kebosabi

Ideally true, but in corporate America run by number crunching MBAs and bean counters, it's all about nickel-and-diming the customer in order to recuperate lost revenue/recover assesed risks.

Inevitably, rising skimming fraud would just put more pressure to the banks and merchants, which in turn just gets passed down to the consumer.

I work in the food industry. Cost of food for consumers because of rising fuel prices. Do you think the grocery stores are eating up the price of rising fuel that is inclusive to bring groceries from the farmland to your neighborhood grocer? No, grocers just pass along the cost of rising fuel to their customers.

And in the end, market forces does drive the rest of the competitors to follow suit to reduce their losses too. Just look at all those baggage fees for the airlines.

Just put yourself in the merchants' shoes than thinking from the consumer standpoint. Imagine you have a restaurant. You became a victim of a fraudulent customer who used a skimmed cloned credit card at your restaurant, so you have to foot the $100 bill. Imagine that happened to your restaurant five times this month already and you're $500 in the red now. What are you going to do? Charge the customers more.

Or, put into another perspective, why do you think a can of Coca-Cola from a convenience store in Thailand costs less than 50 cents when it costs over a buck at a 7-11 stateside? Do you think 7-11 in the US is eating up the cost of higher labor cost, material prices, transportation fuel cost, and other costs associated with bringing that can of Coke from the factory in the US to your neighborhood 7-11 as opposed to the Coke factory in Thailand to the Family Mart in Bangkok? The majority of the extra 50 cents or more we pay for a can of Coke is pretty much passed down to the American consumer.