Merchant definitely needed to be able to adjust price depending on the fees.

Visa and Mastercard are mentionned, but Amex is also egregious to the point some merchant hide the support (bo amex logo or sticker anywhere) to only server customers who insist on using an Amex.

With more latitude, I Think everyone wins: the merchant can set amex prices 4% or more higher, customers get to decide if they really want to pay extra, and everyone else has cheaper prices [0]

And I'd personally still pay for the convenience tax to use a Visa/Mastercard card TBH.

[0] even if prices stays the same, more money going to the merchant would still be a win in my book. It's the actual entity providing me something, and arguably I'm choosing to pay them and am fine with them staying in business.

Cash has died in societies without these rules though.

Across most of the world, Mastercard/Visa has used various threat tactics to basically tell merchants that if they charge a card fee they'll get banned from mastercard/visa.

Obviously for most businesses, thats a death knell, so most capitulate.

And the few places with competing payment methods (eg. Kaspi in Kazakhstan), Mastercard/Visa have ~zero fees, and sometimes even negative fees (eg. "special offer, you get half price use of the subway if you have a mastercard")

I don't think that is the reason cash has died.

Cash has died because it is inconvenient, unsanitary, and risky to walk around with large amounts of it.

When I pay cash it's because (a) I'm getting a discount (b) I want to be anonymous and not give any personal information (c) my credit card isn't working on their equipment (d) I'm giving tips and worried that their company will take some of it (e) I buying/selling used items from a stranger and want to use an irreversible method of money transfer. If it weren't for these reasons I wouldn't ever use cash. It's inconvenient.

(e) can be served by cryptocurrency, I suppose, but there are other issues with it, like the stranger being able to see your account balance and then come at you with the $5 wrench.

Many merchants, especially brick-mortar stores that are not chains, do give discounts for cash if you ask.

Also, look carefully at the T&C for all of your payments. For example, Comcast charges $5 less for paying with a bank account instead of a credit card, which for most plans is worth more than your 2% cashback points.

>I fully support merchants being able to charge more for card or give a discount for cash. The fact they haven't been able to for 3+ decades

This is false. Merchants in the US have been able to give cash/debit card discounts since Oct 2011. I would be surprised if Europe did not have similar rules even before the US.

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/new-rules-el...

The reason many merchants do not is because they want to bet that people are able and willing to spend more when people pay with a credit card, as opposed to cash/debit card.

Note that many larger merchants do give discounts for paying with cash/debit, such as ATT/Target/governments/insurance companies/etc.

From this https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-merchants-enter-...

The old settlement allows giving discounts to cash, to debit cards etc, but it doesn’t allow giving discounts to visa/Mastercard issued by particular banks/businesses.

The new settlement will allows merchants to pass the fees directly to consumers on issuer level thereby disclosing the fee of each card and promoting the transparency. Consumers can understand the cost associated with each card and make their tradeoffs

Interestingly there is a call out on the 2018 American Express SCOTUS judgement. I don’t understand that very well.

> Merchants can charge for using a Visa or Mastercard credit card, regardless of whether they can charge for using American Express, whose rules for merchants were upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018.

It was not an old settlement, it was federal legislation (Dodd Frank 2010).

The 2018 Ohio v Amex ruling is about steering provisions not violating anti trust laws. Basically, Supreme Court ruled that AmEx could prohibit merchants from offering cheaper prices to Visa/Mastercard/Discover credit card users.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_v._American_Express_Co.

This ruling was actually very beneficial for tech companies.

It would be funny if, due to this settlement being only for Visa/Mastercard, merchants can charge different prices for using Visa or Mastercard credit cards, but American Express credit card users still gets to enjoy the lowest credit card price, while American Express gets to enjoy the highest credit card merchant fees.

Idk about Europe in genera, but in France you cannot have different prices for cash/card. There can be (and often used to be) a minimum amount to pay with card, but that's it.

But do note that card fees are capped at 0.3% max for credit cards, so negligible in the grand scheme of things. Banks used to charge an arm and a leg for a terminal though, but a bunch of startups like SumUp broke that oligopoly and even random small stands in fairs propose card payments via them "for free".

>That 1% tax has probably been a pretty massive drag on GDP. Imagine how many new schools we could have had instead.

There are trillions of dollars misspent by politicians on not building schools, not Visa or Mastercard's fault.