“Accepting cards” is not the same as “accepting credit cards” though… A lot of them only accept girocards and not credit cards…

And credit cards in Germany are not "credit" cards as well. At least the one I got from Sparkasse does not let you hold a balance and must be paid in full every month.

Not sure about those, but I got mine around 2-3 years ago from gebührenfrei.de, which is from Advanzia Bank. Seems fine so far…with a minor disclaimer that I don’t really use it much. :-)

I don't have enough experience to speak about CC in Germany, but I don't see why a Rewe or ... boh, Aldi, Mcdonalds, etc should prevent that. I am a bit surprised, to be honest.

Big chains and enterprises, for sure. But there’s still a lot of SMBs not accepting credit cards.

Are these the same SMBs that ... accept only cash? :) Or do they really exclude CCs?

They exclude CCs. They have a card reader but they either have a sign saying, or the vendor will simply say, “keine Kreditkarte”.

If you use contactless payments, this is a non-issue, they can't detect it. Although they wish they could.

So a lot will have in their contract with their processor that they actually can accept Visa/Mastercard, so the sign is there to put you off.

But actually a lot don't, and when you try to pay, even contactless, with a non-Girocard, it won't work.

Visa and Mastercard don't magically let you on their network because you have a card machine.

Because there's a significant a transaction fee if you're paying by credit card, with cash or debit card there's no transaction fee.

The bigger mystery is why stores in some other countries are happy to have a payment method chosen by the customer eat into their profit.

Debitcards, not girocards. I have no girocard since years, and still can easily pay everywhere. But to be fair, the pandemia really pushed this even the small shops.

Ämter only take girocards or cash.

Not true. It probably depends on the location, but last time I paid for a public service, I had no problem using my Visa Debit Card. I think it was not even possible to use cash.

Admittedly, this was almost a year ago. I found I could pay with credit cards in Berlin, but once I was in smaller areas I was looked at like I was insane if I tried to pay by anything other than cash. Probably didn’t help that my German was terrible.

In particular, I was staying in Nordhausen for work for a couple weeks. The hotel I stayed at tried to refuse to accept that I paid by card online in advance. Every small restaurant I went to refused to accept either a credit or debit card, and only a couple chain (read:overpriced) restaurants would accept Mastercard. When I tried to buy an Ethernet cable at a general store they refused to accept anything other than cash once they realized I was a foreigner.

Maybe it’s a myth in large population centres, but definitely not overall. I had roughly the same experience throughout most of Thuringia, with even gas stations in certain areas only accepting cash.