash.
red-iron-pine
> I think there's a term inside credit card companies for people like me: leeches or something like that.
that's some odd classism there.
credit card companies love your data. they can package it, sell it, analyze it.
this is real data of actual behavior, not whatever people say or click -- money where the mouth is.
even if they never make a cent off of you from an interest perspective they 1) still get fees from the merchants, and 2) get all of that juicy juicy transaction info -- and that info alone might be worth the costs.
aurareturn
FYI, Chase Sapphire Reserve made their rewards drastically worse recently. They were losing money on people like me.
internet2000
Prices don't go down, they only ever go up.
There is no situation in which interchange fees get slashed and prices go down across the board by 3% to make it worth it for card users.
Long term average? Sure, it goes up, that's inflation. But do you know what causes inflationary pressure? Visa and MasterCard adding unjustified fees because they're a duopoly and control most of the payments market, and your government won't regulate them and cap fees.
The UK and the EU both cap debit card fees at 0.2% and credit card fees at 0.3%. When the UK left the EU, Visa and Mastercard jacked up their fees over 5x for UK-EEA payments. Not because they had to, but because they could, and they love sucking money out of other peoples' businesses. https://www.psr.org.uk/our-work/market-reviews/market-review...
Retailers in competitive industries absolutely do use a reduction in card fees to lower their prices. Maybe not all the way, but they definitely don't give it all to themselves as margin; their competitors don't.
internet2000
> Long term average? Sure, it goes up, that's inflation. But do you know what causes inflationary pressure?
An economy that relies on growth, yep.
throw0101a
> Prices don't go down, they only ever go up.
Well, there was that time in the 1930s.
dougdude3339
I prefer my debit card because I'm more aware of how much I'm spending. Money taken out of my account is immediate and feels real. Ultimately, I spend less.
paxys
One isn’t more real than the other. They are both numbers in an online database. In one case your assets are going down, in the other your liabilities are going up. The net result is the same.
caminante
The parent isn't explaining it well, largely because it's not rational.
I think of it like alcoholics who can't be near alcohol. It's some deep seated degeneracy or fear.
cpburns2009
I agree with dougdude. I like debit cards better because you see the balance change immediately. The thing I dislike about credit cards is payment is deferred by a month.
ValentineC
> The thing I dislike about credit cards is payment is deferred by a month.
I like this. It means that I can earn a bit more bank interest on what I've spent.
skinfaxi
It's a world of difference if one of them gets stolen vs the other.
paxys
In that case a credit card is actually significantly better than debit
skinfaxi
Yes that was my point. A debit card stolen from you hits harder than some numbers in a database going down when you can't pay your rent.
OptionOfT
Problem with a debit card is that if something goes wrong (product broken, or worse, debit card skimmed) it's my debit card, and thus my money.
Credit card? I file a charge-back which is a forcing mechanism for the vendor. Credit card skimmed? I get a new one, and I don't need to wait for my $ to be re-imbursed.
ValentineC
Debit cards on Visa/Mastercard have chargeback protection too, but yes, the money leaves one's account until the chargeback is successful.
red-iron-pine
it's just as easy to check a debit balance as a CC balance.
and once debt is spent you cannot get it back. you get scammed you can dispute the credit card, and if the CC gets stolen you can fight any charges.
debit means the money is gone and that's it.
matheusmoreira
> Otherwise you're giving up 1-3% discount.
I always ask for a discount but for some reason I almost never get it.
The rational move then is to pay in as many installments as I can get without any additional interest. Then time itself gives me the discount. My actual money stays invested and I only pay later. My credit card gives me 1.1% cashback on all purchases. Inflation too does some of the work.
bluGill
You shouldn't get a cash discount - cash costs the merchant MORE than credit card fees. You have to count all the costs of cash that credit cards don't have: counting, and recounting the cash and change. Then the manager counts and recounts everything in the back room at the end of the shift. Then the manager counts everything twice again to write up the deposit forms. Plus you need a cash register with the extra cash drawer that acts like a safe. Plus other security systems just to prevent robbery (this can get elaborate in areas where robbery is common). Those all add up.
lesostep
That's like a 4-5 seconds of low paid work for each transaction, though. 10 seconds, if I'm being generous. Counting a lot of cash is a long process, but each separate banknote is counted in a fraction of a second.
So, about 4-8 cents, for 30$/hour if we talk about grocery store.
Restaurant might take more time to process cash, but pays lower salary.
I do not think it's a higher cost than current credit card fees
matheusmoreira
> You shouldn't get a cash discount
Maybe, but "should" has nothing to do with it. Either I get one or I use my credit card.
> cash costs the merchant MORE than credit card fees
That's not my problem.
bluGill
None of this is your problem: you are not a merchant. What is wrong is the analysis of various people who think cash is cheaper and thus get mad at not getting a cash discount. It is also wrong that a number of merchants are bad at accounting: they think that cash is cheaper by enough to be worth a discount - but this is not your problem either.
greyw
Just pay with a credit card, it's the optimal way by far (float, flexibility, rewards). No need to overthink it.
matheusmoreira
It's worth to think about it a bit, especially in larger purchases. Significant discounts on the order of 5% to 10% can easily beat all credit card benefits, and not taking advantage of it leaves lots of money on the table.
I have a little lookup table for this. Interest free installments mapped to cash discount necessary to beat the credit card. I just look it up.
These numbers are actually conservative. There's a lot of credit card benefits that weren't priced in. I add a couple percent to the required discount numbers and round it up to compensate.
Mathematically you are right. However those interest free payments are generally setup in such a way as to make it highly likely you won't pay it off by the end of the interest free period. The bills they send contain the minimum payment - designed to get you past that time. I don't trust my ability to get the fine print right - it only takes messing this up once to destroy all the gains from several times getting it right. So I use the credit card anyway and pay it off every month - that payoff is the one number I can get right every month.
hvb2
> Otherwise, you're giving up 1-3% discount.
I would be curious what percentage of people actually qualifies for a card with over 2% cashback especially without a monthly fee. My guess is that that percentage is very low.
High earner/spender, sure but that's not most people
gblargg
It's not hard at all. Citi Custom Cash has 5% on the highest category spend each month for the first $500 (I use it on groceries). American Express Blue Cash Everyday has 3% on groceries/gas/online purchases for up to $6000 purchases each year. Chase Freedom Flex and Discover It have rotating categories every quarter, sometimes groceries, gas, Amazon, PayPal, etc. None of these required much income to be approved.
svpk
I know that Discover has a card with a 5% discount category that changes once a quarter. Everything not in the category gets 1%. It's not hard to get the card (or at least wasn't) and was frequently advertised to college students.
If you combine that with a card that gives 2% on everything than it wouldn't be hard to average over 2% cashback as long as you were mindful about using the discover card for qualifying purchases and the 2% card for everything else.
greenavocado
> as long as you were mindful about using the discover card for qualifying purchases and the 2% card for everything else.
And that's the rub. Credit card companies know most people won't be too mindful most of the time about their spending habits.
bluGill
There is one other rub - because I use my bank's card I get better interest rates. How does a .25-.5 % on my various loans and checking account compare to 2% on groceries - this is a complex question that it not easy to answer.
sokoloff
If you have Amazon Prime, I recommend getting the no-fee Chase Amazon card. 5% on Amazon and Whole Foods; 6% on some Amazon “no rush” deliveries.
No affiliation; just a happy user.
Jach
I treat the Amazon Prime membership as the "card fee". The cash back accumulation per year is always greater than the membership fee for me. (The original main benefit of savings on shipping is of course also nice, though if I'm honest with myself I'd say the majority of my purchases didn't actually need 2-day/1-day/same-day shipping. Very nice luxury however.)
ixwt
I have a 2% cash back credit card from my bank, with no monthly fee. It started as a 1% cash back card around a decade ago, and slowly crept up to 2%. It's a nation wide credit union that has certain requirements to join though.
Xirdus
My first US credit card was a 4-3-2-1% rewards program and I had literally zero income at the time. I was told by the banker, "oh you can't do that right away, you must first get a secured card to build your credit score, after a year you can try applying for real", but I told them I don't care and to send the application anyway, and I've got it.
Ever since then, I wondered how much of the "not qualifying" is due to misinformation like this.
bitmasher9
Most true not qualifying are either
1. People with proven bad credit.
2. People asking for a lot of money without proven good credit.
3. People asking for more specialized credit, such as lines for businesses or lines for high earners.
Xirdus
The question is what percentage of overall population are 1, 2 and 3 combined, and is it big enough to warrant the perception that high reward cards are only for high earners/spenders.
My instinct says hell no, not even close.
Xirdus
A lot of it is to enable the small business owners to hide their real income. At least that's how it works in immigrant communities.
IAmBroom
That's how it works in established US communities, too. Contractors often give cash discounts (off the record).
My lawn mower asks me to write "gift" on checks when I can't pay in cash.
esseph
Huh?
Xirdus
Based on the downvote and your reaction, I assume I misread something. We're talking about why Americans sometimes prefer paying with cash over credit card, no?
IAmBroom
I think it was the "immigrants" comment.
To me, it's like claiming "black people like chocolate!". They do. So do most people. Why single out black people?
Xirdus
I'm the immigrant in question. I pay with card for literally everything online and offline, except two things - my haircuts and my wife's nails. Both of which accept credit cards. I go out of my way to withdraw cash (10 minute drive) just for these two things. Both the barber and the beautician appreciate it, for obvious reasons. My cousin with housecleaning business also gets paid mostly in cash, also for obvious reasons. It's just a thing we do. I don't know if natural born citizens do it too or not. Personally haven't seen it.
IAmBroom
And you wouldn't see it from the POV of a natural citizen, not being one, but I assure you it has nothing to do with immigration. Cash is one of the few ways the "little guy" can sneak things past the IRS.
esseph
I just don't understand the statement.
Can you explain the process or idea?
Xirdus
If there's no electronic record, then there's nothing for tax authorities to compare your declared revenue to. If you say you earned only $1000, then for all intensive porpoises, you earned only $1000 and that's the end of it.
esseph
Ohhh like the thing restaurant servers did with their cash tips until recently (only claim your credit card tips or part of your cash tips).
Xirdus
Yep, exactly.
EliRivers
I've heard such people referred to as deadbeats.
bluGill
Once in a while. However the truth is the large people who collect the 1% and pay off their card every month are the people who don't. These people are customers year after year, and often spend more on their cards (they tend to be higher income), and the bank gets their 2-3% from them (2-3% after rewards)
People who don't pay their card off also are on the look out for lower interest rate cards and switch all the time. they in reality are not paying the very high rates on cards, they are paying the lower introductory rates (which is still a lot of money). These people are also more likely to default and stop paying leaving the bank to write everything off. Combine that with the fact that they typically don't spend as much over several years (they hit their credit limit and their income won't allow an increase so they have to stop spending), and they are not as profitable as it seems.
nsedlet
Credit cards also transfer wealth from people who pay interest to people who don’t.
It’s a silly system, where everyone has to invest their time (optimizing for rewards, avoiding interest) in an ultimately negative sum game. I hate it so much.
The intuition being: people who carry balances and pay interest don't actually spend very much; they are not wealthy.
buran77
What does that graph tell you? Because I think patio11 wanted to send one message and people accidentally misunderstand the graph.
That's the interchange income corresponding to wealthy people. Interchange is paid by the card-accepting business, not by the buyer. The buyer pays interest and other fees and that graph looks very different.
From that original study the full picture table says in % of ADB that the "poorest" (below 620 FICO) pay ~45% interest and fees but bring only 2% additionally in interchange income. The wealthy (at 800+) pay ~10% interest and fees but bring another almost 10% interchange income, on 4 times higher spending, and 3 times higher rewards (so the wealthy get ~12 times higher rewards in $ value than the "poor").
Just the percentages paid by each group more than offset the difference in spending. There are also way more "poor" accounts than wealthy accounts. Intuitively you can tell that the banks are effectively subsidizing the fees and interest for the wealthy with the income from the poor, for the sake of the interchange income which is mostly generated by the wealthy but doesn't come from their pocket.
Those poorest of people (<620 FICO) pay more interest and fees (percentage and absolute terms) than any other group. There's a range in the middle on the wealth scale where the customers are actually a net loss for the banks (the 660-760 FICO range).
tylerhou
Businesses raise prices to account for interchange fees. So they are essentially is paid by the consumer. If we outlawed rewards credit cards (by capping interchange fees), everything would likely be slightly cheaper.
buran77
> Businesses raise prices to account for interchange fees
Agreed, which makes the picture even worse for those low income people. Even poor people are guaranteed to occasionally pay the "rich person tax" included in the prices of some of the products and services. At least until some AI pricing starts changing the price real-time based on the buyer's estimated wealth (sort of already real).
> So they are essentially is paid by the consumer.
Not from a bank's perspective. Only in the sense that prices are higher between the seller and buyer.
> If we outlawed rewards credit cards (by capping interchange fees), everything would likely be slightly cheaper.
I don't agree on the second point as a blanket statement. When Epic game store lowered its fee not a single game got cheaper for the buyers.
quickthrowman
> Agreed, which makes the picture even worse for those low income people. Even poor people are guaranteed to occasionally pay the "rich person tax" included in the prices of some of the products and services.
Credit card fees are baked into the price of everything that can be purchased with credit card, excluding merchants that offer a cash price and a credit price.
Any time someone pays the (credit card) price with cash or a debit card is paying more than someone that earns CC rewards, it’s virtually every transaction.
mrguyorama
>When Epic game store lowered its fee not a single game got cheaper for the buyers.
At least one reason for this is that Valve has language in their agreements to prevent you from selling your game cheaper on other storefronts. Unambiguously anti-competitive.
cmurf
Outlaw rewards credit cards? Or make it compulsory that the true cost of a specific credit card is revealed to the merchant who has the right to absorb or pass on, in a line item, that cost to that specific consumer?
If I know I'm paying for my own rewards, I'd choose a card that keeps more money in my pocket. I'd go as low as the PITA factor of cash.
It's not clear to me what the net benefit is of a credit card over a debit card.
But for sure the confusion ensuing from allowing debit cards to be charged as credit cards should be illegal. The merchant account providers are probably the ones reaping the free money on the racket.
Credit is the POS default, for whatever reason. Not all POS are the same. e.g. US Post Office consistently knows if I am using a debit card, and it prompts for a PIN when I do. Every restaurant, bar, service does not ask for PIN, and the handful of merchants I've inquired with say their debit card fees changed by the merchant account providers are the same as credit. Scammy.
At least in Colorado it's legal for businesses regardless of the TOS contract with a merchant account supplier to pass on the transaction and processing fees of credit cards. It's not legal to pass on cost/fees for debit cards, ACH, or cash.
mrguyorama
The simple solution is the one Europe adopted: Just cap fees. We do this for Debit cards and it's fine.
>It's not clear to me what the net benefit is of a credit card over a debit card.
In a fair scheme, the net benefit to the purchaser is having a rolling line of credit for whatever they want to use that for, like managing cashflow. It's also a benefit in that it puts a behemoth with immense contractual power between you and the merchant. It doesn't matter how a merchant fucks you over, the credit card company WILL give you your money back and punish the merchant.
To the merchant, the benefits are that credit cards unlock significant consumption that humans normally would not do. It literally causes induced demand. As a consumer, you will spend more money using a credit card, and you will purchase things you otherwise wouldn't. The disconnect in your brain is known. It can also, in very specific contexts, reduce the cost of managing payments and cash. It can reduce employee theft. But this improvement is overstated.
The reason merchants put up with giving away 3% of all revenue and eating $20 per fraudulent transaction plus whatever the cost of the transaction was is entirely about the fact that a consumer using a credit card buys more than one not using a credit card. It's a big boost to your revenue.
But there is absolutely nothing about a payment network that requires such transaction fees. Certainly not "Risk", as the credit card payment network itself carries zero risk on each transaction. Every dollar fraudulently spent comes out of the pocket of merchants, not the payment network. Their only risk is consumer default, but the entire "Credit Score" system exists to nearly eliminate that risk.
The structure of the system is built to get consumers to spend more money than they normally would, and incentivize everyone to play along to get a kickback. Everything in payment infrastructure in America is designed around this. Even gift card companies are built around getting you to spend money you were not intending to and kicking a portion of that back to the brand name on the card.
losvedir
I think that's out of date. He links to a study showing interchange revenue net of rewards showing up to 3% by high FICO scores. (Just at a gut check that seems crazy to me, since interchange revenue doesn't really go much above 3%!). But that's from 2013. I remember when Fidelity launched its 2% flat cashback AmEx back in 2003. People didn't really know if it would be sustainable. Now 2% is a dime a dozen.
