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Credit-Card Backlash Mounts as Kroger Weighs Expanding Visa Ban

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Re: Credit-Card Backlash Mounts as Kroger Weighs Expanding Visa Ban

#281

Post by Spooky23 »

matthewwiese wrote: post #193
smileysteve wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy this because it discounts the high costs of cash controls. Cash has high costs that likely make electronic forms of payment competitive. You have - Employees skimming the till; - Theft insurance for a safe, the nightly amount in the safe - Managers balancing the cash registers with change/safe - Armored trucks picking up the money (2-3 men guarding the transfer) - Banks processing the money - Employee tim…

> Employee time and frustration they didn't come up short To add to this, back when I was a retail cashier in high school, there was also the threat of having too much money in the register . Either by negligence, due to miscounting a customer's change, or of outright malevolence (by doing the same). Before I even began training at the register, I was told by the store manager that if the cash in my drawer at the end…

It’s an indicator of skimming gone awry. When I worked at a bagel shop, a common transaction was $4.03. Seeing cash coming out, the cashier would subtotal (sending the ticket down to print), and cancel/no sale the transaction.

They would do it 10 times and pull $40.

Re: Credit-Card Backlash Mounts as Kroger Weighs Expanding Visa Ban

#282

Post by kennydude »

swiley wrote: post #272
smileysteve wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy this because it discounts the high costs of cash controls. Cash has high costs that likely make electronic forms of payment competitive. You have - Employees skimming the till; - Theft insurance for a safe, the nightly amount in the safe - Managers balancing the cash registers with change/safe - Armored trucks picking up the money (2-3 men guarding the transfer) - Banks processing the money - Employee tim…

I wouldn’t buy things with cash if there where a half way decent debit card or similar I could replace it with. It needs to have real transaction authentication so I don’t have to deal with fraud and it needs to decline transactions when I actually don’t have enough money in the account (instead of charging $40 in fees.) That’s it, but no one seems to offer that so I use cash instead.

You don't have that? Damn Monzo needs to get to the states soon!

Re: Credit-Card Backlash Mounts as Kroger Weighs Expanding Visa Ban

#283

Post by chillacy »

clan wrote: post #251
kitsunesoba wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. The US is reasonably safe in this regard, but I’ve had credit cards skimmed a handful of times. These cases were dealt with with little more than a quick call to custom service, but had it been my debit card that was skimmed, it would’ve been bad news. For this reason I carry only a small amount of cash (just enough for cash only bars/restaurants) and never carry my debit card. My primary payment method is credi…

Around here debit cards are protected in the same way as credit cards. You are fully covered if you in no way have been negligent. If the PIN code have been used you have a own risk of $173. Have you been negligent the own risk goes up to $1255. In very severe cases you can be made fully liable but that is very rare.

Do debit cards also issue chargebacks? That’s when you disagree with the service you’ve been provided with by a merchant and you call your credit card provider (usually a bank) and issue a chargeback, resulting in a full refund usually (they tend to side with the customer). You can’t abuse it too much but I know people who definitely abuse it for what I’d consider trivial disagreements.

Re: Credit-Card Backlash Mounts as Kroger Weighs Expanding Visa Ban

#284

Post by h2j24 »

zaarn wrote: post #239
Spooky23 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually that means if he has 25 customers a day, he tells the tax man about 10.

You know, people from the US say that a lot but in other countries like germany where >75% of purchases are cash and a lot of stores are cash only, this doesn't seem to be a problem at all...

I think Germans genuinely enjoy paying taxes. One need not look farther than Germany's close neighbors (Italy, Greece) to see that many people do underreport cash revenue.

Re: Credit-Card Backlash Mounts as Kroger Weighs Expanding Visa Ban

#285

Post by _archon_ »

pwg wrote: post #279
wcoenen wrote: post #242

A lot of problems would go away if all merchants (voluntarily or by law) explicitly charged their payment costs to the customer. Both for card and cash transactions, because cash handling isn't free either. The customers using high reward cards would then soon discover that they are just paying for those rewards themselves, and the free market would quickly push everyone to the most efficient payment systems.

> A lot of problems would go away if all merchants (voluntarily or by law) explicitly charged their payment costs to the customer. At least in the US, the contract the retailer signs with the CC processor to be able to accept CC's explicitly bans passing the card fees on to the customer as a specific line item in the receipt. Which really translates to the merchant increaseing their prices by 1.02x to compensate for…

What prevents a seller from giving a cash discount line item for cash transactions?

