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Comment by kcole16 | Hacker News Reader

In Portugal, very few places accept credit cards, or even debit cards in many cases. This is mainly so the businesses can avoid the crazy fees. It's inconvenient, but the prices are probably slightly cheaper, so people don't really complain.

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It's also used by those business as a way to avoid paying the full taxes owed by underdeclaring profits. Notice the trend of high cash countries and low tax revenue/struggling underclass. Spain, Portugal, Eastern Europe, Greece.

Restaurants in Germany as well. When you ask them why they don't accept cards, they usually say something like "I don't like government surveillance" and you know whats up.

Some countries in the EU started requiring cash registers and receipts and some merchants were able to make some quite good revenue improvements in the month they were introduced :)

Portugal is in the EU so how come CC fees can exceed the EU maximum which is a fraction of a percent? (and likely less than the cost of cash handling for all but the smallest merchants).

I suspect you're misunderstanding that that limit applies to. Until you are taking substantial revenues as a merchant, you are surely going to be paying more than a small fraction of a percent in credit card processing fees one way or another.

Small merchants probably pay north of 2-3% to some intermediary provider (I hope a future regulation will cap this as well). I still see almost no merchants that don't take credit cards here though - likely because when card use reaches a critical mass you 1) lose too much business if you don't accept cards (I can go 6 months without touching cash) and 2) The amount of cash shrinks to a point where there marginal cost of the next cash transaction is also pretty high, e.g if you do 1000 card transactions and only 10 cash transactions in a business day then each cash transaction has to carry 1/10th of the cost of cash handling for the day.

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