I have personally been moving to a more cash-based lifestyle after I realized that I used my card so often that my payment history could be used to construct a reasonable map of my location history.
Do they really deduct the issuer's point scheme from the merchant account now? That seems like it would be difficult to manage, what with rolling point schemes and whatnot. Not to mention it would be near impossible for the merchant to keep balanced books if they don't know their costs per purchase until after they've been paid.
Merchants aren't allowed to charge different prices for different payment methods, so there's an incentive for credit card issuers to maximise the rewards and quietly pass them along as fees to merchants!
It's a huge injustice, IMO. A case was brought to the competition tribunal that would have made issuers notify cardholders that rewards are passed on as fees, but it was rejected. https://www.thebalancesmb.com/small-business-credit-card-294...
Some are as high as 3% - so merchants get charged $12 on a $400 transaction, vs. just 12 cents for Interac debit. So you can see why banks are pushing Visa/MC network debit cards now.
EDIT: The EU stopped this nonsense by straight up capping interchange fees at 0.3%. Pretty sure Visa/MC are still doing just fine there :) http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-15-4585_en.htm
It is not a global optimum though.
Other benefits include: - Paying back other people is easy; - Shops are always lacking change, I can almost always pay with exact change; - Online takeaway shops charge for using their payment provider (% of the total order price) but don't make you pay for cash payments.
If I understand the ruling corretl, this has become illegal in the EU recently. JustEat.co.uk for example now charge a £0.50 fee for cash payments.
I’m not sure how I feel about it tbh; I get that merchants were hiding service fees as card processing fees, but on the other hand we now have government mandated subsidising of credit cards by cash users. CC users get lots of benefits, such as, most importantly the power of chargebacks. You don’t get that with cash, but now you have to subsidise it, because the cost of those services is eventually passed on to the merchant, and thus to the customer.
It's been against the rules (card network? clearinghouse? not sure) for a long time in the United States, too. But it still happens.
As an example, a bookstore I was in a couple of weekends ago had a sign at the cash register notifying people that all transactions incur a 4% "customer service fee." There was a sign immediately below that one noting that there is a 4% discount for paying with cash.
Where there's a will, there's a way.
Also, in the US, why aren't all businesses required by law to just post the prices including all taxes and fees (but not discounts that might apply)?
Certainly not everyone has to pay the taxes, so that may be one reason why they don’t most places.
Source?
"Of course, Google has been able to track your location using Google Maps for a long time. Since 2014, it has used that information to provide advertisers with information on how often people visit their stores. But store visits aren’t purchases, so, as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases."
The more radical option (which would also prevent any possible tracking by my provider) would be to forgo a cellphone entirely, but that doesn't seem practical in this day and age.
This data was used in Italy to catch CIA agents after they extrajudicially extradited (so to speak) a terrorist[1] in 2003 https://youtu.be/BwGsr3SzCZc?t=7m2s. The whole talk is worth watching.
The cost of storing this forever is negligible and going down. The government would be foolish or (in my opinion irrationally) principled not to hold on to this for the next 1,000 years.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17095667
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_Mustafa_Osama_Nasr#Conv...