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Everybody's paying for this, it doesn't matter if you hustle or if you don't, if you have a card or not. Contracts prohibit merchants to charge more than cash so they need to cover the processing fee by increasing the prices paid by all. It's not like they can refuse to accept cards.

It's one of the larger rackets in the economy today, whole percentage points of consumer spending is syphoned by the financial industry as pure rent.

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Pure rent? I don't love them, but providing a worldwide payments network is not free or trivial.

I was talking about the rent part on top of the costs of those systems, nonetheless they are trivial compared to the revenues. If there was an international agreement on a single payment system with mandated interoperability, we could find out what those costs actually are in a competitive market, probably fractions of a cent per transaction.

"Contracts prohibit merchants to charge more than cash" - Interestingly, this is changing in New Zealand. More stores are passing on the fees (2.5%?) if you pay using a credit card.

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