Why many business owners would love it if you stopped using your credit card
npr.org
npr.org
For a while, small coffee shops and the like added around a 20 cent fee for card purchases when tap-and-go payments (paywave, contactless, etc.) became popular. Then the regulator ruled you can only charge the exact fee — on a $3.20 flat white that fee is roughly 6 cents — so they stopped because it was overly burdensome at the point-of-sale to calculate this fee for each card type. Plus the margin on a flat white is so high...
On the other hand, airlines also included the credit card fee (and some still do,) but would instead let you pay via bank transfer. On such small margin, this would have been quite a saving for the consumer and the airline. I find this still exists in wholesale suppliers — that 2%~ fee on a Mastercard hits when you are buying a few thousand of inventory.
As a small business owner, I find credit card charges are just a "cost of doing business." Shopify fees are way more prohibitive, for instance.
I think in the US merchant fees for card transactions are much higher though so may be a different ball game over there.
Mind you - haven't used that for years and I think most supermarkets have stopped offering it.
(The factor of three is real, but perhaps that business had unusually bad contracts with the credit card companies. I wouldn't know.)