Pay 1% more(or 3%-8% more if you have a cash back card and depending on where you bought your coins) to save them 2% and lose all consumer protections in the deal. It's no wonder there is almost no consumer growth in the bitcoin world while new merchants are announced every other day.
You are wrong, there is tremendous consumer growth happening. The two biggest US processors (BitPay and Coinbase) release numbers every once in a while. One example: "Since [...] October, along with the integration with Shopify in November, [...] the transaction volume has tripled." Source: http://blog.bitpay.com/2013/12/11/bitpay-exceeds-100-000-000...
Notice bitpay stopped reporting 7 months ago?
Coinbase has also been called out on posting contradictory numbers on their blog posts in the past which lead to them deleting most of their posts related to numbers.