The most recent I've seen otherwise is this Federal Reserve study[0] from 2022. It finds that the marginal return on swipes is actually slightly negative because of how juicy rewards have gotten, and 80% of their profitability comes from interest (with most of the rest fees):
> we find that, on average, the credit function makes up approximately 80 percent of the credit card profitability, whereas the contribution of the transaction function is slightly negative, as rewards and other expenses on credit card transactions outpace banks' interchange revenues.5 In addition, fees—in particular late fees—comprise approximately 15 percent of credit card profitability.
Patrick McKenzie is a dishonest industry insider that cannot be trusted on this topic, and therefore probably any other. Sophistry to an extreme.
nerdjon
I gave up long ago trying to optimize any rewards, it just ended up being stressful and not really worth it ultimately.
Now I just use my apple card everywhere, pay it off every month and get whatever rewards I get.
It feels like a weird situation, those that stand to gain the most from credit cards are also the ones that should feel a difference of under $100 in rewards the least.
The one exception I see is bonus sign up rewards since those can be fairly significant, or making sure you use an airline card at the airline since those bonuses can be fairly significant (with sometimes other benefits). But outside of those exceptions, just choose a card with good rewards and stick with that and pay it off every month.
roncesvalles
I gave up on optimizing and just use the Robinhood Gold 3% cashback card everywhere (except Amazon/WF, where I use their 5% Chase card). I can probably get more than 3% cashback in some categories on other cards, or more ROI by switch to points, high-tier cards like Chase Sapphire, and churning, but I just don't care.
The gain of a few thousand per annum is not worth the mental distraction.
mekdoonggi
I do the same. Just a single card for most spending, but has a bunch of handy features. I pay $50 a year for that, the convenience in case it gets stolen etc. I will say though that it's a little annoying to constantly transfer to the brokerage and then to the bank, but not too bad.
Brendinooo
I've generally tried to stay with cash back rewards in categories that don't change, that's been the best way to balance complexity with rewards for me while not nudging me to buy stuff I don't actually need. I don't like messing with points or rotating categories or included subscriptions. With one exception I avoid annual fees as well.
So like, I have a card that's 6% on groceries, another that's 3% on gas and restaurants, Apple Card does 2% on Apple Pay transactions, and I have a 1.5% card for everything else.
j_bum
Ive aligned to literally the exact same lineup. Amex blue cash preferred for our 6% groceries.
quickthrowman
> It feels like a weird situation, those that stand to gain the most from credit cards are also the ones that should feel a difference of under $100 in rewards the least.
It’s expensive to be poor. Higher interest rates, no credit card rewards, higher unit prices at places like Dollar General, etc.
soco
I don't bother with rewards either, be it cards or memberships or whatnot - too much hassle if you're also working full time. BUT: one thing I use the credit card for and that is for the pay and travel insurance attached to it. Could I get it otherwise? Maybe, no idea. But if you don't carry debt (and I never do) there's no downside.
losvedir
The rewards differences can be significant. Eg 4% vs 1% cash back is $3k difference on an annual spend of $100k.
On the one hand, relative to our income it's not so important, but on the other it feels bad leaving $3k on the table.
ant6n
How do you spend 100K on a credit card per year? Do you pay housing with the card?
ramijames
I'm 46. I've never had a credit card. I have a bank account and a debit card. If I can't afford something, I don't buy it.
You can just opt out of using credit cards.
gumby
In the US you have several legal safeguards that are not provided by debit cards. Fraud liability limitations, chargebacks, and so on.
You can still implement “if I can’t afford something, I don’t buy it” with a cc. I pay mine off every month so it’s financially the same s a debit card but use a premium card for its purchase benefits.
elmer2
I used to have this same mentality (no credit cards) when I was younger, until my debit card was stolen and someone took $1000. The bank basically shrugged their shoulders and said there was nothing they could do.
I always get my money back when this happens with a credit card purchase. I've also had to dispute things occasionally, and I almost always get refunded.
amiga386
In an alternative universe, the government could require banks to refund victims of theft and fraud. It's entirely possible for banks to do this without requiring you use a credit card, they just don't want to.
> Industry body, UK Finance, estimates that criminals successfully stole £1.28 billion through banking fraud and scams in 2025. Of this, £703 million was unauthorised and £576 million was authorised.
> Unauthorised fraud is where the fraudulent transaction is carried out by a third party, not the victim. Authorised fraud involves the victim being tricked into paying money into another account that is controlled by a criminal. This is also known as Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud.
> Frontier found that APP fraud losses have fallen by an estimated £73 million per year and the number of APP scams have fallen by nearly 35,000 due to the policy. Reimbursement rates for all claims have risen from 54% to 65%, and for claims in-scope of the policy, firms are now reimbursing 97%.
gumby
The origin of these protections in the US date back to the early decade of the general purpose credit cards. They started out for business expenses (the first one was branded “Diner’s Club”), but they were so profitable that the issuers wanted to branch out to consumers, but those were wary: many already had credit with their local merchants and didn’t see the point. (The local merchants offered credit bc women couldn’t have bank accounts).
Anyway, the credit card companies (Diner’s Club and Bank Americard, now Visa but still retaining the original color scheme and logo) lobbied Congress in the late 60s to get these protections enshrined in law so that consumers would get a benefit over using cash as a positive incentive to switch.
ryandrake
Yea, we never, ever use debit cards. Credit cards only, for the heightened consumer protections. It sucks that most banks and credit unions give you one by default that doubles as an ATM card. I always push back and ask if they offer an ATM card that does NOT have debit capability.
ValentineC
> In the US you have several legal safeguards that are not provided by debit cards. Fraud liability limitations, chargebacks, and so on.
These are available to Visa and Mastercard debit cards too.
But yeah, the UK has section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act.
stetrain
If you shop at places where many customers user credit cards, and those places don't change an extra credit card processing fee to customers, then you are effectively paying for those credit card fees whether or not you use one.
Opting out doesn't save you from those costs.
tomaskafka
Whole Europe does this.
I never understood why whole nation wants to live in debt just to have one extra month of cash flow (which they’ll probably squander soon).
rsynnott
This is arguably partly because the EU caps card interchange (at 0.3%, generally). So these reward schemes don’t exist, because there’s no money for them, so why would anyone use a credit card over a debit card or bank transfer unless they need the credit? Most people in the US presumably don’t start using credit cards thinking “I’ll get in debt, that’ll be great”; it’s the reward schemes.
rdschouw
Ex-European here. It is very common to overdraft your bank account in Europe. The overdraft interest fees are very similar to the credit cards here in the US. It is basically the same service but with a different execution.
freeone3000
Because it gives me 2.5% cash back, which is basically free money.
ThePowerOfFuet
That comes out of the merchant's pocket, who has priced it into the sale price you are paying.
It is not, thus, free money, at all.
recursivecaveat
On a macro level, that's true. On an individual level, your avacados cost 3% more whether you use credit or debit, it's just your choice to recover 2.5% from that back in rewards or not.
amiga386
It can also be your choice to lobby your government to shut down the rent-seeking behaviour of Visa and MasterCard.
It can be done. The UK and the EU capped fees at 0.3% for credit cards and 0.2% for debit cards
wookmaster
How do you think they got that 2.5% to "give back"?
ricardobayes
Yet many European countries have high household debt. Switzerland, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, some of the highest in the world. I guess it has to be mortgages, since it's true they are not that "big" on credit cards. Although Klarna is a Swedish company.
Speaking for NL, yes it's mortgages. And those come with monthly payments towards the principal in pretty much all cases. Also, those being mortgages the rates are like 5% or so, not over 20%. Soll
After 30 years, people generally speaking own their home and that's their biggest chunk of wealth. So basically, yes a high debt to income ratio, but it's building towards wealth and its not high interest debt either.
AnnikaL
I'm American, and I don't use the extra cash flow (in fact, I make sure to keep more money in my checking account than I spend on the credit card, so I can always auto-pay my bill and therefore never pay any interest).
If I could get a debit card that gave me 2% cash back on all transactions, I'd use that instead!
nemomarx
Pay your credit card balance off every week, and it's an overly complicated debit card but you technically build up a score for future loans. Also maybe you get cash back on that?
Rational if you want a mortgage in the US at least.
ramijames
I'm in Boston. I'll never earn enough to buy property here. I'll never have a mortgage.
frantathefranta
I'm in <other US city>. It's possible to earn enough to buy property here. I already have a mortgage (as an immigrant, building a credit score from credit cards which in turn qualifies you easily for a mortgage is pretty nice).
gblargg
Using a credit card isn't only about living on debt. Some people pay them off every month, and use them for the fraud protection and rewards.
croon
While I hate that it's like this, you're leaving money on the table.
Currently you're keeping money in the bank accruing the bank interest to occasionally pay for stuff.
With a credit card you would get various bonuses/cashback/gameified returns by owing them money, and it costs you nothing as long as you pay them back once a month interest free.
If you however slip up/miss a payment it will cost you a lot.
Both cases suck, but the latter saves you money if you play that game.
That's from a EU perspective. From a US perspective you also require it from a credit score perspective, which EU thankfully hasn't adopted... yet.
Aefiam
as far as I understand it, the creditcard rewards are from the creditcard fee, which is capped in the eu, so you are not missing out much.
croon
Cashback is definitely capped, I'm less sure on other forms of rewards, but by my napkin comparisons, I do get out more "value" from my credit cards than the fees and cashback caps. YMMV of course.
amazingamazing
Honorable but foolish. You could effectively get a discount and still use it the same way as your debit card.
ramijames
Sorry, but I don't care what other people think. It's my money and I'm careful with it.
The entire credit card industry is set up to squeeze out as much profit from people as possible. They offer discounts as an incentive, but it is a huge trap that many, many people fall into. I'm not interested in risk. I'm interested in simplicity.
It's participating in the credit card industry that is foolish.
wildrhythms
For people who only spend what they have, what is the risk? I don't accrue credit card debt, never have, so I've enjoyed a 2-3% discount on my entire spending history. Over lifetime that will probably amount to a couple of vacations.
john_strinlai
>For people who only spend what they have, what is the risk?
there is none. some people are just ideologically opposed to credit cards, like the parent appears to be.
their loss, really. they end up paying a portion of the cost but reap none of the benefits (rewards, additional legal protections)
rpdillon
I completely get where you're coming from, but credit cards are a tool, and you can came out way ahead using them properly. For starters, they are key to having a good credit rating, which opens a lot of doors - maintain 3 open cards, pay off the full balance every month, and keep those accounts open for 10+ years. Big lift.
Second, never use a card with an annual fee.
Third, which I already said, but bears repeating: pay off the full balance every month.
Fourth, look out for one good rewards card and funnel expenses through it, so you can get the rewards.
My parents taught me all of this 40 years ago, and it was exceptional advice, and has served me (and my family) very well.
Credit cards are not about carrying debt. They are the worst tool for that.
phil21
> way ahead
This is overselling it. You can come out 2% ahead or so. 4-5% if you are an extremely high spender who enjoys mentally managing 5 or 6 credit cards to max out category bonuses and other benefits and all that.
You come out marginally ahead at the expense of mental overhead. Good tradeoff for some, not for others.
I use a credit card, I dropped from 3-4 different cards trying to max out those 4-5% spending categories and just have a straight 2% cashback on everything card now. Plus one backup on a different payment network in case one goes down. It got to be exhausting trying to remember to manage so many cards plus remember to use the points, make sure to use the right card for the right thing, and all the other BS.
For some of my friends it's a hobby which is great for you if you enjoy such things! For me, it's just adding another chore to my life. Not worth the 1-2% or so marginal gain against my spending.
The super easy stuff is long gone these days too. You get far larger discounts paying via ACH for utility bills/cell phone bills/etc. vs. what credit card rewards give you so all the "autopilot" stuff is largely gone.
I do remember the days where we paid our Equinix bill via the company Amex. That was pretty fun while the party lasted!
rpdillon
I don't play the credit card points game. I have an Amazon Visa, and I get 5% back, which has been thousands of dollars over the life of the card. When I say that you're coming out way ahead, I'm referring to two things. One is the value you get from the points, but the other is the way credit agencies view credit accounts that are open for a decade or more and are consistently paid off. This is a strong signal to the industry that you are a person that can be relied upon to pay your debts, and this is reflected accordingly in your credit score.
oefrha
Try to pay for SaaS online. Tons of them accept nothing but credit cards; and then some of them accept direct withdrawals from bank account but it takes days to verify. Services using Stripe seems to be the worst at this. (I’ve never carried a credit card balance my whole life.)
timcobb
Debit cards charge as credit cards no problem. That said not having a credit card is tough on your credit history. You could just have one and pay the balance but then they still have all your data, it sucks
oefrha
I’ve specifically had debit card with Visa mark declined online where credit card was expected. Don’t know how common that is because one stops doing that once it happens a couple times.
kotaKat
I assume you've somehow gotten access to stable housing though via that bank account (possibly a home loan, or something else), or accessed a large line of credit before 'modern' credit scoring came into play (FICO scores and the Big Three).
I see many commercials for local banking up here that pulls out 30-40+ year members of the banks boasting about the prosperity the bank provided them, but at the same time, when they'd walked into the bank back in the day A Guy just said "yeah he's good for it" and wrote out the loans they needed.
You can't opt out of the modern credit scoring system and if you fuck it up even once with a bad line item you're out of the running for quite a few things and become virtually poor.
ponector
If you are traveling and need to rent a car in the airport - sometimes it is not possible to do without credit card. Otherwise you don't need a credit card.
ButlerianJihad
Using a credit card makes it way, way easier to rent a car or book a hotel room, or do other transactions that require a significant preauth.
If you present a debit card to one of those desks, they may encourage you to swap for a credit card. Because a debit preauth ties up actual funds in your account. A credit preauth costs nothing but part of your credit limit. It really is a difference if you expect to spend money on vacation.
Lucasoato
I’ll never understand this credit card debt thing... and why should businesses eat the credit card commission cost? Is it 5%? You pay for it, why should I?
sokoloff
I’ve literally never bought anything with a debit card. I’ve definitely spent over a million dollars on credit cards in the last 3 decades and maybe over 2 million if you include personal and business card transactions.
That’s why businesses eat the credit card fees.
quickthrowman
Businesses accept less money when someone pays with BNPL. They also accept less money when someone pays with a credit card.
The reason is rather obvious, people spend more money with credit than they would’ve with cash. Accepting 95 cents on the dollar to get a sale with credit that you wouldn’t have got with cash still earns the seller money, money they wouldn’t have earned without accepting credit.
whaleofatw2022
5% is a pretty high rate IMO. When I worked at retail 20 years ago we got around 2 or 3%, and that was a mom and pop shop, not big retail...
KellyCriterion
AMEX acceptance is super expensive, IIRC they are around on that level
dboreham
Vampire Squid. But this is only in one country. Go other places (e.g. New Zealand) and reality is different. There every single transaction has the credit card fee added explicitly.
tialaramex
The reason for a business to want to accept cards is that some fraction of your customers would choose not to buy whatever it is you sell if not for the convenience. Whether that's a guy who decides not to buy donuts because then he won't have even to buy more scratch-offs or the woman who doesn't get those bald tires replaced because if she did the family will be leaving on cheese sandwiches until payday.
For the consumer the reason is that this is revolving credit. If you pay next month you can have stuff today. That's a small relief, unless it turns into a carried balance and then it's an ongoing burden, but you don't think about that burden at first because you're naturally optimistic.
nickjj
> If you pay next month you can have stuff today.
There is value in this even if you always pay your full statement balance every month.
If you have a stable source of income knowing your credit card payment is due on the 7th of every month means you don't have to monitor your checking account's balance for every purchase. You only have to think "make sure you can cover $X by the 7th".
nutjob2
I don't have to invest any time at all. I just use the (US) card that gives me the greatest benefits, be it cash back or services. Usually I just look at the reward rate, which is a base 2% for me right now going up to 5% for some things.
I love it. As someone who never carries a balance I get paid by banks for doing pretty much nothing at all.
And I don't worry about US retailers, I don't live there.
I should add that rewards are not the best benefits. Sign up bonuses are much more lucrative, running to hundreds of dollars per card, and can often be repeated. Same applies to bank accounts.
croon
Imagine a world where the pipeline from extra fees back to hoop-hopping cashback didn't exist and your services were just cheaper by the same percentage points instead. It's designed to make money off people slipping up instead of serving customers.
nutjob2
Yes, but there are so many financial injustices and inefficiencies in the world.
