The dealer will absorb the credit card fees for one reason: because, after you take the manufacturer's holdback into account (let's not pretend that "invoice" is really what the dealer pays, OK?) the profit on the deal is better than he's going to get any other way. His alternative is to let the car keep sitting on the lot accruing floor-planning charges. If he's got the only BMW 7 Series Alpina within a thousand miles he has some leverage, but if it's a Honda Civic, and all I care about is it has a five-speed transmission and it's blue? I can get a dozen others like it inside a twenty-minute drive. He takes my deal or he gets no deal, and he knows it. That's why.