I'm not sure about the rest of Europe, but in the UK most credit cards don't cost money.
Unless you don't pay your bills, of course. But direct debit takes care of that.
Unless you don't pay your bills, of course. But direct debit takes care of that.
There are alternatives that are cheaper and work just as fine. Thankfully not every country is already majorly infected by credit cards.
Do you have an example? Debit cards have very similar cost structures, cash is more expensive to handle.
That is unfair, and not all businesses do that. I criticize it and prefer shops that don't.
I guess I don't object in principle to a cash discount (a card fee would annoy me), but those tend to exist for the sake of tax evasion, which I won't support.
This is definitely the case for the underlying costs as you can imagine. Doing an online transaction is much cheaper these days than operating trucks, cash sorting, etc. It's however not always the case that banks will charge merchants less for cards than for cash handling unfortunately. This has maintained the weight of cash as a payment method past it's actual usefulness.