And it may not work the way you expect. Retailers may favor credit card users if they tend to spend more. There are substantial costs associated with handling cash, so cash users may end up paying more.
croon
Sure, but I'm not comparing credit cards to cash, but credit card incumbents to hypothetical lower rate ones that don't offer rewards in exchange for risk and busywork.
gsb
You're not paid by the banks you're paid by other, usually poorer, customers
nutjob2
Incorrect. I am paid by the banks, I have no financial relationship with other customers.
But of course banks make huge amounts of money from poor customers via various fees and interest payments. It warms my heart that I get some of those ill gotten gains insead of the evil banks.
gsb
In order for the banks to retain the market power required to keep such high interchange fees in place the need to incentivise those who don't NEED to pay with a credit card to do so anyway, and the biggest way they do this is by splitting the loot with you. You share in the loot, and you share in the responsibility for how it was accumulated.
quickthrowman
Assuming you have sufficient income, paying your balance off in full every month and instantly redeeming the rewards each month doesn’t take a whole lot of time. I just use a card that gives 1.5% cash back.
fhdkweig
Agreed. I have my rewards configured to automatically convert to cash to reduce my bill. The button was buried deep in the website, but once I found it, I've never had to go back to the rewards site again.
roenxi
Credit isn't negative sum, it is a positive sum game. "Negative sum" has a specific meaning here and just because wealth is being transferred isn't that significant; positive sum games also have wealth transfers.
It is risky and it is very easy to lose great amounts of money on a bad decision when credit is involved. Arguably that makes it bad. But still not negative sum.
mc32
Alternatively CC companies could cut off people over certain credit risk and then be able to charge interest in line with the lower overall credit risk…
Borrowers can also keep from overextending their credit and go on debit cards instead…
Obviously these things can have an impact on people but before the 80s credit cards were not widely available to people with high credit risk and the world still functioned.
pathikrit
Why is it so hard lol? I have the Bank of America Rewards card for 25+ years. 2.62% cashback on everything, 3.5% on dining/travel. Maybe there are better ones out there but this is good. I have auto-pay setup so I don't have to worry. I have not spent a second of my time optimizing anything in last 15 years
jazdw
Lol because in order to get 2.625% cashback at BoA you need to have $1,000,000 in your BoA accounts, maybe that's why it's hard?
lotsofpulp
It was $100k for a couple decades. The $1M threshold started just now.
pants2
Just be rich. What's so hard about that?
motbus3
countries ditching those companies are making themselves a favour.
twoodfin
Why do you think it’s a negative sum game?
I don’t have any data, but my intuition is that overall high-fee, high-reward cards increase propensity for consumer spending by at least a few % beyond the fees/rewards.
The merchants think so, too, or they wouldn’t accept the processors that let their banks hand out these cards.
vitus
> The merchants think so, too, or they wouldn’t accept the processors that let their banks hand out these cards.
Visa / Mastercard / American Express all have lines of premium credit cards (Visa Infinite, World Elite Mastercard, Amex Platinum), and they're very much too big to ban. You'd just be left with one processor in the US (Discover, now owned by Capital One).
lotsofpulp
This is wrong. Merchants can elect to only accept debit cards.
In recent years, all of my utilities have added 3%+ credit card surcharges, so I pay most of my household expenses with debit cards/ACH now.
Tmobile, Comcast, Verizon, ATT, Target, grocery store, electric utility and water utility (government), annual vehicle tax (government), auto body shop, daycare, and any home repair contractors all charge 3%+ (or give a discount, same thing), so I basically only use credit cards for other retail stores and travel and restaurants.
twoodfin
So why don’t the Visa and Mastercard banks up fees across their entire card lineup?
If they’re truly too big to give up no matter the fees they charge, they’re leaving money on the table.
Of course, they can’t. If Chase started handing college students a 3% card, the merchants would riot.
ValentineC
From what I understand, the card-issuing banks get a cut of the merchant fees, but they're required to provide premium benefits like lounge access.
vasco
It has no relation to paying interest, only to making transactions with the credit card.
turkey99
If you use a credit card, but can’t pay it immediately then you pay interest. It’s a trap the less wealthy fall into.
koolba
Spending money on don’t have with no financial repercussions is known as the elusive “infinity money hack”. Which clearly does not exist.
Of course there’s going to be a a cost to spending beyond your means.
vasco
Yes that is true, and what I said is also true.
iso1631
Or you could simply not pay on the credit card, and avoid the trap?
jubilanti
The point is they make a lot of their money from people who don't, paying 20% APR -- the 'whales' in this consumer industry aren't the richest people, unlike retail, gaming, travel, etc.
snarf21
Not everyone always has the money not to.
nutjob2
This isn't correct, rewards and benefits are not 100% funded by interchange fees. They wouldn't be possible without many customers paying interest.
vasco
What funds it is besides the point, you didn't understand.
nutjob2
Understand what? I'm responding to your claim as written in the context of the comment you replied to. Your current reply is just as vague and light on details so not sure what you were expecting.
kybernetikos
The relationship is that the service and rewards you get are subsidised by generally poorer people who mess up their financial planning.
vasco
Rewards are paid out for transactions, not interest paid, that's all. Otherwise poor people failing payments would get more rewards than the rich which don't. The dynamics would be completely different.
cpburns2009
There is literally no time involved in avoiding interest. You pay your complete balance when it's due. As far as rewards go, I can't be bothered with them so I always just opt for cash back which I do maybe twice a year. Time involved: 5 minutes / 6 mo.
LoganDark
There's plenty of time: the time you waste by not spending money you don't have. You have to wait longer until you make more money in order to spend more without interest.
cpburns2009
Don't spend money you don't have. Especially don't do it with 20% interest short-term loans. It's not that hard. If you're not financially responsible enough to handle a credit card, do not get one. I didn't have one until my late 20s.
LoganDark
I'm not arguing for myself, I agree you shouldn't spend money you don't have.
tyrabound
That is a spurious argument. You have a choice in whether you pay interest, you do not have a choice about a purchase including the cost of paying payment processor fees since the price is the same if you use paper money.
One of the most corrupting yet hidden forces in America today are the payment networks MC/Visa etc. due to their bribing and corruption of the government in order to prevent things like making payment processor fees separate/independent of the cost, i.e., similar to how taxes are added after the fact, not included in the price; and also preventing merchants from having two different prices, cash vs card.
I’m a bit surprised that HBR does not seem to even really have an accurate mental model if the matter, unless they’re making an editorial choice to speak in vernacular turns to relate it to the audience.
The problem is not really the cards, it even credit cards, it’s actually the payment processing networks that are the corrupting force.
If America has a legitimate government, there would have been a federal alternative payment processor that charges nothing as an accompaniment and based on the authority to mint the currency, which is what a payment processor today is, a digital currency mint.
To put it into perspective, when you purchase something by credit card, a merchant may have to l pay a little under 3% on a $100 purchase. When you purchase something cheaper let’s say $5, a merchant may pay 6.5%. And no, they don’t just say “awe shucks, I guess I’ll lose that money”, They increase the prices by some averaged amount.
Some may say that they can’t do that because competition, well, because there is no real competition and because the payment processor de facto monopoly/cartel has basically every single company in lockdown and you have no real alternatives, especially in places like Europe where they’ve foolishly and enthusiastically started forcing everyone into digital payment, all the merchants simply roll what is effectively a kind of organized crime/mob extortion into the prices of the goods and services the common person pays and never knows is paying.
_aavaa_
> similar to how taxes are added after the fact
That is not a positive. I'm fine with splitting up a price if you want to show how much tax gets added, but having to continuously do the mental math of "no this item is 10.99 it's 10.99 + tax" is very frustrating. When I pick up a $11 item, I want to spend $11.
tyrabound
I get your point, it's the argument of the disengaged pseudo-citizen that just doesn't want their convenience bothered. We have those here too even though it's a bit different here. A good case could be made for cash payments receiving a discount, i.e., less the payment processor fee. You may not pay $11 when you pick up a $11 item that way either, but it might place you to never know by how much it will be that way, i.e., maybe $10.75 instead.
I would even advocate that in the US we require taxation to be handled that way too because you are right, most of our citizens can't do basic math, let alone in their heads, or even really care; but if the price tag had to be the taxed price and you then get a discount if you pay cash, it would be a far better situation. There has never been a better time to do this with digital price tags.
The inherent problem is that the likes of the masses are hard to organize, let alone corral and focus on a single thing and everyone thinks they are smarter than the average.
rsynnott
> especially in places like Europe where they’ve foolishly and enthusiastically started forcing everyone into digital payment
In Europe (or at least the EEA, but the UK and I think Switzerland have their own capping) card interchange is capped at, generally, 0.3%.
tyrabound
That does not apply universally and it mostly for various domestic payment processors of the very kind that should have also been implemented in the USA a long time ago, if the US government weren't so dark rotten and corrupt and had actually been responsive or even just representative of the people for the last 150 or so years.
rsynnott
It applies to all card networks (ie Visa and Mastercard, and local schemes like Girocard and Cartes Bancaires, though in practice most local schemes had cheaper-than-cap fees anyway), for consumer cards only. About the only significant thing it does _not_ apply to is Amex, but in practice that's only issued in a couple of EU countries these days, and is not widely accepted.
Forgeties79
> Because merchants charge everyone the same price regardless of how they pay, those fee costs are factored into prices for all shoppers. However, credit card users get that money back and then some through rewards, while cash and debit users get little or nothing.
>The result: People paying cash face the equivalent of a 26% higher sales tax than premium credit card users shopping at the same store.
I am surprised this never occurred to me or has come up at all in discussions with people (in the context of rising costs/inflation specifically). I’ve literally never considered this compounding effect until now. It’s so obvious of course, it just never even crossed my mind.
toomuchtodo
Many restaurants I’ve eaten at lately surcharge credit cards with a 3% fee, offering a discount if you pay cash. This is the way to nullify this regressive policy until the US commercial banking system offers instant payments for merchants, internalizing the externality of the interchange fee. If you pay with card, you
US FedNow instant payments went live three years ago, and can move $10M per transaction for a few pennies per transaction.
(A gap in legislation was not mandating offering FedNow capabilities to your customers as a condition of your banking license as a bank; I expect this to be patched eventually)
steveBK123
The problem is the way the US credit/debit card systems are setup, there's not much of a discount/surcharge that would make me switch usage to debit.
If my credit card number gets stolen, zero money ever leaves my account. It simply gets contested before the monthly bill is even due, and cancelled. I have probably had number stolen 5 times in 20 years, and its never cost me a cent. Zero dollars every left my accounts even temporarily.
If my debit card number gets stolen, the money is out of my checking account immediately. Mortgage payments and other bill payments might fail, and the onus is on my to chase up the bank to get charges reversed and money returned to my account.
toomuchtodo
n=1 of course. All US mobile carriers provide a substantial discount if you establish autopay with ACH over debit or credit. I've seen the same with Xfinity. It will take time, but we'll get there.
> You can get a $10 discount on your monthly bill if you: Have Xfinity Internet and sign up for automatic payments and paperless billing with a stored bank account
Walmart was one of the larger supporters of FedNow during public comment period, as they experience billions in interchange costs per year, and are building instant payment support into the Walmart Pay component of their app to avoid these costs.
> “It surprised me,” Henry said of adoption of Walmart’s first iteration of pay-by-bank, which is available online but hasn’t been marketed to customers. “It’s certainly surpassed our expectations of the amount of customers that have registered and actually use the payment type.”
> Walmart’s upgraded pay-by-bank offering will be rolled out in 2025. The transactions will occur over bank technology provider Fiserv’s NOW Network, which integrates with The Clearing House’s Real Time Payments network and the Federal Reserve’s FedNow. Until now, large retailers hesitated to launch real time payment options because many banks were not connected to an instant settlement system, meaning their customers would not be able to use the product. NOW Network aims to connect to as many banks as possible to reach 100% of deposit accounts by combining its own network with RTP and FedNow.
My understanding is that Meta is also pushing ad buyers to invoicing vs credit card payment.
Like the slow decline of check volume, I see the same here. Credit card rails will exist for some time, perhaps another 10-15 years, but they have likely peaked from a volume perspective. If you're a merchant, surcharge when you can, and work towards on boarding and offering customers cheaper payment rails (imho). If folks want to pay the ~3-4% surcharge, enable them to, that is a choice if they want the benefits of using a credit card. But we should not all have to eat the cost for their benefit when less expensive options are available.
(I work in financial services adjacent to payment systems, thoughts and opinions always my own, this is behavioral economics at scale, as always think in systems)
internet2000
Not only would the 3% fee not make me blink, as my cards have 3% cash back for dining, I doubt I'd change my behavior even at a 5% discount. If anything it'd dissuade me slightly from patronizing the restaurant.
Credit cards are convenient and cash isn't. The genie is out of the bottle, no way to make people move back to cash.
aprilthird2021
You're not the avg person though. Most people are being squeezed by inflation and watching prices on everything and trying to claw an extra 2-3% back wherever they can.
If interchange fees were capped, people would go back to cash, imo. A lot of research shows you spend less when you pay with cash. And the lack of credit card rewards as a draw might lead people to carry it again
iso1631
> If interchange fees were capped, people would go back to cash, imo
And this is based off evidence from countries where interchange fees are capped?
zf00002
Car mechanics, dealerships, house fixing contractors, city (property taxes), these are the ones that I can think of in the past year I've come across charging a fee for credit card payments. What's most irritating is that most of them do not setup for and drop the fee if you pay by debit card.
toomuchtodo
Always ask if they’ll give you the discount paying with Zelle if they won’t for debit. Almost every major bank supports Zelle currently in your native banking app.
In small restaurants, that’s just a tax grift for the owner. The “smarter” ones underreport income, the dumb ones steal the sales tax and the hammer eventually drops. Over time, they’re probably paying a lot more than 3% for shrink, Due to screw ups and employees skimming the till.
Credit cards have a really high ROI. The 3% drives 10-20% more spend, sometimes even more. When I was on the board of a small private school, we bought a square terminal and used QRs for flyers. That drove 30% increases in fundraiser expenses and helped us reduce mailings and nags. We would cross-sell stuff - could buy your youth soccer registration at the fall fest or whatever.
The things where ach, check, cash make sense are where there’s no discretionary spend at point of sale or recurring payments. If you pay 75 bucks a week that have your apartment cleaned dog groomed or whatever. You’re not getting value beyond taking the payment in advance with a credit card. Those are the areas where Venmo and Cash app have really dominated.
r3trohack3r
I was surprised by this number too - and I’m pretty sure it’s a clever wording trick to inflate the percentage:
> equivalent of a 26% higher sales tax than premium credit card users shopping at the same store.
I do not think the sale price is increased by 26% - which doesn’t square with a 1% to 3% fee - I think they pay approximately 26% more in “sales tax” so you’re paying 26% more than the 7% tax.
Forgeties79
I wasn’t questioning the number so much as saying I hadn’t considered the mechanics of what was happening
slicktux
I believe a similar thing happened with fast food and food delivery fees. It costs money to be listed on the food delivery app so fast food chains started charging everyone the same price to offset the cost of being listed on the apps.
paxys
Delivery apps don’t mandate that the price on their apps be the same as on the actual menu. If you walk in and order you’ll pretty much always get a lower price.
tialaramex
It also means stratifying card users, even if you actually make all the card users pay more than those with cash. The people who can just barely qualify for a card are paying to fund the "rewards" for the wealthy who pick the best options.
"It's expensive to be poor" is a more or less universal experience under capitalism and it's amazing how many novel ways we've come up with to make it more expensive for poor people.
"Means testing" is one of the fun ones. The wealthy will often justify this as "People like me shouldn't get this help" which sounds even generous, and then you realise, oh, because we're testing if you're worthy to receive help now to get help you need to expend some time and effort to pass the test. When this "I shouldn't get benefits" is offered to you as a reason to means test, ask them why they're taking a benefit they don't think they should have and why they can't pay society back in other ways rather than inflict more misery on the poor...
Forgeties79
Then they get angry when the other side of the coin is discussed - they can’t get certain benefits because they’re above the threshold too, but they’re different of course.
nilamo
And there I was thinking it was obvious that merchants wouldn't just eat cc fees, and would cushion all prices to account for their costs.
Forgeties79
You’re right but that’s actually not the part I’m talking about. Specifically the fact that even though we are all “being charged the same price,” as prices increase, the amount I am saving increases as well due to cashback or other benefits on a credit card. And because I am spending less money, I ostensibly have more money to make my credit better, which means the benefits only increase on top of that.
