A lot of the fee goes to the customer's bank that funded the transaction, which is what enables Credit Card rewards programs. If you limit that fee (like the E.U. has), Visa et al. don't go out of business, but then you won't see any similar level rewards programs like we have here in the US (e.g. 2% back on everything, or 3-5% on specific categories, etc).

At this point, every local restaurant in my area is charging 2.9% fee for using a credit card. Let's just lower these processing fees, get rid of credit card rewards, and small businesses can stop charging fees for using credit cards for payment.

Such fees just encourages bad incentives. Such as terrible security because reimbursing people / financing organized crime is cheaper (cheaper for the bank, of course much more expensive for society).

What? Financing organized crime? How does that relate to credit card processing fees?

Sloppy security in favor of reimbursement is financing organized crime.

Though how credit card processing fees relate to sloppy security is mostly a brainfart by me.

Is it just me who'd prefer they just didn't take my money in the first place...?

There's plenty of things about modern finance you're free to complain about. Things we're largely forced to do with onerous and useless fees attached - Realtors taking 6% of multi-million dollar transactions for doing nearly nothing has been in the news recently.

Pretty sure nobody is forced to buy info products on Black Friday for an 80% discount.

>and enforce through monopoly government force!

???