Originally Posted by
nacho
Whether you pay more or not it's not as black and white as you think. It's not like in September a room costs $200 and since the law passed they reduced the price to $194. This is an excuse for merchants to put up the price legitimately. Plus the world is bigger than the US, here in Denmark we have a forex fee of 2% and rebate of 0.5% for the only one no annual fee credit card. If you want any benefits you pay a hefty annual fee, and you can get a free cc without any annual fee but they will rob you through a hefty forex fee from 2% and up.
They can charge whatever they want but when a business like hotel/car rental that requires authorization or credit card is the only form of accepted payment, I think they shouldn't be charging a fee for using credit cards. If I visit Canada again I might have to carry CAD 500 to use as deposit when I check into a hotel.
There's a better way, tell the banks to cap the fees, plain and simple. In Scandinavia we are going towards a cashless society and it seems like North America is going backwards.
Every time I tank with cash in the US and I was thinking gas stations must be a prime target of robberies, the till must have like thousands of dollars cash (20 cars per hour and each pay $20).
Actually the EU went backward some time ago by capping interchange fees, which is why your cards offer terrible rewards, anemic benefits, and annual fees are more common.
Studies have shown the ~2% interchange fees charged by credit card processors and used to fund the much higher levels of benefits for US cardholders are absorbed by merchants, and forcing them lower comes exclusively at the cost of consumers.
Gas stations have been permitted to offer cash discounts for some time.