It’s a variation on a theme we are all very familiar with. It’s expensive to be poor. But this is another angle I hadn’t really considered. It’s a little more complicated than just “I can have better cards with better benefits.”
TL;DR: The actual cost per item for me is, in very literal and quantifiable terms, lower as a result - and the more expensive things get, the steeper my discount gets while the person next to me paying cash is paying a little more than I am every transaction for the same items.
Put another way: As price/inflation increases, the real number I am saving increases as well. So we aren’t just paying different prices, but their increase is also higher the higher prices get.
pistoriusp
Same, that percentage seems absurd though.
cge
The only way I can interpret the percentage is that they are stating the increased cost as a percentage of sales tax rather than a percentage of the sale, such that "26% higher sales tax" in a state changing 10% sales tax would mean paying 2.4% more in total. That choice seems misleading, but does make the percentage make sense.
post-it
That is what it says after all, it's pretty explicit.
cge
It's just such a bizarre choice that one might hope there would be another interpretation. Why measure a percentage change on sales tax, which varies heavily from location to location, and is not what the associated fees are based on, rather than simple choice of total cost?
post-it
Because sales tax is something you pay that's more than the sticker price, and people tend to have an intuition for sales tax in their area. Personally, I find "a 3% credit card fee is like paying 21% more in sales tax" to be intuitive.
alex43578
One factor that never seems to come up in these discussions is that while businesses might not like credit card fees, they also don’t like all the issues with cash: managing it, transporting it, losing it to employee theft, etc. The cost of cash transactions isn’t 0.
Same argument for people: managing cash is a pain, swiping a card is easy. Contesting a transaction or fraud is way easier (infinitely easier?) with a card than cash. Having day to day liquidity even without ever carrying a balance is nice.
Is all this worth $9.2B across the economy? Maybe not, but again, certainly worth more than 0.
gruez
>Is all this worth $9.2B across the economy? Maybe not, but again, certainly worth more than 0.
Nobody's arguing that credit card companies are proving zero value, only that they're charging more than what can be "justified" (whatever that means). That's why in europe the interchange rates are capped at some amount to reflect that.
alex43578
Europe is artificially capping the interchange rates - that doesn’t mean that’s the market price for that service.
As for America, there’s 4 card networks, and no explicit regulation preventing you from starting another (just the huge regulatory burdens involved with any money-processing business, PCI, etc).
If they were charging so much more than is “justified”, couldn’t one of the dozens of well-funded players in the fintech space swoop in? Couldn’t Walmart fall back to cash and a “Walmart card”?
Instead, we see even goliaths like Walmart spending money and time to support newer features like tap to pay because it reduces fraud losses and customers just prefer it.
The “justified” thing is silly - is Apple charging more than is justified because they make a profit?
Starbucks also pushes their app and paying via app, which has the side-effect of bundling 5 $5 transactions into one $25 transaction (a "card reload"), thus reducing their fee overhead.
jen20
I don’t really care what businesses want at this point: my default position is that they are trying to scam me in some way and must be handled appropriately. Credit cards are a must-have in this situation, since they provide a mechanism other than hope to deal with recalcitrant merchants without wasting my time.
gblargg
A better comparison would be between debit cards (which have low fees) and credit cards.
Tepix
Credit card owners benefit. But they also pay: With their data.
figmert
More actually. Generally those rewards happen by using your credit (there are exceptions). Meaning you are more likely to pay for something that you'd probably otherwise not have spent money on.
dramm
I was working with a team pitching a new marketing database system to Discover Card decades ago. When we were first shown around their HQ which was a kind of hybrid open floor plan with lots of cubicles there was a large office with fancy Queen Anne? style furniture in it, IIRC an EA or two sitting outside. it looked nice but kinda out of place in a sea of cubicles and standard office furniture. I asked who's office that was and was told it's Nancy Donovan's (we were meeting with her team). But they did not describe Nancy as the head of Marketing and Sales etc., they described her as "the person who developed the cashback program". I liked their clarity about recognizing what worked.
gruez
The most defensible framing that I came across (maybe from patio11?) in favor of credit card rewards is that they're a "bulk discount" on interchange fees. People who spend more on their cards also pay more fees (passed through the stuff they buy), so it kinda makes sense to give them a discount[1]. That's what credit cards do. Cards with the highest rewards are geared towards high spenders, with corresponding credit score and/or minimum income requirements. It's not unlike how the 2 quart (1.89L) bottle of mayo at costco is cheaper than the 8oz (0.24L) bottle from dollar general, but nobody would frame that as a "wealth transfer".
[1] of course, this doesn't need to rely on some principle that people are entitled to discounts if they buy more, because in reality discounts arise from complex market dynamics such as competition and price discrimination.
The only way to solve this is to have the user of the credit/debit card pay the fee. Sure, you can do an EU thing of 0.2-0.3% or whatever it is, but this might still be 0.2-0.3% more than it could be in a competitive market.
brainwad
Australia tried this, but it led to a different problem of payment processors being able to gouge card payers because merchants were allowed to pass on whatever their costs were, and consumers didn't really have a real choice of paying the fee or not. Also since the fee had to be stated before the card was presented for tap and go payments, it didn't solve the OP problem: debit cards and premium cards all got hit with the same surcharge.
m101
Interesting. I guess one would then ask why was it not the case that the merchants were not also behaving in a similar way and looking for the cheapest payment processors (as long as they were also asked to eat their own side of the fees).
Perhaps forcing everyone to just implement free payments between any bank accounts, like pix, is actually the only viable solution here (and i just accept that this is one of those market failure things).
code-blooded
Handling cash is expensive too, so what EU does is probably beneficial (as in cheaper) to the society as a whole.
I wonder if true transaction cost even reaches the 0.2-0.3% or could be further lowered.
like_any_other
> Because merchants charge everyone the same price regardless of how they pay, those fee costs are factored into prices for all shoppers. However, credit card users get that money back and then some through rewards, while cash and debit users get little or nothing.
And they charge everyone the same price because credit cards contractually force them to. Merchants can either accept these terms, or forego credit cards entirely. This way credit cards prevent other payment methods from competing on price. Free markets for thee, contractually forbidding competition for me.
paxys
While they’re probably right from a consumer perspective, the article skips over the fact that accepting and handling cash is a significant cost for businesses, way more than the credit card fees. Delays in checkout, making change, counterfeit bills, employee theft, external theft, safe transport, added accounting burden…all add up to an estimated 5-15% (https://plainscapital.com/blog/the-cost-of-accepting-cash/). In fact merchants can now legally pass through credit card surcharges to customers but very few choose to do so, because they’d prefer you pay by card.
DrScientist
It's cheaper to be rich, and expensive to be poor.
59percentmore
How hard is it for the wealthy to not smack everyone else around at every possible opportunity? What happened to noblesse oblige?
(This is not a rhetorical question, I would love to hear others' take on the psychology and history of the subject. Really, how hard is it?)
arjie
One thing that happened is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, right? Mark Zuckerberg is panned for having 'defunded' a school. What happened was he paid for it for a while and then stopped in a planned manner. Those who didn't ever pay were better off. In general, at the margin you move some guy who was ambivalent to opposed. Jordan Henderson spoke for gay rights, and got panned when he moved to Saudi Arabia, while many footballers did not speak out about gay rights ever and received no censure over this.
The general rule with many of these causes is that unless you're willing to be absolutely committed, it's better not to be involved. If you cannot prove to yourself absolute fidelity perpetually into the future, it's better to not do it at all. The punishment for the apostate far outweighs the punishment for the infidel.
So your commitment has to be at least high enough to be willing to bear the resulting punishment for your apostasy. And if it is any less than that, you are strongly encouraged to just stay out of it. It's not that anyone is mean or anything. It's just that on the margin not-participating costs nothing and participating incurs a massive liability. That causes a shift in the window.
snarf21
It becomes a scorecard. Success in life is strictly about making the number go up. It doesn't matter if they could spend $100K a day for life and never go broke. They must have a bigger number and be higher on the Forbes (e.g.) list. Some people are so obsessed with it they lie and make up things to claim their number is much higher than it actually is.
podgorniy
> everyone else around at every possible opportunity?
How exactly to become wealthy then?..
--
> What happened to noblesse oblige?
Some things made noblesse oblige way harder to manifest.
Meritocracy. "I deserve what I have", versus "I got lucky have what I have" made harder to share back.
Globalization. When you use one community to produce and another to consume, and third to register a company, and owner lives in fourth it's hard to associate yourself with the community. Where exactly to give back? You won't even see those people.
Secularizarion. Though USA is still significantly religious place comparing to europe.
Easiness to move. Today you're here, tomorrow you're there in new zealand bunker.
Culture. Somehow the rich are in the people who are heavily interconnected, spend time together at the khe khe pedoisland.
Natural selection. The ones who care less about others mathematically have more advantage than those who care enough to spend resources on non-resource-aggregation activities.
--
So. There is no intristic motivation to do so (with majority), there is no external motivation, and there is no repercussions of not giving back.
elmer2
I have several credit cards and pay them off at the end of the month. I get mostly free hotel stays when I take my family on vacation and have had many free airline tickets.
I also used a credit card to bootstrap my business 15 years ago. At it's height, I was brining in $1 million/year. The bank would have never given me a loan for the amount I was able to use on a credit card. I ended up shutting the business down a few years ago, with no debt.
Most people can't handle spending and rack up tons of debt. Credit cards can also be used to make money, instead of buying stupid things you can't afford.
wat10000
Ridiculous. I suppose I’m also making a wealth transfer when I buy in bulk while poor people can’t afford to, or I drive to a discount store while people with bad transportation options have to shop at an expensive local place, or I use a loyalty card.
The store still makes a profit on my purchase. My rewards are my own money coming back to me. I’m not sticking my hand in a poor person’s pocket just because I use a fancy card.
ilamont
Because merchants charge everyone the same price regardless of how they pay
Not at many gas stations. Cash gets a discount usually $.10 per gallon. I’ve also started to see restaurants either give a discount for cash, or charge extra for credit card purchases. Business suppliers from tiny shops to large national companies tack on 3% for people paying with credit cards, or like T-Mobile, a $5/line monthly fee in order to get people to pay by direct debit.
dmayle
It goes a step further... previously, card agreements (between merchants and the networks), required the prices to be the same between cash and credit (with the well known gas carve-out), but Durbin made that tying illegal, so now retailers are free to charge different prices for cash, credit, and debit.
The article has one thing mistaken, because it says that Durbin lowered costs for transactions, but credit owners got to keep their perks... That's not technically true (I worked at a supermarket when debit rails first went into effect, and I worked in payments when Durbin went into effect).
There are no benefits to credit users who use the debit rails, and the merchants would really rather you use the debit rails, because it is much cheaper for them. Durbin was mostly a win for the merchants, not a win for the customers.
However, if you take that to believe that the merchants lowered prices overall because they were paying less for transactions, than you might try to read into it that credit users kept their perks, while cash and debit users paid.
The true story, however, is that it's an equilibrium... When the costs go down, the saved money goes somewhere in between the two (supply and demand), and as long as there is competition, the savings are shared.
However, the real problem is that credit companies are allowed to invest interchange fees in perks at all. Credit card companies decided to take their low-risk pool, and offer them incentives, splitting the money they saved between themselves and their users, and using it as a way to pull more low-risk users. The more that happens, the more expensive it becomes for credit companies that serve mid-to-high-risk users... and since we can't stop offering credit to those users as well, those companies push for and get increases to interchange fees to cover the additional cost... which creates more room for benefits for the low-risk users, and the cycle begins anew. It's a vicious cycle that can't be fixed by changing amounts on the existing fee schedule... The only possible fixes would be in either disallowing these kinds of perks, or splitting the rail charges, and specifically charging less interchange for low-risk users (which dries out the benefit pool)
dukeofdoom
So if anyone is trying to picture what 9.2 would buy. The new bridge between US and Canada (Gordie Howe) was 4.6 billion. So that is 2 giant bridges + related infrastructure ... worth of wealth transfer. That bridge had some corruption / payoffs, so we should discount that by 10% wealth transfer as well.
Brendinooo
They mention "premium credit cards" in the article, is there a general understanding of which cards are premium? I clicked through to the study and the only example they cited in there was Chase Sapphire Reserve but I didn't see, like, a list or something.
diego_moita
Credit card fees is one of the main reasons why Brazil's Pix and India's UPI are destroying their market share in those countries.
For merchants, it just doesn't make sense to pay high fees to cater to a dwindling minority of consumers.
Besides, NPCI has introduced merchant transaction fee for UPI now causing decline in UPI transactions.
nyeah
I interpret this article, and all related discussion, as an invitation to talk about my personal finance habits.
myrmidon
I think this is disingenuous framing.
Credit card rewards are not a mechanism to shift wealth towards premium card holders (this is a negligible distraction), they exist purely to increase revenue/conversion rate, by decreasing customer price sensitivity (compared to cash payments) and encouraging financially irresponsible spending. If this did not actually work in practice, every merchant would just insist on cash and pocket the difference.
"Poor people" are hurt much more from the changes in spending behavior induced by credit card use than by paying for card rewards.
diego_moita
You are an economist, aren't you?
I suspect that because I didn't understand what you wrote.
You used a lot of passive voice and complex jargon. That is economists favorite writing style: they write to confuse, not to explain.
myrmidon
> You are an economist, aren't you?
No. I do embedded software engineering for a living.
I use (in my view) HN appropriate levels of jargon (because lots of people here are involved with getting people to pay for some newfangled cloud thing or other, so I use their terminology).
In simple words:
People pay more for the same (and spend more recklessly) when you let them pay by credit card, and this causes much more economical "damage" to poor peolpe than any "wealth transfer from card rewards".
diego_moita
Thanks, it is better now.
kova12
I'm the one on receiving end of this game, and I'm sick and tired of playing it. I would so much rather pay full price and stop wasting my time looking what credit card to use for what purchase. This game benefits nobody but banks, and the total amount of time it wastes unproductively is staggering.
oldsklgdfth
Merchants pay the transaction cost. In my parents business in the early 2000s customers would ask in advance if they could use a CC. Some places installed ATMs in the corner (still a thing in some places), but quite unpopular. Rather than lose a customer the merchant will accept payment with credit card and pay the fee.
One consequence of this system is the large merchants have more bargaining power and can negotiate lower fees. So large retailers, gas station chains, etc. are able to reduce the overhead of accepting CC payment. While smaller merchants have the same higher cost.
From a capitalism perspective, this is the most egregious example of "you have capital, so you can make more capital". Banks holding the capital in this case.
Fun fact: when credit cards were first introduced only to people with good credit, which paid the balance in full. this was not profitable. Only after opening the pool to other credit levels did CC start printing money for banks.
bluGill
> Merchants pay the transaction cost.
This applies to cash as well. It takes a lot of time to count change for everyone. Plus all the ways there are to steal cash.
Your fun fact is wrong. Credit cards were always profitable. They were not in the beginning because scale is what makes them profitable. Anyone who uses their cards for a couple meals a month (which is what it was first started for) is going to cost money because of all the overhead to have you as a customer. In those days that was a stamp to send the bill, someone to open the payment and cash the check - now that everybody works electronically the overhead is lower, plus people are using it for more and so there is enough left over to pay for it.
camkego
Honestly, TL;DR
I wrote a summary for you...
"Because they receive a rebate, credit rewards-card users often effectively pay less than the posted or cash register price for equivalent goods or services."
Mamut3
Credit card systems are a Ponzi scheme that favors those who already hold a lot of capital, at the expense of those who weren't lucky enough to be born heirs.
This is even more true of the American brands that are getting Trump to attack modern, open, cost-free systems from other countries—like Brazil's PIX, maintained by the Central Bank of Brazil.
I call it 21st-century American usury.
gustavus
So i may be an anomaly but I'd say 20-40% of all places I shop have a specific fee to cover CC transactions using a CC vs Cash.
criddell
There are places I go to that only accept credit or debit cards. No cash or cheques.
aprilthird2021
Yeah and a good smattering of cash only businesses as well
amazingamazing
What a silly article. Don’t buy things you cannot afford. Wealth transfer is a ridiculous framing. Is any heterogeneous situation involving money a wealth transfer?
