"Visa Trying to Bribe Merchants to Stop Taking Cash" (V)
From naked capitalism:
The war on cash is escalating. A big driver isn’t central banks who
want to be able to inflict negative interest rates on savers, or
Treasuries who see cash transactions as hiding revenues from their tax
collectors, but the payment networks that want to kill cash (and
checks!) as competitors to their oh so terrific (and fee-gouging) credit
and debit cards.
However, one bit of good news is there doesn’t appear to be much enthusiasm on the buyer, as in merchant, end.
First, the overview from the Wall Street Journal:
Visa Inc. has a new offer for small merchants: take
thousands of dollars from the card giant to upgrade their payment
technology. In return, the businesses must stop accepting cash.
The company unveiled the initiative on Wednesday as part of a broader
effort to steer Americans away from using old-fashioned paper money.
Visa says it is planning to give $10,000 apiece to up to 50 restaurants
and food vendors to pay for their technology and marketing costs, as
long as the businesses pledge to start what Visa executive Jack
Forestell calls a “journey to cashless.”
There are good reasons to think this initiative won’t get far.
Customer resistance. Food vendors, and in particular
restaurants, are low margin businesses with fickle customers who have
little to no loyalty. Why risk driving business away?
Aside from the fact that some customers prefer cash, a related issue
is that using cards and smartphones often seem to be a tax on time. I
really hate using chip cards. Mag cards were often faster than cash,
since you swiped and could stuff the card back in your wallet while the
transaction was being approved. Chip cards, by contrast, require you to
keep the card in the machine while it is being approved, so one is very
much aware of the wait. And when I’ve seen people using phones (often to
buy small stuff like coffee, which really amazes me), I find that they
are slower with it that they would probably be with cash, in that they
seem to have to fumble with the phone to get the right app readied and
then the payment doesn’t always go right through either.
And that’s before you get to the fact that ApplePay and other
smartphone payments time stamp exactly when you paid, adding to the
information the surveillance state is gathering about you. By contrast,
even if you use a credit card at a store, Clive informs us that the card
network typically retains only the date of transaction.
Higher merchant charges. I take credit and debit
cards through PayPal, and also checks. And even though I am often slow
to deposit checks because I find it hard to get to the bank, I’d still
rather have checks despite the somewhat greater hassle because I save
the 3% cut the card networks take. Visa makes the argument that handling
cash has costs too, but they are the ones that have ginned up the
numbers, and in my case, they don’t wash. As the Journal points out:
Indeed, many merchants prefer cash because they don’t
have to share the revenue with card companies. Credit-card interchange
fees, which networks like Visa set and that merchants pay to the banks
that issue their cards, are on average around 2% of the transaction
amount, according to the National Retail Federation, the largest trade
group that represents merchants in the U.S....MORE