Re: Credit-Card Backlash Mounts as Kroger Weighs Expanding Visa Ban

#286

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mehrdadn wrote: post #247
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an object versus pointer debate. A card is “really” a collection of contracts. A bunch of cards are collectively referred to as a “card type,” for merchant billing purposes. It’s nice when that aligns with the card’s marketing, but nothing requires it. Each payment network has its own conventions, which have changed over the years, and are constantly interacting with hundreds of layers and parties. Nobody pri…

> The “real” thing to the merchant is the mapping from card to type. This is exactly what I'm trying to understand: how specific/granular the "card types" can be. Maybe another way to ask it is the following: is there a pre-set list of "card types" with pre-set merchant fees provided by Visa/MC/etc. that issuers must choose from (whether Rewards Traditional vs. Signature, or something else) and that merchants can exp…

> is there a pre-set list of "card types" with pre-set merchant fees provided by Visa/MC/etc. that issuers must choose from (whether Rewards Traditional vs. Signature, or something else) and that merchants can expect, or do issuers get to come up with their own distinct "card types" that result in different fees for the merchant?

The latter. There are presets for smaller institutions. But these fees and labels are negotiated and renegotiated between big banks and payment networks.

If JPMorgan wants to call their cards with a prime last two numbers KOOPA and pay Visa 1¢ extra for all KOOPA swipes, that would be valid. Nobody does this. Because marketing terms--at least initially--tend to correlate to the perks the issuer is giving cardholders, and thus tend to correlate with the issuer's costs. But that's all.

Re: Credit-Card Backlash Mounts as Kroger Weighs Expanding Visa Ban

#287

Post by nicoburns »

kalleboo wrote: post #228
radicalbyte wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in The Netherlands you basically can't use credit cards for offline purchases. Everyone uses the European debit cards with chip/pin. The fees are very low too, it's cheaper to process than cash is.

Conversely in Sweden all debit cards are VISA/MasterCard so credit cards work literally everywhere

Same in the UK.

Re: Credit-Card Backlash Mounts as Kroger Weighs Expanding Visa Ban

#288

Post by mikeash »

randomsearch wrote: post #199
amsilprotag wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AmEx was one of Warren Buffet's earlier investments, and a proof-of-concept of investing in companies with defensible moats. This ruling comes 55 years after his initial investment, and the moat feels as deep as ever. Later businesses have perfected the art of winning the customer relationship and solidifying their lead with hardball terms for vendors (Walmart), merchants (Amazon), advertisers (Facebook/Google), deve…

Very interesting quote from Musk: “saying you like moats is another way of saying you like oligopolies”. I like Musk’s focus on innovation, and I also thought this was interesting because it came from one of the PayPal+ group.

If your only goal is to turn a large amount of money into an even larger amount of money, you ought to love oligopolies.

Re: Credit-Card Backlash Mounts as Kroger Weighs Expanding Visa Ban

#289

Post by bunderbunder »

randomsearch wrote: post #199
amsilprotag wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AmEx was one of Warren Buffet's earlier investments, and a proof-of-concept of investing in companies with defensible moats. This ruling comes 55 years after his initial investment, and the moat feels as deep as ever. Later businesses have perfected the art of winning the customer relationship and solidifying their lead with hardball terms for vendors (Walmart), merchants (Amazon), advertisers (Facebook/Google), deve…

Very interesting quote from Musk: “saying you like moats is another way of saying you like oligopolies”. I like Musk’s focus on innovation, and I also thought this was interesting because it came from one of the PayPal+ group.

It's not necessarily moats I'm opposed to; it's moats that are created or defended using crony capitalism that I'm opposed to.

Re: Credit-Card Backlash Mounts as Kroger Weighs Expanding Visa Ban

#290

Post by zmk_ »

stickfigure wrote: post #154
kccqzy wrote: post #94

Relevant: due to Ohio v. American Express , merchants are generally unable to steer customers from using a particular card. For example if a merchant accepts Visa at all, the merchant has to accept all Visa cards, not selectively choose the lower-fee cards; the merchant also cannot tell the customer to use Discover instead to save costs and only use Visa if that's the customer's only card. This anti-steering provisio…

It has been asserted elsewhere in this HN discussion that Visa charges merchants higher amounts for transactions with higher-end rewards cards. Assuming this is true, and these anti-steering provisions prevent merchants from discriminating, what prevents Visa from issuing cards with 200% fees? What's holding the cash back level at a mere 1-2%?

In Europe at least, this would be regulation. There are max amounts on fees.
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