It's clearly more complex than the story these authors are telling, in particular the highest income consumers get the worst returns on their interchange payments. So stores and services catering to wealthy consumers are actually subsidizing an opportunity for savvy customers, many of whom are not wealthy
mchusma
One note on patio11’s opinion on this is that he really overweights the ongoing work and innovation required for electronic payment processing. It WAS a great novelty and deserves to have made a lot of money for 30 years. But the reason they make so much money today is monopolistic low behaviors to lock in their advantages. It’s not a free marlet because of deals over time, some of the most famous of which are their prohibition on charging different rates for cards or even disclosing the rates on cards.
I think the most simple piece of legislation to solve a lot of problems is to allow merchants to pass along the interchange rate to their customers. If they could do this legally and operationally, this would solve most issues here. If a credit card wants to be expensive, fine the consumer should pay for it. Because of contractual and operational limitations, credit card companies have gotten themselves into the current arms race.
If stripe implemented this, it would make me appreciate them as a force for good instead of being a part of the problem.
gruez
>in particular the highest income consumers get the worst returns on their interchange payments
That's not what the article says:
>High-income consumers with high FICO scores benefit the most from reward credit cards compared to mid- and low-income consumers with high FICO scores. At the lower end of the FICO distribution, however, this pattern is reversed. On average, net rewards are far more negative for high-income consumers with low FICO scores than for middle- and low-income consumers with low FICO scores.
>Or, to put that another way: if there is redistribution happening, it necessarily includes redistribution from unsophisticated high income customers to sophisticated low income customers.
While it's true that wealth customers with low FICO scores are getting hosed, it's not clear whether that is enough to cancel out the effect that richer people (presumably) have higher FICO scores on average
ngriffiths
To be clear though, the higher FICO scores get hosed the most, see the graph earlier on. Your quotes are conditional on FICO so they don't take that into account.
The only way I can put these things together is that at the high FICO end, both wealthier and poorer consumers get hosed a lot but wealthier consumers not quite as much. On the other hand, lower FICO band doesn't get as bad of a deal overall but it is worse for wealther people (plausibly because they have high interchange fees and don't use their rewards).
It's complicated, but... this is not a wealth transfer right? It is a transfer mostly just from consumers to credit card companies that provide them a service.
gruez
>To be clear though, the higher FICO scores get hosed the most, see the graph earlier on. Your quotes are conditional on FICO so they don't take that into account.
Are you talking about "Consumption by income decile" graph? That doesn't show them being hosed, unless you think everyone should pay a flat rate to access the credit card system.
ngriffiths
I'm talking about "Interchange income - rewards expenses," where the difference is 6x higher at the highest FICO scores. And of course interchange income is not the same as cost to the cardholder but they are linked
So in US card processing is x5-x10 more expensive.
At least we have cheap gas? farts
(+) there still seems to be a massive wage premium for "being physically in a San Francisco office" even if most of the work is being done by an AI, which cannot be sustainable
Their education was not 10x ours and their economy was only a few % over ours per capita.
This is not the case.
Canadians like myself have ~40% of our provincial taxes spent on healthcare, so in my case about ~8% of my gross income. Somewhere in the tune of $20k/yr. While I was living in Seattle and filing American, quite a bit less of my gross income went to healthcare. Just food for thought.
Well, maybe I spoke too soon, because my private American healthcare turns out to also be about 8% of my gross income (of $60k)(before copays and my deductible)(and also it's crap). Twinsies!
But yes I agree that it would be awful to have my health needs taken care of and a mere ~160k USD left to spend on everything else.
I think either way both of us are in really good shape. In my experience the quality of American care is better in nearly every regard (having experienced both pretty intimately), but the simplicity and the peace of mind of the Canadian system has its benefits too. In either case you end up paying.
> But yes I agree that it would be awful to have my health needs taken care of and a mere ~160k USD left to spend on everything else.
I’m confused - do you actually think it’s awful?
>I think either way both of us are in really good shape.
I'm lying in bed with non-specific upper abdominal discomfort that I'm hoping isn't related to digestive issues (pancreatic) that I've had for years, but which I can't get treated for because my insurance-related circumstances have made it very difficult to get consistent access to, and then to be taken seriously by, relevant specialists. These issues have combined with chronic injuries that were poorly managed in their acute phase and poor access to quality nutrition to make it difficult for me to exercise consistently. Contrarily and consequently, I'm quite out-of-shape.
The best and most consistent care I've ever gotten was while I was on Medicaid (which was still yet hampered by the professional stigma against accepting Medicaid and treating Medicid patients well).
>In my experience the quality of American care is better in nearly every regard (having experienced both pretty intimately
You experienced the quality of care available to rich people. That quality of care is not widely available, not for lack of institutional capacity, but primarily due to lack of profit.
>I’m confused
I really don't think you are.
Worth noting that taxes in the US are a lot lower than they should be because a large portion of government expenses are financed with debt. Canada owns over 400B in US debt, so that's Canada "subsidizing" US taxes.
Also, yes, that's how healthcare works: when you're young and less sick, you tend to pay more than you get out of it, and then it reverses as you get older.
Healthcare, education, and housing are expensive in the US for the same primary reason: political interventions that simultaneously subsidize demand and restrict supply.
e.g. https://documentscontractuels.orange.fr/les-offres-orange-mo...
The good news is that modern fiber systems blow cable internet out of the water. It is far cheaper to supply symmetric gigabit internet to every customer over fiber than over cable. Fiber just has more bandwidth to go around. And because it’s a different technology it is not subject to the same local monopolies that cable is encumbered with. This means that the free market is correcting the problem and has been for a decade. In many parts of the country it is now possible to get internet that is faster and cheaper than what is available in the even the best built parts of Europe. The main obstacle to that build–out is probably local permitting. Many large cities require new permits, with public comment periods for each and every one of them, for every single block that an ISP lays fiber for. Cities like San Francisco have imposed a glacial pace on their ISPs.
Exclusive francise agreements between municipalities and cable operators have been outlawed since 1992. But it's generally uneconomic to overbuild a new network with the potential to touch every home unless a large portion will subscribe.
Fiber internet is typically much better than cable internet, but cable internet is good enough for most people, so they're unlikely to switch unless it's significantly cheaper, which it often isn't -- especially since local incumbents tend to lower prices or rollout better service when a new entrant is entering the market (or announces they will ... Google Fiber city selection announcements drove lots of competing rollouts even though Google didn't install anything in those cities).
Regulation requiring wholesale access / line sharing / or strict separation of first mile and service infrastructure would allow for competition in service and routing, without having to build a 3rd last mile network. Congress did this in 1996, but the FCC walked it back for cable, the courts said if it doesn't apply to cable, it doesn't apply to telephone, and the FCC said internet over power lines exists and provides competition despite the lack of providers. Congress never came back to make clear that it wanted line sharing, so it disappeared from the mainstream.
I have municipal fiber where the municipality handles last mile only and I have a choice of IP service providers. But installation was very expensive and monthly service is also expensive relative to the ILEC and the cable company, although the cable company service on my street ends before it reaches me.
The cable and telephone companies have a major cost advantage that they can rebuild their networks with a good expectation of customer uptake; and they're allowed to manage the finances of build out however they see fit. The muni fiber (in my state anyway) has to bill customers for the costs of install and even if it could self-finance a build out to service all homes, wouldn't see a lot of uptake because most people find their current service to be good enough.
Where we are is very much not a function of the free market.
And that competition is definitely a good thing. Xfinity’s offering was far worse before they had competition because there was no incentive to offer anything better. They’ve even introduced a new idea to the market in order to win people back away from fiber: guaranteed fixed prices for five years. No surprises when promotional rates expire, no price increases, no shenanigans at all for five whole years. That alone is a breath of fresh air compared to their own business practices of just a year or two ago. Ziply had to respond by lowering their prices and ending promotional rates because they were losing customers. You know the old saying: as iron sharpens iron, so too does man sharpen man.
It would be better, of course, if the government were not mismanaging things. Switzerland’s solution is the better way to go than what we have today. Their government paid to build a nation–wide fiber network, and any ISP can service any customer on that network. That allows ISPs to compete on price and features without worrying about having to build their own competing and overlapping network. This is already how electric service works in many states, so it’s not even like we can’t make it work.
>Their government paid to build a nation–wide fiber network
So did we. The last step is nationalizing that network and finishing the build-out in-house.
When we paid for national broadband access here in the US, it was not for fiber to the home. It was for DSL. Worse, the FCC measured coverage not by service address as it does today, but by census district. The phone companies merely had to assert that they could provide service to an address in the district and the FCC would count the whole district as covered. The districts aren’t very big, so in dense areas that was not a bad estimation. In less dense areas it was just a giant loophole. They could provide service to one house on the edge of the district and not bother with the hundreds of homes miles away out in the countryside. Officially we got exactly what we paid for.
As you say we could still nationalize these fiber networks and stitch them together into a real national network. Of course they don’t all use exactly the same technology, and it would be a huge political fight, but in principle I could see a government agency gradually buying networks from the ISPs and integrating them. Of course you know that if Trump proposes it then the Democrats will immediately oppose it on the general principle that Trump proposed it.
I have never seen anyone articulate this so crisply.
The government has created a situation with the student loans thing where basically anyone can borrow 500k to get an obviously useless degree.
Are the colleges going to ensure they collect that money? Obviously yes.
The point applies even to the useful degrees, and more broadly to the universities irrespective of any particular degree program. Student loans and scholarships make demand almost completely inelastic -- totally insensitive to price increases. Universities compete to attract the best students, and a major mechanism for doing that is to invest in non-academic amenities, such that tuition prices are funding much more than literal tuition. Combine these two factors together, and you have a feedback loop of continuous price inflation.
Similar factors are at work in the healthcare and housing sectors, with the most important element being that external subsidies eliminate price elasticity on the demand side of the equation, and completely obliterate the dynamics that ensure downward price pressure in normal markets.
Sure is funny how FDR had us spend a little cash 100 years ago to ensure even the remotest farm gets electricity, and we already gave ISPs a shitload of cash to do the same, but now "We can't" build telephone poles to rural places. Even though those same places already have telephone poles for power and telephone.
AT&T was able to leverage it's monopoly position and defense industry relationship to basically invent everything that runs the modern world (and were compelled to license those advancements out) while modern monopolies can't even dig some holes.
Sounds like we need some more "Consent Decrees" and a DoJ that makes large companies scared.
We damned every single river in the nation. We built so much railroad that it crashed the industry. We built those railroads purposely in places where nobody lived and then willed towns into existence around them. We built the interstate highway system.
Why can we suddenly not build anything? Maybe it's because people keep insisting, against all historical evidence, that we can't, and they don't even try.
That does even begin to touch on crazy laws banning people from setting up their own ISP to compete: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/07/16-u-s-states-still-ban-....
There is ample historical evidence that this is a poor excuse.
Long ago, leaders in the US understood the value of universality. You'll likely recognize this as the Network Effect, Metcalfe's Law, etc. Back in the day, they called this "universal service." That thinking was central to the policies established for both electrification and phone service in the US: it wasn't then, and isn't now, truly universal, but what could be feasibly accommodated was, even when costs were/are quite high.
It wasn't lost on the people of those times that such policies inherently meant the cost of including sparsely populated, distant areas would be subsidized by concentrated areas. Before those systems appeared, the founders welded the same thinking into the US constitution in the form of the US postal service, with exactly the same knowledge and concerns.
We've lost that. The change happened prior to the advent of the internet. You're free to attribute this to whatever you wish; I won't offer my view on that, except to say there are no innocents: every argument that fingers ebil capitalists can be countered by examples of urban leaders damning government policies that subsidize non-urbanites. What I know with certainty is, if packet switched networking was somehow a thing in the 19th century, availability would be a given for almost any structure more significant than a hunting cabin in the US today, complete with common carrier, service baselines and rates established with clarity.
But, a quick search indicates you can get similar broadband in Glasgow, Scotland for ~15 GBP/month. And Rome, Italy looks like ~25EUR/month.
Otherwise the same system.
But this is a pretty common setup for condos in Swedish cities. Rentals usually have access to the same infrastructure but at higher prices due to kickbacks demanded by the landlords from the ISPs.
The backbone of it all is a state owned fiber connecting the cities together with municipal fiber.
But even outside of the cities FTTP is quite common. There are companies which specialize in finding rural areas where there’s enough interest to justify the cost of connecting them and then coordinating getting an economic association setup to own and manage the local infrastructure.
Some kind of city(iirc) managed fiber and he can switch commercial operators (And speeds/prices) by contacting them to get new terms, that's an actually free market.
Debit card fees are capped in the US, yet I’ve never received a discount from a merchant for paying with debit instead of credit.
As such, I just pay with credit and have never understood this argument.
Managing cash for a merchant also brings real costs as well.
You have to take it to the bank or pay a service to pick up cash. You’re way more likely to have “leakage” when any cashier can pocket cash. Etc
Because the merchant pass the higher processing cost to all customers.
I know this because I used to work on a US military base. There was a sole merchant on a particular installation that was doing this, but it was extreme. They'd force you to buy over 10 USD if you wanted to use a card, and it was the only place to grab a snack. One day there terminal was shut down, and for a period they only went to cash payments. Once they took credit again they removed the minimum purchase. Turns out somebody got pissed, and reported them.
Regarding the article, the ~390 USR sounds about right to me. I only use a credit card, pay it completely off at the end of the month. I've never once paid interest since in the 8 years I have used this card. Every few years I buy a plan ticket with the rewards.
This also varies by country, but I think Visa/Mastercard relented on it in many jurisdictions.
In Australia, for example, merchants have been allowed to add on credit card fees everywhere, and their card readers automatically tack on the fee when they detect a credit card.
It used to be true, but this changed many years ago.
Second thing: interchange fees are not the only fees that your typical store has to pay, the total fees are much higher. I think the EU essentially capped Visa/Mastercard profit in the EU, more than they capped small business fees for card payment.
If 1% is huge, that's a lot better. 2% cashback is my baseline for normal in the US and I currently use a 4% on everything card (no longer available for new customers).
I don't like the cashback system, but the economics insist I use it while it's available.
We're a business in the UK and the charges for accepting Business credit cards is much higher.
I don't have current charges to hand, but in 2023 Personal Credit Cards were 1.97% whilst for Business Credit Cards we were charged 3.43%. That's probably how they afford such high cashback/loyalty schemes.
I think we're paying about half those rates now. I know Amex is somewhere between Personal and Business charges.
Although we are a B2B business, most of our card transactions are from business owners personal cards so it's not really an issue. We occasionally monitor the split and if it became significant we'd need to look at addressing it, probably by increasing prices for those customers.
That used to be the case, but it's not current. Merchants can charge a credit card fee, and many do. Many merchants near me (washington state) don't, but those that do add a fixed fee of 1-3% for credit.
This feels like a potential arbitrage opportunity... I live in Sweden, but if I can use a US credit card I can get high rewards?
You will probably not see rates that are even competitive with a dodgy FX cash place at an airport, let alone with the numbers you've seen on financial networks for what FX transactions by banks cost, but you feel happy because there was "no fee".
No, the rate is set by the card network, eg https://usa.visa.com/support/consumer/travel-support/exchang...
>> Your bank may or may not use the rate indicated by this calculator to bill you
---
(As a side note: the fine print follows up with this:
>> If your transaction is converted by the merchant or ATM operator, the exchange rate indicated by this calculator will not apply.
Don't ever let a merchant or ATM do foreign currency conversion for you. They charge astronomically high fees without exception. Pay in the foreign currency and let your card do the conversion.)
You're crazy.
I have a Capital One account because they advertised "no foreign transaction fees". I checked on my foreign-currency payments and was always charged an amount that looked eerily similar to "1% more than you would have paid at the published exchange rate", so it's not clear to me why they say "no fee" and not "1% fee".
But the 1% fee that they actually have is very reasonable. An airport stall is in an entirely different league.
Where the banks do get their pound of flesh, though, is the foreign transaction surcharge, which is often around 3%. No-fee cards exist but you need to look for them. And a whole new set of charges applies to doing a foreign cash advance on a credit card.
The card companies always add a margin to FX conversions, usually in the 0.5% range. This is fairly benign since the market rate can move between the transaction and the settlement, so sometimes you save money.
You see at the bottom of restaurant menus a note stating this.
It also applies to Danish business credit cards, as those aren't covered by the consumer credit card fee limits.
No one wants to accept amex here.
E.g. for now I have the most premium card offered by my bank (50€/mo), and it gets me extra product insurance, rental car insurance, travel insurance, free lounge access, and some other things like that, but no cashback or similar.
I think some premium cards do offer cashback nowadays, but they are in the minority. Some cards also offer airline reward points. My experience is limited to Finland, though.
