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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

> At least here in Europe MasterCard and visa are the only options. Amex and Discovery are really unusable here

Growing up, my parents had a Discover card (among others) and everywhere we went, I remember them asking if they took Discover because so many places didn't. It wasn't until years later when I saw the joke about this on Futurama that I realized this wasn't a unique experience:

> Fry: Do you take Mastercard? > Employee: Mastercard has been out of business for 100 years. > Fry: Okay, do you take Visa? > Employee: Visa has been out of business for 200 years. > Fry: Hmm, do you take Discover? > Employee: Sorry, no, we don't take Discover.

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In the US today, it's been my experience that if a business accepts credit cards, Visa, MC, Amex and Discover are all accepted. Costco would be the exception that proves the rule. This has been the case since I started using credit cards, maybe 10 years ago.

Does anyone know when this changed? I don't think I've just been lucky this entire time.

Edit: When traveling overseas, I've always just used VISA though, but that's just because I have a card without foreign transaction fees with them.

Amex is frequently not taken by small businesses that don’t use one of the newer POS systems like Square or Clover.

IME, it’s less about POS systems and more about what the merchants are willing to give up in fees.

Amex charges significantly more than the others, to the point that multiple businesses I frequent offer a sliding scale - par for cash/check, +2-5% for Visa/Mastercard/Discover, +5%+ for Amex.

This is just one more input to an optimization problem for me, but for merchants makes a significant difference: my mechanic says he saves thousands of dollars a month by turning Amex customers into Mastercard customers, and Mastercard customers into cash customers.

Well, I’ve noticed businesses switch to accepting Amex when they got one of the newer POS systems. I wonder if Square/Clover/etc. have negotiated different rates for their customers.

I think Square has a flat fee no matter what card. They probably just average out the fees between the cards.

I stopped noticing several years ago, it seems every place has all 4 on the "We proudly accept" window decal. But I do remember checking 10-15 years ago to make sure places took my Amex, because not all of them did.

I have seen a few places not take Discover, or Amex, or only take Visa/MC here in the US.

Costco was unique because they used to only take Amex credit cards and then Citi/Visa won that business.

Huh. I hadn't even heard of Discover.

Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, JCB are the five that started PCI-DSS

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Sec... [2]: https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/

It's the company that now owns Diners Club (and is better known under that name in many countries other than the US), who in turn invented credit cards way back :)

They did not invent credit cards. Diners Club was a charge card. They did not invent that either. American Airlines had their own charge card a few decades before.

They did start the first payment card that wasn’t linked to a specific company (i.e. the American Airlines card).

The invention was having a card accepted across a wide range of merchants (all under different ownership).

Store accounts/cards have indeed been around significantly longer.

The distinction between a credit and a charge card is not that relevant in that context, in my view: For both, you spend an issuer’s money at unaffiliated merchants and pay the issuer back later.

You had yet to discover them.

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