EC is Eurocheque, a German specific card system. In my experience in Germany, lots of places take EC but neither visa, mastercard or amex, so in effect, only Germans can pay with credit in a lot of places. This is true even in Frankfurt (arguably the financial capital of Europe). In the cafeteria of a place I frequently work, they also don't take cash, so foreigners can't eat.

SEPA is the single euro payment area. Here it refers to the cost of a wire transfer.

Now that we are talking about card payments (NFC, chip and pin, etc.): jump into a random Frankfurt taxi in 2017, and IF they are willing to take your card (pretty big if), this will be their method of choice:

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They put your card in there, put a paper on top, and proceed to press and copy the embossing of all you card numbers into a carbon copy paper. Talk about swipe card insecurity... That is by far the slowest way, you spend 5 minutes easily.

I agree with the laundering / tax evasion cause only partly: I once wanted to pay upwards of 900€ in IKEA with mastercard. The cashier asked me to go to an ATM that was inside the IKEA building, take out cash from the card, and pay with that. With its scale, I don't think IKEA prefers cash to launder money or evade taxes...

> EC is Eurocheque, a German specific card system.

Eurocheque hasn't existed since 2003. The current system is Girocard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girocard), it's just that the colloquial name is still "EC".

Germany doesn’t use the MasterCard or the VISA network, instead having an entire separate payment network, EC, which uses under the hood wire transfers via SEPA. This is the E in EMV (EC, MasterCard, VISA) which created most of modern payment infrastructure.

SEPA is the Single European Payments Area, standardizing how to process fast and cheap payments, all transfers are in Euro, from 2018 on also having a standardized API between banks, wire transfers are free or below 1 cent each, etc.

Thank you for explaining those, but I'm still not sure what they have to do with the "real cost of dealing with cash". EC and SEPA seem to be digital payment technologies, and therefore aren't dealing with cash.

I would think that the means that banks charge for dealing with cash inputs, either directly or indirectly, to cash heavy businesses.

> Germany doesn’t use the MasterCard or the VISA network

Well, it is used (almost all major stores and large grocery chains support both Visa and MasterCard), but Girocard is far more widespread.

Only since the EU limited the fees. Until 2016, neither ALDI nor LIDL nor REWE nor PENNY nor Edeka nor Coop supported it.

I know it's nitpicking but Rewe has accepted credit cards since 2007.

Some REWEs have, but not all. There's still some where I live that don't. (REWE eG is a cooperative, so it's all a bit more complicated)

Basically there is Rewe Dortmund (with stores across NRW) and Rewe anywhere else (including NRW). The latter requires credit card acceptance for all Rewe-branded stores. If a store does not have that, an email to Cologne usually changes it.

There's also Rewe and Coop (Sky, Plaza, etc) in Schleswig-Holstein, which have merged now, but offer different amounts of credit card acceptance.

And members of both have reservations against MasterCard and VISA, due to what happened with Rossmann a few years ago (Rossmann sold cuban cigars, as punishment MasterCard, VISA and PayPal seized Rossmanns funds and suspended all payments), but as EC was also bought by MasterCard and merged with the Maestro brand, currently there's no option but to continue on.

Personally, as member of both the REWE eG and coop eG, I'd support a move away from CC to any national or EU based payment system as soon as possible.

I know that there are some reservations but the rule the cooperative (including SH) decided as binding still stands. You are of course free to lobby internally for change.

Rewe has a fairly complicated legal structure, I'm not sure which you are a member of. There is no single "Rewe eG" which you can just buy into, especially not if you don't happen to own supermarkets.

EC was not bought by MasterCard, the brand was always owned by them (though there have been various mergers). The system behind those cards was not merged with Maestro (which is a different system) but merely rebranded as Girocard, an independent scheme by the German banks. It works without any reliance on MasterCard.

> Rewe has a fairly complicated legal structure, I'm not sure which you are a member of. There is no single "Rewe eG" which you can just buy into, especially not if you don't happen to own supermarkets.

I'm personally not sure either. Originally my entire family was just a member of the coop eG, but when they started to merge with REWE eG in the past months the coop eG offered an option to invest additional money into the REWE eG (at better than usual terms). So we did.

https://www.shz.de/regionales/schleswig-holstein/tschuess-sk...

So now we have some stores that have just been rebranded REWE, some still branded Sky, operating with the same mix of REWE and Sky products, and some accepting CCs, some not.

> The system behind those cards was not merged with Maestro (which is a different system) but merely rebranded as Girocard

In marketing, EC stopped being the main brand, though, and MasterCard provides their EC cards under the "Maestro" brand within of Germany, although they are not operating over the Maestro network, or in any way compatible with it. Take any recent EC card, it'll work only via the EC system, say Girocard Electronic Cash on the back, and Maestro on the front, but doesn't actually have any relation to the Maestro system. That's what I was referring to with the rebranding.