Some weird crypto stuff can give more cashback, but it mostly for scheming nerds.
There are some specific discounts and benefits but not cash rewards.
It is illegal (not banks will not let you, actual legislation) here to charge more for card payments or discount for cash or bank transfer.
First, businesses are increasingly differentiating pricing between cash and credit card - this is most obvious in gas stations where the price you see on the big sign is the cash price and not what you practically end up paying. Or the various restaurants and other businesses that offer cash discounts. While this is relatively new, the earlier manifestation of this is the credit card fee - eg try paying your tuition or utilities using a CC and you'll immediately find this option costs more.
Interestingly all the above usually hover around 3% so it's tellingly the rate the merchants themselves perceived CC use and infrastructure cost them.
Second, credit cards are clearly good for business volume. Most people have had the experience of wanting to buy something unplanned and not having the cash on them, but buying it anyway via credit card. On a larger scale, hard to imagine on-line shopping without a credit card.
Third, I don't find cash-only businesses cheaper. In my town there's a cash-only barber, pizza place, and ice cream shop and they cost just as much as the credit card taking ones. In every case the dynamic is there are long running businesses with sufficient clientele that they never bothered, but they don't use absence off CC fees/infrastructure to generate a consumer savings.
Fourth, poor people can play the point game too. As a broke college student I was very fond of my Exxon Mobil card that gave me cheaper gas. Now I don't really care about an extra ten cents on a gallon as much.
I believe you, but this experience is totally alien to me and I don’t know of anybody who has done this. I wonder if it’s a generational thing.
I basically never use my debit card for anything but ATM transactions, and the only time I have any cash in my wallet is when I have recently gone to a cash-only bar or to Las Vegas.
If you pay the balance on time, you are getting free liquidity from the bank. But they get if you don’t pay off the balance.
Imagine everything you bought in the past 3 decades from grocery to hotel room and air travel. Now imagine having 2% of it in your pocket.
that's eaey to understand right?
additional benetit like purchase protection, vendor disputes, etc.
It's literally the opposite. The credit card lends you money for free - if you pay your bill every month.
That's the "credit" in "credit card" - they are extending a line of credit to you, not the other way around.
You are, apparently, well-off enough to have enough money in your venmo/checking where you don't think about it too much but I think the OP was referring to the less well-off but common situation where you are spending a little over your current ability - be it physical cash on hand (not your situation) or the amount available in your account.
There is a lot that goes into it, and it is interesting how customers like me who literally never have carried interest and have to made thousands of $ in rewards over the years still make the banks money....
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/anatomy-of-credit-car...
1. Merchant sells for price X
2. Credit card is invented
3. Merchant has to sell for price > X (say, 1.02 X) to cover some buyers using CC
4. Credit card offers 2-3% rewards on some goods
5. Merchant has to sell for prices even > X (say 1.04 X) to cover nearly all customers using cards. Customers who do not use the cards pay 1.04X and do not get rewards to compensate.
6. Merchant loses because they're beholden to processors, Customers lose because they're getting 2-3% of semi-currency for the cost of ~4% cash currency.
7. Processors get their profit
[1] - Employees deserve good wages for good work, tipping is just a bad algorithm to accomplish that
They are a way for airlines to create value out of thin air with their own fiat currency. For the average consumer the miles create less of a pure economic efficient benefit and more of a psychic benefit - funny money bucket that accumulates to defray some trip expenses. Economically they'd be best off with an outright 2% back card.
For the minority of customers who are flexible on dates/locations and willing to plan in advance - most airline/hotel programs have sweet spots at the more premium level.
I use them to fly overseas business class refundable fares at discount. It's not free, but the taxes paid + foregone $ I could have gotten with a cash-back card ends up being 2-3x economy non-refundable fare instead of the 5-7x listed cash price if I bought the business class ticket outright.
It's generally a time-vs-money thing though in that to maximize airline/hotel programs you need to pay attention to various limited time offers for signup bonuses, spending bonuses, conversion bonuses, redemption bonuses, etc. Without those it's a very uphill battle.
Credit card hotel booking portals are often much worse than what's available too.
For example, you might end up paying 30-100% more for a hotel booked through Chase Travel. At the very least you'll have way less selection. Even if price matching exists, you could still end up paying more.
I am traveling to Mexico next month and I do have a Chase Sapphire Preferred card (the one with the $95 annual fee). You get $100 in hotel credits per year if you book through Chase Travel.
In one of the spots I'll be at, there was (1) selection. It was $92 for 2 nights in a pretty low populated town that I'll be passing through. That hotel was rated 3.2 stars on Google.
If I use Google search or any hotel aggregator site, there were over 10 hotels available for half the price with much better ratings.
In this case it cost me about $50 extra to use the card's benefits.
Many people don't understand how rewards work when it's marketed towards your annual fee. The $100 credit doesn't offset the $95 annual fee. You pay $95 out of pocket for the fee. As soon as you book that hotel for $100 you've now paid $195 total out of pocket of which $100 gets credited back, so you're still out $95. If you instead didn't have the card and got the hotel at the cheaper rate, you'd only be out $45 or whatever you paid.
I mainly got the card because it had a really good sign up bonus, 0% international exchange fees and reasonable rental car coverage. Other cards can cover these benefits without an annual fee.
Supposedly the free Chase cards have comparable rental insurance. The main difference is Sapphire is always primary insurance, but Flex and Unlimited become primary when traveling internationally and if you happen to live in a place that requires no car in the US and you don't have insurance, it becomes primary in the US too.
Not sure what the differences are when filing claims though.
I will say this, it seems like more and more countries are starting to require Third-Party Liability (TPL) insurance and the Chase cards don't cover that so you still end up having to pay out of pocket for partial coverage (Chase for CDW, TPL from the rental agency). Some rental places don't make it easy to split these out.
“Saving” airline miles is definitely suboptimal, like you said, getting 2% cash back and redeeming it immediately is the optimal strategy. Money is fungible and cash depreciates.
Plus, the “deals” you have access to with airline miles are not slanted in your favor.
At least cash has the option of earning interest in a bank account, or getting invested in other instruments.
Miles can always be devalued by the airline. Some airlines like Singapore, Qatar, and United, even practise stealth devaluation by controlling the number of cheap "saver" seats released.
What does this mean? I'm not clear what the sweet spot is - are you talking about buying points/miles/etc outright with cash rather than earning them as credit card rewards? Everything I've read is that these are almost always bad deals.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer.
If you do not have time to look into it, plan trips 6-12 months in advance, or have flexibility (will go anywhere thats a deal), then they aren't worth it.
Robin hood is pushing a 3% card right now. Not holding my breath for the rate to last more than a year though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39928604
It’s hard to put a real world number on what the cost to the consumer is for losing this data ownership, but it is not zero: these data are increasingly used for targeted pricing practices which extort additional margins from the consumer at a later date.
It's not zero sum game, that either I have it or seller have value out of it. Just like with garbage - for me old broken furniture might be a garbage, while for other it's a burning fuel.
However, it doesn't need to be exclusively negative. The data will both show where you can price gouge but also simply where demand is.
Put your coffee shop near a metro stop and sell sourdough bread and people will buy that because they want it isn't exactly negative.
I'm generally a pretty frugal person, I have a good handle on my personal finances and I don't really buy much stuff at all. Maybe for someone else, shopping can be similar to an addiction where they see an ad and they know they shouldn't buy it but they can't resist. Women with a closet full of shoes come to mind. For those people I can see how this might be problematic but personally I largely ignore ads altogether. If I need a small thing I just go to the nearest store and buy the first best thing I find, if I'm making a more significant purchase I generally do some research and look at tests, user reviews etc. Sure there's some opportunity for manipulating me with fake/biased tests and reviews etc but I'm not really seeing how my spending info helps with that.
If you don't have time, you can find brief but less compelling argument here: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/why-privacy-matters/
There's no advertising here, there's just aggressively trying to drain each person's wallet as much as possible and seeing how far you can get before they change behaviour.
One example: my friend and I both requested rides using the same app, standing next to each other to the same street in the same neighborhood 3-4 miles away. He owns a car and rarely uses car services, I do not and it's my primary transportation. The quoted cost of his ride was half mine. It was shocking.
And I'm sure there would be competitors simply not doing this where I could shop instead.
If Uber does this and you don't like it then don't use Uber. Regular taxis still exist and I'm sure they'd love to have your business back. Or you could get a car, low-end used EVs are quite affordable and fuel is almost literally free. They seem to hold good resale value too.
It's not a scientific discovery.
THIS data has no value to the people collecting it except for the power it gives them to predict and/or manipulate you.
That seems unlikely, since I don’t see how many of them could be profitable if they were paying Google more than their own revenue.
Those numbers don’t make any sense. Alphabet had 403 billion in revenue in 2025. The UK’s population is around 69,000,000. This amounts to $5,840.57 per person, which is nowhere near a lifetime of retirement savings.
What incentive is there for them to not do that? Laws? I'm asking sincerely, not rhetorically.
And I don't mean "politicians can use it" - but instead, as corporations are more and more involved in the politics, you get targetted and directed based on their needs
Presumably, the same is being done in Ukraine and Russia too.
Would be very curious to see studies on this if anyone finds one!
Oh it very much is, (at least in Australia the major 4 banks have agreements with data brokers)
Frequently sited investigative video journalism on grocery delivery prices (and more): https://youtu.be/osxr7xSxsGo
Airlines: https://fortune.com/2025/07/16/delta-moves-toward-eliminatin...
Insurance: https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/technology/gm-l...
Frankly, it’s everywhere— if a company is large enough, they will leverage consumer data to increase profits as much as the consumer will bear. There are many other examples, but I’ll just link you this as a jumping off point if you want to go further: https://epic.org/krogers-surveillance-pricing-harms-consumer...
Ongoing US house oversight committee investigation http://pallone.house.gov/media/press-releases/pallone-launch... https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Lette...
See also: https://lpeproject.org/blog/surveillance-pricing-exploiting-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_pricing
The others are all about companies that seem to want to use this technique. And of course they want to. But several states either outlaw this outright or will do so soon. The Trump FTC has a draft rule which would prohibit it nationwide: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/08/...
This is such a toxic idea that I’m not particularly worried about it happening much in the real world.
Sure, take any slice of a vast number, and you get a big number.
It's not a "wealth transfer" when everyone gets what they bargained for and can opt in or out.
Most importantly, the transaction value of using credit cards or rewards systems - what the user actually gets - is not enumerated.
Beyond what others have noted (mainly deferred payment), credit cards offer legal transaction protections: my legal liability for fraud is limited (unlike debit or Zelle transfers), and I can challenge any transaction even later, which gives the vendor an incentive to ensure I'm happy even after they have my money. While reputation provides some incentive for repeat customers, the ability to retract a transaction governs even non-repeats. I would submit this alone has improves quality of service for everyone anywhere credit cards are accepted.
Rewards vary by type. Cash-back rewards reflect the fact that interchange fees were set to recapture initial investments, but servicing costs have plummeting (thanks to computing); governance-wise, it's almost impossible for a "representative" political system to extract a large cost from a small number of powerful agents with vested interests to provide a tiny amount of benefit to a very large numbers of other people. But that's a much more extensive governance issue.
So where does the benefit go? To competition between credit providers, initially as cash-back, and then to tying rebates to future purchases within controlled channels. For airline point systems that give free flights or upgrades, it improves retention, but other forms of rewards would seem to verge on tying, where power in one market is extended into another.
Politically-mediated wealth transfers are a political issue. Economically-mediated wealth transfers should raise market-regulation policy issues, in particular whether the law is inducing or protecting them, and then whether they are good or bad. Tallying that requires not just seeing the money flow, but seeing all the value received or cost exported.
Just the 150 billion from "interchange" (merchant fees) would be enough reason to fund the 15 billion (estimated) rewards.
1) https://a2apaymentsaustralia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/...
2) https://www.rba.gov.au/payments-and-infrastructure/review-of...
Cards that redeem to cash or payment credit are readily available. You only get miles or flooz if that's what you want.
The system is bad, but if I'm buying stuff within the system, a rewards card is usually the least cost out of pocket.
>When merchants raise prices for all consumers in response to these costs, users of low-cost payment methods (e.g., cash and debit) cross-subsidize high-reward credit card users who shop at the same merchant"
Cash handling is not a low-cost payment method, Cash handling can cost businesses between 4% and 15% of each transaction, when factoring in labor, security, bank fees, and risks like theft and counterfeit bills.
One could argue that credit card users have been lowering prices for cash payers as business avoid cash handling pitfalls and get their funds safer and faster.
Otherwise, you're giving up 1-3% discount.
Set auto-pay on your credit card to pay in full every month. I've never once paid for credit card interest. I think there's a term inside credit card companies for people like me: leeches or something like that.
They genuinely don't care because they offer different products for different groups of people.
Poorer people typically use credit cards to borrow money. The amount they spend in a month is typically much lower than the balance on the card. This means that the company makes most of their money from interest payments. Cards meant for this audience typically have few or no rewards, and instead use the interchange fees to allow for a lower APR.
Meanwhile, wealthier people typically use credit cards as a payment instrument. They pay off the balance in full each month like you do. This group of people is responsible for the majority of credit card spending, and the credit card company makes most of their money from interchange fees. Cards meant for this market have higher APRs, and use some of the interchange to pay for the rewards. The cards meant for the top end of the market with the best rewards (i.e. Chase Sapphire) even charge retailers more in interchange, with the argument being that it's worth it because you get to bring in wealthy people who will buy more stuff.
Really helped us float the moving company and also some DIY renovations on our house that we didn't have all the cash on hand to pay for outright. And we didn't pay a thin dime for the privilege.
Another reason is that credit card companies sell your purchase data to aggregators and advertisers, and cash affords more privacy.
If I pay cash for everything and my cash level fluctuates down to $0 temporarily, how do I buy something right then?
Frankly these questions astound me, do y'all really know no low income folks?
With card: you can set the cash aside at the time of purchase to pay when the card bill is due.
How does the card give you less flexibility or make it harder to pay for?
Even as someone who is a credit card optimizer, I also ignore numerous 1-3% choices a day.
Many people also spend more than they can cover on it.
At one time, credit card companies forced vendors to charge the same, whether cash or credit, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside.
The problem is, is that cash is becoming less and less acceptable.
In a nearby town, you can't pay for parking, with cash. I have seen credit-card-only vending machines. A lot of restaurants have iPads at the table, and you never see anyone but the bus[boy|girl|whatever], bringing you your food.
Huh. I always thought it was the opposite. I know several restaurants that refuse to accept credit cards. They are great places to eat, but I won't go there. I don't think they miss my custom, though. Refusing to accept credit seems to be a signal of excellence, around here.
For the same reason those food establishments had to get a government approved White Cash Register, because there was so much money disappearing.
The cost of a credit card is very obvious. The cost of cash is many small things that are very hard to see and thus very hard to account for correctly.
* As long as you don’t raise any red flags in your accounting, which can be difficult.
I miss that. I really dislike that it is allowed to charge extra for a credit card. It shows that the company doesn't understand the cost of cash.
that's some odd classism there.
credit card companies love your data. they can package it, sell it, analyze it.
this is real data of actual behavior, not whatever people say or click -- money where the mouth is.
even if they never make a cent off of you from an interest perspective they 1) still get fees from the merchants, and 2) get all of that juicy juicy transaction info -- and that info alone might be worth the costs.
There is no situation in which interchange fees get slashed and prices go down across the board by 3% to make it worth it for card users.
Long term average? Sure, it goes up, that's inflation. But do you know what causes inflationary pressure? Visa and MasterCard adding unjustified fees because they're a duopoly and control most of the payments market, and your government won't regulate them and cap fees.
The UK and the EU both cap debit card fees at 0.2% and credit card fees at 0.3%. When the UK left the EU, Visa and Mastercard jacked up their fees over 5x for UK-EEA payments. Not because they had to, but because they could, and they love sucking money out of other peoples' businesses. https://www.psr.org.uk/our-work/market-reviews/market-review...
Retailers in competitive industries absolutely do use a reduction in card fees to lower their prices. Maybe not all the way, but they definitely don't give it all to themselves as margin; their competitors don't.
An economy that relies on growth, yep.
Well, there was that time in the 1930s.
I think of it like alcoholics who can't be near alcohol. It's some deep seated degeneracy or fear.
I like this. It means that I can earn a bit more bank interest on what I've spent.
