Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

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Went to the donut shop, got a $1.50 donut with a credit card, no minimums here in LA. This NYC place sounds fairly strange.

I lived in Beijing for 9 years. It changed much since then, but the tech brought out was solving mostly local problems with local solutions. When I started living there, I used to pay for rent by withdrawing 20K or so RMB from the ATM machine (in 100 bills), loading it into a bag, then giving it the landlord. I never did that in the USA before, never had to, it wasn't the problem the USA had. Now I can use Wepay, oh, or I can go to the bank and do a direct funds transfer (as a foreigner, I could never get ebanking setup).

> If every American had to fly to Tokyo or Seoul for a week, I think we'd put up less with our failing infrastructure.

All of these places have their own thing. Don't get confused and think that the problems they are solving are much better than the ones we are. I've had plenty of trouble in Tokyo that I wouldn't experience in the states (dammit, streets should have names!), they are just different.

yeah, and Walgreens will allow you to buy a 40 cent pack of gum with a credit card. They are surely losing money on that transaction. Your donut shop is losing over 30% when they let you buy a single donut for 1.50$ with your card. That's why sane merchants (often independent) will have a minimum. This isn't a NYC specific thing at all.

Where do you get this 30% number?

Typical minimum credit charge is 30 cents plus a percentage of the gross.

These are very high interchange numbers. I think it was bad like that in the past, but not today.

interchange can be pretty high, especially for premium reward cards. what changed recently was interchange on debit cards (which used to be much higher in the US). this is why debit issuers no longer offer any real sort of "points" or cashback on debit. and why debit and cash users essentially subsidize credit card users in the US

The amazing internet infrastructure in Korea caused them to develop many service that relied on Internet Explorer, preventing them to pick up new standard as easily as countries that were later to the party.

That's probably the same kind of stuff here. The US did develop a universal non-cash system decades before other countries and now is stuck with its quirks. Europe started later and is slightly better. China started even later and could just use the fact that even poor people had an internet connected computer with them at all times except in the shower.

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