The Shenzhen subway seems like an exact copy of Hong Kong's MTR, which uses the excellent and ubiquitous Octopus system. The MTR is its own entity and allowed to play favourites (or enable monopolistic behaviour).
I did feel screwed when I arrived in he Netherlands thinking my unionpay card to work, just to find out it was one of the countries besides India where it didn't. Thankfully, I could find some place that took credit cards...but I was freaking out as I didn't have much convertible cash as backup.
Well, didn't.
The EU limited fees for credit cards to 0.125% recently, and while EC (now bought by MasterCard and called Maestro for SEPA) is still cheaper, credit cards start being affordable for merchants. But almost none support it yet.
And Google still hasn't launched Android Pay, despite every ALDI having NFC. I'd prefer if there was a local NFC payment option actually.
Germany already had a well-working giro system by the time credit cards were invented – almost instant, free transfers between bank accounts were common.
Then, credit cards were obscenely expensive (and still are in some cases, many credit cards cost a hundred euros or more per year for the owner, and taking credit cards often costs 6-7% of sale price + 60€/month for the merchant, and merchants can’t ask credit card users to pay more, so merchants would go bankrupt if they’d do that).
And this is because credit cards in the US are only free and have bonuses because they’re basically a tax on the less educated, with high fees and interest. Germany, which traditionally has a culture where having debt means being guilty (literally, that’s the same word), obviously is far more cautious, so far less profitable.
And then the EC cards happened, which introduced the EMV chip, were safer, faster, and had far lower fees, so they were supported everywhere.
And then there’s privacy.
And the fact that the US – especially MasterCard, VISA and PayPal – love stealing customers money in legal transactions inside of Germany just because it violates US law (which, fyi, does not apply in Germany, although the US pretends it does), as [1] and [2] show.
All in all, credit cards are a horribly insecure implementation of a ridiculous system that only works when it can scam enough people, interferes with local law, and doesn’t fit the strict privacy morals of Germany.
________________________
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ka26b/paypal_bl...
They’ve been in an eternal race for lower prices since they started competing.
Also, it literally applies here – since the fees for credit cards were reduced, ALDI and LIDL introduced payment with credit card (which wasn’t possible before at all at them). Same with REWE and coop.
How can you say it doesn’t apply if it literally happened.
The EU reduces your transaction costs by 2% for all retailers there's no way they will pass this on to the consumer eg my morning Starbucks did not get cheaper