Re:Why Germans pay cash for almost everything
by bluGill on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @01:47PM
(#14960429)
Nobody to my knowledge has every measures the costs of cash, it is just something they accept. With credit cards it is easy to measure because you get a number, but with cash it is not, you have to calculate too many different parameters and figure out what applies where.
Re:Why Germans pay cash for almost everything
by germanier on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @02:55PM
(#14961245)
I'm pretty sure every single German supermarket chain measures that, it's just a requirement to operate at those margins. The Edeka cooperative published in 2012 that their all-in cash handling cost is 0.14%. The 2013 Steinbeis Cost of Cash study[0] estimated a much higher number of 2.7% for merchants. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
Such studies have also been used to arrive at the EU interchange cap.
[0]: http://www.steinbeis-research.de/images/pdf-documents/CFP_Co...
Until 2016, the costs were 30€/mo+0.125% for EC, 160€/mo+4% for VISA and MasterCard, 160€/mo+7.5% for AMEX in Germany.
Most German merchants run on margins below 1-2%. Good luck paying 7.5% transaction fee on a margin of 1%.
This is why EC was far more widely accepted, although even that was too expensive for small places, such as farmers selling stuff on the market.