Agree, such a pain. Especially in restaurants if you take a large group out and want to pick the bill up. It has got better but I have been totally caught out with this on one of my first visits to Berlin with a fairly pricey group dinner and I physically cannot take more than €250 out of the ATM a day without taking cash out on CC which involves horrendous cash advance fees.

I also don't buy this cc fee argument. It's regulated (and low) in the EU, perhaps 1-2%. This must be lower than the cost of storing cash, counting cash, paying it in to the bank, transporting it, getting fraudulent notes, people giving wrong change, etc etc.

The other annoying thing is DB machines not taking visa/mastercard and no notes over €10 (though this may have changed recently), which is all you get out of an ATM when you land at the airport. Such a hassle.

I hope Berlin can fix this and the BER airport situation one day.

EC cards have 0.125% fees. That’s an entire order of magnitude cheaper than CC.

Of course no one is going to support CC if they can save that much money.

If your gross profit (not including rent and other fixed costs) at a restaurant is, say, 80%, do you still think 1% CC fees are silly? To me this seems like ridiculous premature optimisation. If I go to Germany and I'm having a meal with clients I'll phone ahead and see if they accept CC and won't visit if they don't.

> If your gross profit (not including rent and other fixed costs) at a restaurant is, say, 80%, do you still think 1% CC fees are silly?

That's a question, but that's not what things look like.

Many German businesses are operating at razor-thin margins, or even at losses. From farmers (which lose around 13ct for every liter milk sold) to small restaurants (often making losses on all of the food, and only minor profit on the drinks) to any other kind of business.

If you are a 4 people company and you're trying to compete (and do so successfully) with american multinational chains, then you don't have enough profits to pay 7% CC fees. You'll be lucky if you can afford the 30€/month + 0.125% EC fees, and many businesses can't even do that.

> If I go to Germany and I'm having a meal with clients I'll phone ahead and see if they accept CC and won't visit if they don't.

Trust me, these businesses prefer not having your business. You'd only make losses for them.

7% CC fees? Are you crazy? The EU regulated it at less than 1%.

The EU regulated VISA and MasterCard, and only since a year ago.

AMEX still takes 7% fees, even today, and even MasterCard and VISA could take those fees in 2015 still.

Ok, don't accept AMEX then (that's common for a lot of shops to not accept in the UK).

It's definitely not 7% though, considering Stripe offers AMEX processing for 1.4% in the EU.

Can't see any reason not to accept MC/Visa now though.

> Can't see any reason not to accept MC/Visa now though.

Still 10 times higher fees than with the German card systems. If your profit margin is 1.4%, you can't afford 2.2% credit card fees. And if you increase the price, all customers go to the cheaper competitor.

German stores are in a reaaaaal close competition with these things.

Where can I get those magical 30€/0.125% fees? Girocard is cheap (though less than an order of magnitude compared to CC) but I'm not aware of an offer that cheap, especially for low volume.

Those were the prices offered by EC (the original EC back in the day, before MasterCard bought it: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Cash) back when a local business wanted to start supporting EC, and made an inquiry to several payment processors.

I'm not sure about values today, but they don't seem to be much higher if you exclude costs for the actual readers and the connection.

Currently I seem to find for low volume situations only contracts from iZettle and co for 0.95% fees.

EDIT: Just found this Verordnung setting the maximum fee for EC at 0.2%: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/DE/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX...

> das Interbankenentgelt, das Zahlungsdienstleister bei Debitkartentransaktionen pro Zahlungsvorgang bieten oder verlangen dürfen, beträgt höchstens 0,2 % des Transaktionswerts.

Absolutely, I too think it's a matter of supply. So often shops refuse to take cards to avoid the fees. I suspect a systematic or law issue making card transactions more expensive.

Just keep a couple hundred in your pocket, like everybody else and their grandma.

What if your wallet gets stolen or you misplace it?