Credit card? I file a charge-back which is a forcing mechanism for the vendor. Credit card skimmed? I get a new one, and I don't need to wait for my $ to be re-imbursed.
and once debt is spent you cannot get it back. you get scammed you can dispute the credit card, and if the CC gets stolen you can fight any charges.
debit means the money is gone and that's it.
I always ask for a discount but for some reason I almost never get it.
The rational move then is to pay in as many installments as I can get without any additional interest. Then time itself gives me the discount. My actual money stays invested and I only pay later. My credit card gives me 1.1% cashback on all purchases. Inflation too does some of the work.
So, about 4-8 cents, for 30$/hour if we talk about grocery store.
Restaurant might take more time to process cash, but pays lower salary.
I do not think it's a higher cost than current credit card fees
Maybe, but "should" has nothing to do with it. Either I get one or I use my credit card.
> cash costs the merchant MORE than credit card fees
That's not my problem.
I have a little lookup table for this. Interest free installments mapped to cash discount necessary to beat the credit card. I just look it up.
These numbers are actually conservative. There's a lot of credit card benefits that weren't priced in. I add a couple percent to the required discount numbers and round it up to compensate.I would be curious what percentage of people actually qualifies for a card with over 2% cashback especially without a monthly fee. My guess is that that percentage is very low.
High earner/spender, sure but that's not most people
If you combine that with a card that gives 2% on everything than it wouldn't be hard to average over 2% cashback as long as you were mindful about using the discover card for qualifying purchases and the 2% card for everything else.
And that's the rub. Credit card companies know most people won't be too mindful most of the time about their spending habits.
No affiliation; just a happy user.
Ever since then, I wondered how much of the "not qualifying" is due to misinformation like this.
1. People with proven bad credit.
2. People asking for a lot of money without proven good credit.
3. People asking for more specialized credit, such as lines for businesses or lines for high earners.
My instinct says hell no, not even close.
My lawn mower asks me to write "gift" on checks when I can't pay in cash.
To me, it's like claiming "black people like chocolate!". They do. So do most people. Why single out black people?
Can you explain the process or idea?
People who don't pay their card off also are on the look out for lower interest rate cards and switch all the time. they in reality are not paying the very high rates on cards, they are paying the lower introductory rates (which is still a lot of money). These people are also more likely to default and stop paying leaving the bank to write everything off. Combine that with the fact that they typically don't spend as much over several years (they hit their credit limit and their income won't allow an increase so they have to stop spending), and they are not as profitable as it seems.
It’s a silly system, where everyone has to invest their time (optimizing for rewards, avoiding interest) in an ultimately negative sum game. I hate it so much.
The intuition being: people who carry balances and pay interest don't actually spend very much; they are not wealthy.
That's the interchange income corresponding to wealthy people. Interchange is paid by the card-accepting business, not by the buyer. The buyer pays interest and other fees and that graph looks very different.
From that original study the full picture table says in % of ADB that the "poorest" (below 620 FICO) pay ~45% interest and fees but bring only 2% additionally in interchange income. The wealthy (at 800+) pay ~10% interest and fees but bring another almost 10% interchange income, on 4 times higher spending, and 3 times higher rewards (so the wealthy get ~12 times higher rewards in $ value than the "poor").
Just the percentages paid by each group more than offset the difference in spending. There are also way more "poor" accounts than wealthy accounts. Intuitively you can tell that the banks are effectively subsidizing the fees and interest for the wealthy with the income from the poor, for the sake of the interchange income which is mostly generated by the wealthy but doesn't come from their pocket.
Those poorest of people (<620 FICO) pay more interest and fees (percentage and absolute terms) than any other group. There's a range in the middle on the wealth scale where the customers are actually a net loss for the banks (the 660-760 FICO range).
Agreed, which makes the picture even worse for those low income people. Even poor people are guaranteed to occasionally pay the "rich person tax" included in the prices of some of the products and services. At least until some AI pricing starts changing the price real-time based on the buyer's estimated wealth (sort of already real).
> So they are essentially is paid by the consumer.
Not from a bank's perspective. Only in the sense that prices are higher between the seller and buyer.
> If we outlawed rewards credit cards (by capping interchange fees), everything would likely be slightly cheaper.
I don't agree on the second point as a blanket statement. When Epic game store lowered its fee not a single game got cheaper for the buyers.
Credit card fees are baked into the price of everything that can be purchased with credit card, excluding merchants that offer a cash price and a credit price.
Any time someone pays the (credit card) price with cash or a debit card is paying more than someone that earns CC rewards, it’s virtually every transaction.
At least one reason for this is that Valve has language in their agreements to prevent you from selling your game cheaper on other storefronts. Unambiguously anti-competitive.
If I know I'm paying for my own rewards, I'd choose a card that keeps more money in my pocket. I'd go as low as the PITA factor of cash.
It's not clear to me what the net benefit is of a credit card over a debit card.
But for sure the confusion ensuing from allowing debit cards to be charged as credit cards should be illegal. The merchant account providers are probably the ones reaping the free money on the racket.
Credit is the POS default, for whatever reason. Not all POS are the same. e.g. US Post Office consistently knows if I am using a debit card, and it prompts for a PIN when I do. Every restaurant, bar, service does not ask for PIN, and the handful of merchants I've inquired with say their debit card fees changed by the merchant account providers are the same as credit. Scammy.
At least in Colorado it's legal for businesses regardless of the TOS contract with a merchant account supplier to pass on the transaction and processing fees of credit cards. It's not legal to pass on cost/fees for debit cards, ACH, or cash.
>It's not clear to me what the net benefit is of a credit card over a debit card.
In a fair scheme, the net benefit to the purchaser is having a rolling line of credit for whatever they want to use that for, like managing cashflow. It's also a benefit in that it puts a behemoth with immense contractual power between you and the merchant. It doesn't matter how a merchant fucks you over, the credit card company WILL give you your money back and punish the merchant.
To the merchant, the benefits are that credit cards unlock significant consumption that humans normally would not do. It literally causes induced demand. As a consumer, you will spend more money using a credit card, and you will purchase things you otherwise wouldn't. The disconnect in your brain is known. It can also, in very specific contexts, reduce the cost of managing payments and cash. It can reduce employee theft. But this improvement is overstated.
The reason merchants put up with giving away 3% of all revenue and eating $20 per fraudulent transaction plus whatever the cost of the transaction was is entirely about the fact that a consumer using a credit card buys more than one not using a credit card. It's a big boost to your revenue.
But there is absolutely nothing about a payment network that requires such transaction fees. Certainly not "Risk", as the credit card payment network itself carries zero risk on each transaction. Every dollar fraudulently spent comes out of the pocket of merchants, not the payment network. Their only risk is consumer default, but the entire "Credit Score" system exists to nearly eliminate that risk.
The structure of the system is built to get consumers to spend more money than they normally would, and incentivize everyone to play along to get a kickback. Everything in payment infrastructure in America is designed around this. Even gift card companies are built around getting you to spend money you were not intending to and kicking a portion of that back to the brand name on the card.
The most recent I've seen otherwise is this Federal Reserve study[0] from 2022. It finds that the marginal return on swipes is actually slightly negative because of how juicy rewards have gotten, and 80% of their profitability comes from interest (with most of the rest fees):
> we find that, on average, the credit function makes up approximately 80 percent of the credit card profitability, whereas the contribution of the transaction function is slightly negative, as rewards and other expenses on credit card transactions outpace banks' interchange revenues.5 In addition, fees—in particular late fees—comprise approximately 15 percent of credit card profitability.
[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/cred...
Capital One also is supposedly huge on car loans; I'd imagine the interest from those would comprise a big chunk of that revenue.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39928604
Now I just use my apple card everywhere, pay it off every month and get whatever rewards I get.
It feels like a weird situation, those that stand to gain the most from credit cards are also the ones that should feel a difference of under $100 in rewards the least.
The one exception I see is bonus sign up rewards since those can be fairly significant, or making sure you use an airline card at the airline since those bonuses can be fairly significant (with sometimes other benefits). But outside of those exceptions, just choose a card with good rewards and stick with that and pay it off every month.
The gain of a few thousand per annum is not worth the mental distraction.
So like, I have a card that's 6% on groceries, another that's 3% on gas and restaurants, Apple Card does 2% on Apple Pay transactions, and I have a 1.5% card for everything else.
It’s expensive to be poor. Higher interest rates, no credit card rewards, higher unit prices at places like Dollar General, etc.
On the one hand, relative to our income it's not so important, but on the other it feels bad leaving $3k on the table.
You can just opt out of using credit cards.
You can still implement “if I can’t afford something, I don’t buy it” with a cc. I pay mine off every month so it’s financially the same s a debit card but use a premium card for its purchase benefits.
I always get my money back when this happens with a credit card purchase. I've also had to dispute things occasionally, and I almost always get refunded.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
> Industry body, UK Finance, estimates that criminals successfully stole £1.28 billion through banking fraud and scams in 2025. Of this, £703 million was unauthorised and £576 million was authorised.
> Unauthorised fraud is where the fraudulent transaction is carried out by a third party, not the victim. Authorised fraud involves the victim being tricked into paying money into another account that is controlled by a criminal. This is also known as Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud.
https://www.psr.org.uk/news-and-updates/latest-news/news/pay...
> Frontier found that APP fraud losses have fallen by an estimated £73 million per year and the number of APP scams have fallen by nearly 35,000 due to the policy. Reimbursement rates for all claims have risen from 54% to 65%, and for claims in-scope of the policy, firms are now reimbursing 97%.
Anyway, the credit card companies (Diner’s Club and Bank Americard, now Visa but still retaining the original color scheme and logo) lobbied Congress in the late 60s to get these protections enshrined in law so that consumers would get a benefit over using cash as a positive incentive to switch.
These are available to Visa and Mastercard debit cards too.
But yeah, the UK has section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act.
Opting out doesn't save you from those costs.
I never understood why whole nation wants to live in debt just to have one extra month of cash flow (which they’ll probably squander soon).
It is not, thus, free money, at all.
It can be done. The UK and the EU capped fees at 0.3% for credit cards and 0.2% for debit cards
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...
After 30 years, people generally speaking own their home and that's their biggest chunk of wealth. So basically, yes a high debt to income ratio, but it's building towards wealth and its not high interest debt either.
If I could get a debit card that gave me 2% cash back on all transactions, I'd use that instead!
Rational if you want a mortgage in the US at least.
Currently you're keeping money in the bank accruing the bank interest to occasionally pay for stuff.
With a credit card you would get various bonuses/cashback/gameified returns by owing them money, and it costs you nothing as long as you pay them back once a month interest free.
If you however slip up/miss a payment it will cost you a lot.
Both cases suck, but the latter saves you money if you play that game.
That's from a EU perspective. From a US perspective you also require it from a credit score perspective, which EU thankfully hasn't adopted... yet.
The entire credit card industry is set up to squeeze out as much profit from people as possible. They offer discounts as an incentive, but it is a huge trap that many, many people fall into. I'm not interested in risk. I'm interested in simplicity.
It's participating in the credit card industry that is foolish.
there is none. some people are just ideologically opposed to credit cards, like the parent appears to be.
their loss, really. they end up paying a portion of the cost but reap none of the benefits (rewards, additional legal protections)
Second, never use a card with an annual fee.
Third, which I already said, but bears repeating: pay off the full balance every month.
Fourth, look out for one good rewards card and funnel expenses through it, so you can get the rewards.
My parents taught me all of this 40 years ago, and it was exceptional advice, and has served me (and my family) very well.
Credit cards are not about carrying debt. They are the worst tool for that.
This is overselling it. You can come out 2% ahead or so. 4-5% if you are an extremely high spender who enjoys mentally managing 5 or 6 credit cards to max out category bonuses and other benefits and all that.
You come out marginally ahead at the expense of mental overhead. Good tradeoff for some, not for others.
I use a credit card, I dropped from 3-4 different cards trying to max out those 4-5% spending categories and just have a straight 2% cashback on everything card now. Plus one backup on a different payment network in case one goes down. It got to be exhausting trying to remember to manage so many cards plus remember to use the points, make sure to use the right card for the right thing, and all the other BS.
For some of my friends it's a hobby which is great for you if you enjoy such things! For me, it's just adding another chore to my life. Not worth the 1-2% or so marginal gain against my spending.
The super easy stuff is long gone these days too. You get far larger discounts paying via ACH for utility bills/cell phone bills/etc. vs. what credit card rewards give you so all the "autopilot" stuff is largely gone.
I do remember the days where we paid our Equinix bill via the company Amex. That was pretty fun while the party lasted!
I see many commercials for local banking up here that pulls out 30-40+ year members of the banks boasting about the prosperity the bank provided them, but at the same time, when they'd walked into the bank back in the day A Guy just said "yeah he's good for it" and wrote out the loans they needed.
You can't opt out of the modern credit scoring system and if you fuck it up even once with a bad line item you're out of the running for quite a few things and become virtually poor.
If you present a debit card to one of those desks, they may encourage you to swap for a credit card. Because a debit preauth ties up actual funds in your account. A credit preauth costs nothing but part of your credit limit. It really is a difference if you expect to spend money on vacation.
That’s why businesses eat the credit card fees.
The reason is rather obvious, people spend more money with credit than they would’ve with cash. Accepting 95 cents on the dollar to get a sale with credit that you wouldn’t have got with cash still earns the seller money, money they wouldn’t have earned without accepting credit.
For the consumer the reason is that this is revolving credit. If you pay next month you can have stuff today. That's a small relief, unless it turns into a carried balance and then it's an ongoing burden, but you don't think about that burden at first because you're naturally optimistic.
There is value in this even if you always pay your full statement balance every month.
If you have a stable source of income knowing your credit card payment is due on the 7th of every month means you don't have to monitor your checking account's balance for every purchase. You only have to think "make sure you can cover $X by the 7th".
I love it. As someone who never carries a balance I get paid by banks for doing pretty much nothing at all.
And I don't worry about US retailers, I don't live there.
I should add that rewards are not the best benefits. Sign up bonuses are much more lucrative, running to hundreds of dollars per card, and can often be repeated. Same applies to bank accounts.
And it may not work the way you expect. Retailers may favor credit card users if they tend to spend more. There are substantial costs associated with handling cash, so cash users may end up paying more.
But of course banks make huge amounts of money from poor customers via various fees and interest payments. It warms my heart that I get some of those ill gotten gains insead of the evil banks.
It is risky and it is very easy to lose great amounts of money on a bad decision when credit is involved. Arguably that makes it bad. But still not negative sum.
Borrowers can also keep from overextending their credit and go on debit cards instead…
Obviously these things can have an impact on people but before the 80s credit cards were not widely available to people with high credit risk and the world still functioned.
I don’t have any data, but my intuition is that overall high-fee, high-reward cards increase propensity for consumer spending by at least a few % beyond the fees/rewards.
The merchants think so, too, or they wouldn’t accept the processors that let their banks hand out these cards.
Visa / Mastercard / American Express all have lines of premium credit cards (Visa Infinite, World Elite Mastercard, Amex Platinum), and they're very much too big to ban. You'd just be left with one processor in the US (Discover, now owned by Capital One).
In recent years, all of my utilities have added 3%+ credit card surcharges, so I pay most of my household expenses with debit cards/ACH now.
Tmobile, Comcast, Verizon, ATT, Target, grocery store, electric utility and water utility (government), annual vehicle tax (government), auto body shop, daycare, and any home repair contractors all charge 3%+ (or give a discount, same thing), so I basically only use credit cards for other retail stores and travel and restaurants.
If they’re truly too big to give up no matter the fees they charge, they’re leaving money on the table.
Of course, they can’t. If Chase started handing college students a 3% card, the merchants would riot.
Of course there’s going to be a a cost to spending beyond your means.
One of the most corrupting yet hidden forces in America today are the payment networks MC/Visa etc. due to their bribing and corruption of the government in order to prevent things like making payment processor fees separate/independent of the cost, i.e., similar to how taxes are added after the fact, not included in the price; and also preventing merchants from having two different prices, cash vs card.
I’m a bit surprised that HBR does not seem to even really have an accurate mental model if the matter, unless they’re making an editorial choice to speak in vernacular turns to relate it to the audience.
The problem is not really the cards, it even credit cards, it’s actually the payment processing networks that are the corrupting force.
If America has a legitimate government, there would have been a federal alternative payment processor that charges nothing as an accompaniment and based on the authority to mint the currency, which is what a payment processor today is, a digital currency mint.
To put it into perspective, when you purchase something by credit card, a merchant may have to l pay a little under 3% on a $100 purchase. When you purchase something cheaper let’s say $5, a merchant may pay 6.5%. And no, they don’t just say “awe shucks, I guess I’ll lose that money”, They increase the prices by some averaged amount.
