Originally Posted by
docbert
That's because the EU has passed legislation that limits the maximum fees that credit card companies can charge to 0.3%, whilst in the US it can be 10x (or even more) as much. At 0.3%, the overhead of accepting cash is almost always going to cost more than accepting credit card. At 3% that's frequently not going to be the case.
I wouldn't necessarily say that cash is always going to be less expensive for American merchants to accept, especially once you consider all the other things around it (i.e. having to get that cash to/from the bank, theft, etc.) Otherwise, even the still rare-ish card-only stores wouldn't have bothered to do such and would be accepting cash.
But yeah, with them knowing that it's cheaper elsewhere, I'm not surprised that many US merchants aren't as enthused about card payments.