Squillions: How money laundering won

Interchange for debit and credit cards is now almost the same in Europe (0.2% vs. 0.3%).

Retailer here: Most of these costs are fairly fixed. We have to have a safe, bags, armored transport, staff training on counterfeit detection, etc. whether the percentage of our sales in cash is 8% or 80%. The few costs that are variable are still far, far less than the processing fees.

It's also worth noting there are also huge fixed costs for credit card transactions. We're currently upgrading our pinpads and it's been an absolute nightmare to get the right parts in just for physically connecting the damn things to our counters, we lost almost a whole day of backend POS access for our vendor to push a required update, and I'm looking at more fees to be able to support other types of cards which require POS certification.

We strongly prefer our customers use cash.

Buddy of mine runs a cash only bar and grill.

The costs to handle cash are fairly low. He bought one of those fancy cash counters like they have at the bank for a few hundred. He also bought one of those cheap little ATMs for perhaps $500 and charges $1 to take out cash. He keeps $2,000 on hand at all times between the safe and the ATM itself. Otherwise, he just stops by the bank two blocks down the street to deposit profits. As for security, well, they just carry concealed weapons.

The ATM paid for itself in the first month, presumably also the cash counter machine. Notably they did have one counterfeit $100 come through that they forgot to scan. I suppose that’s novel to cash although chargebacks on cards also do occur.

At least these are mostly local jobs.

All of those talking points appear to be some preprepared copy pasta, because they don't appear to relate to my comment at all.

I never spoke about speed.

> the need to make a cognitive operation of 1st grader counting, which is apparently a daunting prospect for many people.

Don't be a condescending prick. The fact that counting exists at all is a cost that people don't measure.

> due to the AML surveillance from the discussed article the banking privacy is practically dead.

Or if you read the fine article you would realise that AML rules generate so much noise that there isn't any analysis.

Costco in the US has, for as long as I’ve shopped there, only accepted visa or debit.

Those rules are about discriminating against various cards from the same brand. They have also been significantly limited in many jurisdictions by now.

It isn't illegal but it is against most credit card companies merchant agreements. But I do rarely see it like in some vending machines.

Sure, but somebody is still paying more in aggregate than what you get out as rewards, or this industry would not exist.

The credit card companies tell you that the merchant pays. Cost incidence doesn't work like that. If every seller in a fungible commodity market has the same additional cost, the price is going up by that amount.

Yes, but consider who pays the merchant fee in the end. Sure, you might be getting a kickback of that in rewards, but usually less than you pay yourself in fees indirectly.

In many cases they do actually offer the discount (or tack on the "hidden" fee for using a credit card). In some markets there are also sellers who only accept cash (often discount stores etc.) and correspondingly have lower prices, which is a slightly more inconvenient version of the same thing if you patronize them.

Moreover, we should encourage every retailer to offer this, because getting 2% back (or less) while paying 3% more is not just a net loss, it's also worse for privacy.