With BTC you have to really, really trust the merchant, because you can't compel them to refund you. Without the chargeback ability, a lot of smaller merchants would never get business in the first place.
The blockchain and smart contracts provide interesting ways to tackle these problems with clever and transparent protocols. It is not difficult to imagine a credit score system (https://hellobloom.io/) that is based off a transaction history tied to an identity token (https://www.uport.me/). In that case, merchants and customers can choose who they want to engage with based off reputation and history.
That is one way of doing a transaction with a merchant. Another way would be to use a hashed time lock contract that allows you to get a refund on demand. In that event, the merchant has to trust you.
As both a consumer and a business owner, I am excited to see a highly diverse market of options for how we do transactions, as opposed to a market dominated by 3-4 players.
The fees don't have much effect on me buying coffee and reputation based systems are a libertarian panacea that honestly, look nutty to the rest of us.
As a European consumer I too am looking forward to lots more options in the near future, some of which will ditch fees entirely,and none of them cryptocurrency based.
To many Americans and world citizens with less disposable income, you might seem kind of nutty to not worry about losing 3% on your under $15 purchases. Credit score and insurance industries are ubiquitous. For most folks if they move to another country you will often be penalized by that country's insurance or credit score agencies for not having recent history. There is certainly room for improvement.
And I'm not losing 3%, the business may be but I'm not in any way that's visible.
Further, there are new products and methods entering the market that require neither Visa/Mastercard nor a hideously inefficient PoW blockchain or multiple exchange parties.
Payments (in Europe at least) are likely to change in the near future, but not to that.
Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2)
Open Banking
And that's a real problem if you're trying to run a business.