Some may say that they can’t do that because competition, well, because there is no real competition and because the payment processor de facto monopoly/cartel has basically every single company in lockdown and you have no real alternatives, especially in places like Europe where they’ve foolishly and enthusiastically started forcing everyone into digital payment, all the merchants simply roll what is effectively a kind of organized crime/mob extortion into the prices of the goods and services the common person pays and never knows is paying.
That is not a positive. I'm fine with splitting up a price if you want to show how much tax gets added, but having to continuously do the mental math of "no this item is 10.99 it's 10.99 + tax" is very frustrating. When I pick up a $11 item, I want to spend $11.
I would even advocate that in the US we require taxation to be handled that way too because you are right, most of our citizens can't do basic math, let alone in their heads, or even really care; but if the price tag had to be the taxed price and you then get a discount if you pay cash, it would be a far better situation. There has never been a better time to do this with digital price tags.
The inherent problem is that the likes of the masses are hard to organize, let alone corral and focus on a single thing and everyone thinks they are smarter than the average.
In Europe (or at least the EEA, but the UK and I think Switzerland have their own capping) card interchange is capped at, generally, 0.3%.
>The result: People paying cash face the equivalent of a 26% higher sales tax than premium credit card users shopping at the same store.
I am surprised this never occurred to me or has come up at all in discussions with people (in the context of rising costs/inflation specifically). I’ve literally never considered this compounding effect until now. It’s so obvious of course, it just never even crossed my mind.
US FedNow instant payments went live three years ago, and can move $10M per transaction for a few pennies per transaction.
FedNow Is Live - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36801491 - July 2023 (1022 comments)
(A gap in legislation was not mandating offering FedNow capabilities to your customers as a condition of your banking license as a bank; I expect this to be patched eventually)
If my credit card number gets stolen, zero money ever leaves my account. It simply gets contested before the monthly bill is even due, and cancelled. I have probably had number stolen 5 times in 20 years, and its never cost me a cent. Zero dollars every left my accounts even temporarily.
If my debit card number gets stolen, the money is out of my checking account immediately. Mortgage payments and other bill payments might fail, and the onus is on my to chase up the bank to get charges reversed and money returned to my account.
T-Mobile, AT&T follow Verizon on discouraging credit cards for bill-pay - https://www.paymentsdive.com/news/tmobile-att-verizon-incent... - August 10th, 2023
Xfinity Automatic payments and paperless billing discount (APPD) - https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/automatic-payment-p...
> You can get a $10 discount on your monthly bill if you: Have Xfinity Internet and sign up for automatic payments and paperless billing with a stored bank account
Walmart was one of the larger supporters of FedNow during public comment period, as they experience billions in interchange costs per year, and are building instant payment support into the Walmart Pay component of their app to avoid these costs.
Walmart Plans Instant Bank Payments, Cutting Out Card Networks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41593450 - September 2024
Walmart FedNow instant payment public comments: https://www.federalreserve.gov/SECRS/2019/December/20191227/... [pdf; 2019]
> “It surprised me,” Henry said of adoption of Walmart’s first iteration of pay-by-bank, which is available online but hasn’t been marketed to customers. “It’s certainly surpassed our expectations of the amount of customers that have registered and actually use the payment type.”
> Walmart’s upgraded pay-by-bank offering will be rolled out in 2025. The transactions will occur over bank technology provider Fiserv’s NOW Network, which integrates with The Clearing House’s Real Time Payments network and the Federal Reserve’s FedNow. Until now, large retailers hesitated to launch real time payment options because many banks were not connected to an instant settlement system, meaning their customers would not be able to use the product. NOW Network aims to connect to as many banks as possible to reach 100% of deposit accounts by combining its own network with RTP and FedNow.
My understanding is that Meta is also pushing ad buyers to invoicing vs credit card payment.
Meta Ends Credit Card Payments for High-Spend Ad Accounts: Mandatory Monthly Invoicing Starts April 1, 2026 - https://www.auditsocials.com/blog/meta-ends-credit-card-paym... - March 31st, 2026
Like the slow decline of check volume, I see the same here. Credit card rails will exist for some time, perhaps another 10-15 years, but they have likely peaked from a volume perspective. If you're a merchant, surcharge when you can, and work towards on boarding and offering customers cheaper payment rails (imho). If folks want to pay the ~3-4% surcharge, enable them to, that is a choice if they want the benefits of using a credit card. But we should not all have to eat the cost for their benefit when less expensive options are available.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/cb03-charted-the-end-of-...
https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/check_commchec...
(I work in financial services adjacent to payment systems, thoughts and opinions always my own, this is behavioral economics at scale, as always think in systems)
Credit cards are convenient and cash isn't. The genie is out of the bottle, no way to make people move back to cash.
If interchange fees were capped, people would go back to cash, imo. A lot of research shows you spend less when you pay with cash. And the lack of credit card rewards as a draw might lead people to carry it again
And this is based off evidence from countries where interchange fees are capped?
https://www.zelle.com/get-started
Credit cards have a really high ROI. The 3% drives 10-20% more spend, sometimes even more. When I was on the board of a small private school, we bought a square terminal and used QRs for flyers. That drove 30% increases in fundraiser expenses and helped us reduce mailings and nags. We would cross-sell stuff - could buy your youth soccer registration at the fall fest or whatever.
The things where ach, check, cash make sense are where there’s no discretionary spend at point of sale or recurring payments. If you pay 75 bucks a week that have your apartment cleaned dog groomed or whatever. You’re not getting value beyond taking the payment in advance with a credit card. Those are the areas where Venmo and Cash app have really dominated.
> equivalent of a 26% higher sales tax than premium credit card users shopping at the same store.
I do not think the sale price is increased by 26% - which doesn’t square with a 1% to 3% fee - I think they pay approximately 26% more in “sales tax” so you’re paying 26% more than the 7% tax.
"It's expensive to be poor" is a more or less universal experience under capitalism and it's amazing how many novel ways we've come up with to make it more expensive for poor people.
"Means testing" is one of the fun ones. The wealthy will often justify this as "People like me shouldn't get this help" which sounds even generous, and then you realise, oh, because we're testing if you're worthy to receive help now to get help you need to expend some time and effort to pass the test. When this "I shouldn't get benefits" is offered to you as a reason to means test, ask them why they're taking a benefit they don't think they should have and why they can't pay society back in other ways rather than inflict more misery on the poor...
It’s a variation on a theme we are all very familiar with. It’s expensive to be poor. But this is another angle I hadn’t really considered. It’s a little more complicated than just “I can have better cards with better benefits.”
TL;DR: The actual cost per item for me is, in very literal and quantifiable terms, lower as a result - and the more expensive things get, the steeper my discount gets while the person next to me paying cash is paying a little more than I am every transaction for the same items.
Put another way: As price/inflation increases, the real number I am saving increases as well. So we aren’t just paying different prices, but their increase is also higher the higher prices get.
Same argument for people: managing cash is a pain, swiping a card is easy. Contesting a transaction or fraud is way easier (infinitely easier?) with a card than cash. Having day to day liquidity even without ever carrying a balance is nice.
Is all this worth $9.2B across the economy? Maybe not, but again, certainly worth more than 0.
Nobody's arguing that credit card companies are proving zero value, only that they're charging more than what can be "justified" (whatever that means). That's why in europe the interchange rates are capped at some amount to reflect that.
As for America, there’s 4 card networks, and no explicit regulation preventing you from starting another (just the huge regulatory burdens involved with any money-processing business, PCI, etc).
If they were charging so much more than is “justified”, couldn’t one of the dozens of well-funded players in the fintech space swoop in? Couldn’t Walmart fall back to cash and a “Walmart card”?
Instead, we see even goliaths like Walmart spending money and time to support newer features like tap to pay because it reduces fraud losses and customers just prefer it.
The “justified” thing is silly - is Apple charging more than is justified because they make a profit?
Starbucks also pushes their app and paying via app, which has the side-effect of bundling 5 $5 transactions into one $25 transaction (a "card reload"), thus reducing their fee overhead.
[1] of course, this doesn't need to rely on some principle that people are entitled to discounts if they buy more, because in reality discounts arise from complex market dynamics such as competition and price discrimination.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39928604
Perhaps forcing everyone to just implement free payments between any bank accounts, like pix, is actually the only viable solution here (and i just accept that this is one of those market failure things).
I wonder if true transaction cost even reaches the 0.2-0.3% or could be further lowered.
And they charge everyone the same price because credit cards contractually force them to. Merchants can either accept these terms, or forego credit cards entirely. This way credit cards prevent other payment methods from competing on price. Free markets for thee, contractually forbidding competition for me.
(This is not a rhetorical question, I would love to hear others' take on the psychology and history of the subject. Really, how hard is it?)
The general rule with many of these causes is that unless you're willing to be absolutely committed, it's better not to be involved. If you cannot prove to yourself absolute fidelity perpetually into the future, it's better to not do it at all. The punishment for the apostate far outweighs the punishment for the infidel.
So your commitment has to be at least high enough to be willing to bear the resulting punishment for your apostasy. And if it is any less than that, you are strongly encouraged to just stay out of it. It's not that anyone is mean or anything. It's just that on the margin not-participating costs nothing and participating incurs a massive liability. That causes a shift in the window.
How exactly to become wealthy then?..
--
> What happened to noblesse oblige?
Some things made noblesse oblige way harder to manifest.
Meritocracy. "I deserve what I have", versus "I got lucky have what I have" made harder to share back.
Globalization. When you use one community to produce and another to consume, and third to register a company, and owner lives in fourth it's hard to associate yourself with the community. Where exactly to give back? You won't even see those people.
Secularizarion. Though USA is still significantly religious place comparing to europe.
Easiness to move. Today you're here, tomorrow you're there in new zealand bunker.
Culture. Somehow the rich are in the people who are heavily interconnected, spend time together at the khe khe pedoisland.
Natural selection. The ones who care less about others mathematically have more advantage than those who care enough to spend resources on non-resource-aggregation activities.
--
So. There is no intristic motivation to do so (with majority), there is no external motivation, and there is no repercussions of not giving back.
I also used a credit card to bootstrap my business 15 years ago. At it's height, I was brining in $1 million/year. The bank would have never given me a loan for the amount I was able to use on a credit card. I ended up shutting the business down a few years ago, with no debt.
Most people can't handle spending and rack up tons of debt. Credit cards can also be used to make money, instead of buying stupid things you can't afford.
The store still makes a profit on my purchase. My rewards are my own money coming back to me. I’m not sticking my hand in a poor person’s pocket just because I use a fancy card.
Not at many gas stations. Cash gets a discount usually $.10 per gallon. I’ve also started to see restaurants either give a discount for cash, or charge extra for credit card purchases. Business suppliers from tiny shops to large national companies tack on 3% for people paying with credit cards, or like T-Mobile, a $5/line monthly fee in order to get people to pay by direct debit.
The article has one thing mistaken, because it says that Durbin lowered costs for transactions, but credit owners got to keep their perks... That's not technically true (I worked at a supermarket when debit rails first went into effect, and I worked in payments when Durbin went into effect).
There are no benefits to credit users who use the debit rails, and the merchants would really rather you use the debit rails, because it is much cheaper for them. Durbin was mostly a win for the merchants, not a win for the customers.
However, if you take that to believe that the merchants lowered prices overall because they were paying less for transactions, than you might try to read into it that credit users kept their perks, while cash and debit users paid.
The true story, however, is that it's an equilibrium... When the costs go down, the saved money goes somewhere in between the two (supply and demand), and as long as there is competition, the savings are shared.
However, the real problem is that credit companies are allowed to invest interchange fees in perks at all. Credit card companies decided to take their low-risk pool, and offer them incentives, splitting the money they saved between themselves and their users, and using it as a way to pull more low-risk users. The more that happens, the more expensive it becomes for credit companies that serve mid-to-high-risk users... and since we can't stop offering credit to those users as well, those companies push for and get increases to interchange fees to cover the additional cost... which creates more room for benefits for the low-risk users, and the cycle begins anew. It's a vicious cycle that can't be fixed by changing amounts on the existing fee schedule... The only possible fixes would be in either disallowing these kinds of perks, or splitting the rail charges, and specifically charging less interchange for low-risk users (which dries out the benefit pool)
For merchants, it just doesn't make sense to pay high fees to cater to a dwindling minority of consumers.
Source: https://bfsi.economictimes.indiatimes.com/articles/credit-ca...
Besides, NPCI has introduced merchant transaction fee for UPI now causing decline in UPI transactions.
Credit card rewards are not a mechanism to shift wealth towards premium card holders (this is a negligible distraction), they exist purely to increase revenue/conversion rate, by decreasing customer price sensitivity (compared to cash payments) and encouraging financially irresponsible spending. If this did not actually work in practice, every merchant would just insist on cash and pocket the difference.
"Poor people" are hurt much more from the changes in spending behavior induced by credit card use than by paying for card rewards.
I suspect that because I didn't understand what you wrote.
You used a lot of passive voice and complex jargon. That is economists favorite writing style: they write to confuse, not to explain.
No. I do embedded software engineering for a living.
I use (in my view) HN appropriate levels of jargon (because lots of people here are involved with getting people to pay for some newfangled cloud thing or other, so I use their terminology).
In simple words: People pay more for the same (and spend more recklessly) when you let them pay by credit card, and this causes much more economical "damage" to poor peolpe than any "wealth transfer from card rewards".
One consequence of this system is the large merchants have more bargaining power and can negotiate lower fees. So large retailers, gas station chains, etc. are able to reduce the overhead of accepting CC payment. While smaller merchants have the same higher cost.
From a capitalism perspective, this is the most egregious example of "you have capital, so you can make more capital". Banks holding the capital in this case.
Fun fact: when credit cards were first introduced only to people with good credit, which paid the balance in full. this was not profitable. Only after opening the pool to other credit levels did CC start printing money for banks.
This applies to cash as well. It takes a lot of time to count change for everyone. Plus all the ways there are to steal cash.
Your fun fact is wrong. Credit cards were always profitable. They were not in the beginning because scale is what makes them profitable. Anyone who uses their cards for a couple meals a month (which is what it was first started for) is going to cost money because of all the overhead to have you as a customer. In those days that was a stamp to send the bill, someone to open the payment and cash the check - now that everybody works electronically the overhead is lower, plus people are using it for more and so there is enough left over to pay for it.
I wrote a summary for you...
"Because they receive a rebate, credit rewards-card users often effectively pay less than the posted or cash register price for equivalent goods or services."
This is even more true of the American brands that are getting Trump to attack modern, open, cost-free systems from other countries—like Brazil's PIX, maintained by the Central Bank of Brazil.
I call it 21st-century American usury.
It's clearly more complex than the story these authors are telling, in particular the highest income consumers get the worst returns on their interchange payments. So stores and services catering to wealthy consumers are actually subsidizing an opportunity for savvy customers, many of whom are not wealthy
I think the most simple piece of legislation to solve a lot of problems is to allow merchants to pass along the interchange rate to their customers. If they could do this legally and operationally, this would solve most issues here. If a credit card wants to be expensive, fine the consumer should pay for it. Because of contractual and operational limitations, credit card companies have gotten themselves into the current arms race.
If stripe implemented this, it would make me appreciate them as a force for good instead of being a part of the problem.
That's not what the article says:
>High-income consumers with high FICO scores benefit the most from reward credit cards compared to mid- and low-income consumers with high FICO scores. At the lower end of the FICO distribution, however, this pattern is reversed. On average, net rewards are far more negative for high-income consumers with low FICO scores than for middle- and low-income consumers with low FICO scores.
>Or, to put that another way: if there is redistribution happening, it necessarily includes redistribution from unsophisticated high income customers to sophisticated low income customers.
While it's true that wealth customers with low FICO scores are getting hosed, it's not clear whether that is enough to cancel out the effect that richer people (presumably) have higher FICO scores on average
The only way I can put these things together is that at the high FICO end, both wealthier and poorer consumers get hosed a lot but wealthier consumers not quite as much. On the other hand, lower FICO band doesn't get as bad of a deal overall but it is worse for wealther people (plausibly because they have high interchange fees and don't use their rewards).
It's complicated, but... this is not a wealth transfer right? It is a transfer mostly just from consumers to credit card companies that provide them a service.
Are you talking about "Consumption by income decile" graph? That doesn't show them being hosed, unless you think everyone should pay a flat rate to access the credit card system.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39928604