These network transactions cost between 2 to 4 % for merchants, which is a cost passed to consumers by businesses raising prices. That’s a fairly large “inflation”, and certainly it seems out of line with the effort they out into it. It’s anticompetitive practices that keep it in place.
Fwiw debit card transaction are capped around 21 cents per transaction depending on the size of the bank holding the account. You’re right for credit cards though. Also, imho, I’ve never seen merchants pass along these debit card savings to the consumer. With they would though.
I’ve never heard of that cap! Any references.
Also, imho, I’ve never seen merchants pass along these debit card savings to the consumer. With they would though.
Gas stations do! But not really passing the savings, just flipping it by penalizing credit cards.
They can easily say, “Actually it’s 0.10 off by using a debit” as opposed to “it’s 0.10 more for using credit”.
From the federal reserve directly : https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/boardmeetings/frn-reg-ii-20231025.pdf Also, I guess what I meant is, the cap used to be 45 cents, and when it was reduced to 21 cents, there wasn’t some massive reduction in prices of products for consumers. Merchants just pocket that difference.
This also became trend for locally owned restaurants around me recently. From pizza shops to fine dining.
Yeah, you can think of it as a simple transaction fee for debit transactions, and a full blown credit and risk shifting system for credit transactions. The banks charge high fees for credit transactions because they’re actually lending money and bearing some credit risk for them, whereas the debit transactions are just moving money from one account to another.
Banks charge higher fees for credit transactions to fuel the loyalty programs (flyer miles, cash back, etc) on those cards. This is why you no longer get any loyalty benefits on debit cards but you still do on credit. The fees don’t cover the risk on credit cards , the interest does.
Whether they directly pass the costs or indirectly, these are still costs made by the seller. In other words either the costs are passed on by the credit card customers or simply all customers. Somebody has to pay for the costs and in the end the seller has to make some profit to survive.
DOJ is really going at it lately.
I can’t wait to hear about the outcome of this litigation in 20-25 years.
Right?
Going after Google AND Visa?!
Even if it’s all theatrics, the Justice department hasn’t really showed up to work in recent memory and this is a refreshing change from the void abyss DOJ usually haunts
This stuff takes a while to get going.
The FTC sued to stop Microsoft from acquiring Activision in December 2022, but lost.
DOJ sued Google in January 2023, and won their trial last month.
The FTC and DOJ started rulemaking on new merger disclosure and review requirements in June 2023.
The FTC sued Amazon in September 2023.
DOJ sued Ticketmaster/Live Nation in May 2024.
The last two years have shown aggressive antitrust enforcement for the first time in about 50 years, when Robert Bork basically convinced the Supreme Court and all Republicans to impose almost impossible standards for antitrust regulations.
According to Cory Doctorow, Rupert Murdoch owned newspapers have made over 100 editorials attempting to smear Lina Khan at the FTC. A cursory google search seems to corroborate this assertion.
I’m inclined to agree that there’s nothing ‘election year’ about these cases, and that real work is being done to claw back some measure of control from these monopolies.
The DOJ isn’t going after this, but VISA is also the source of all these fucking porn bans on like Tumblr and shit because if you want to be able to use their payment processing, you also have to follow their fucking puritan ass values.
Honestly, if this kicks that secondary issue in its ass, that’s amazing.
Not exactly puritan to expect that if you’re serving porn you’ve done at least the base line vetting to make sure it’s not child porn or non-consensual.
Then what about the fact they also ban payments for legalized weed? Nothing CP or non-consensual there.
What isn’t a monopoly anymore? Which doesn’t make their ultimate goal is to fuck people to make a profit. Latest one that hit me hard is cat car manufacturers selling people’s data to the insurance companies and people are getting insurance price bike hike(fuck you, Google and fuck your fucking keyboard) for no reason.
cat manufacturers
insurance price bike
I know exactly what you meant but these typos are strangely hilarious. Cheers, we all make silly typos sometimes. Me especially when I’m typing on a phone because I hate using autocorrect.
For anyone confused: car manufacturers / price hike
This is 100% Gboard autocorrecting words that are already correct. It feels the need to speak for me. I’m so fucking sick of it changing already correct words to what it thinks I need to type. I’ve even fucking emailed Google about it. They think they’re helping us type better and faster, but they’re actually making us type slower, as we have to fucking double check everything we type.
You realize you could have turned the auto correct off probably 100 times over the amount you have complained about it right? Takes 2 seconds.
If I were a conspiracy theorist I’d say they’re deliberately making it shittier to push voice-to-text for that sweet, sweet AI training data.
But I think it’s probably just incompetence. Keyboards from a decade ago were a lot better at learning your typing/swiping patterns, I feel.
