I have noticed some strange behavior with some cards at certain supermarkets. That may be them trying to fight back against the US interchange fees, but there are workarounds.
> ... the capping of interchange fees should result in lower fees charged by banks to retailers for processing card payments.
If users of US cards still get 5% rewards when using their cards in the EU, I'm curious about who pays for the 4.7% shortfall.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_1...
The number of people who can effectively use/abuse this consistently is probably pretty low.
Yes using the card as designed and promoted I don't know how I live with myself.
Even just using the word "use," US cards are designed for and promoted to people who live in the US, and are likely to do most (if not all) of their shopping in the US. Absolutely, there's nothing morally wrong with getting a US card and using it a bunch in the EU, but the point is that the number of people doing that is low enough for the banks/card companies to just subsidize the fees.
Credit cards, from nearly their inception, have been widely promoted to be used when travelling. The cards could charge for foreign transactions but they choose not to, obviously to promote use overseas.
They could simply specify that the rewards only apply to US purchases, yet they don't.
They could notice that I've been committing this "abuse" for TEN YEARS and cut me off, yet they don't. They keep on upgrading me instead.
Sure, many of them might be "promoted" for travel (never mind you not providing any citations or statistics for this statement). The vast majority of people probably can't afford the money or vacation time to travel internationally more than once, maybe twice per year (at least in the United States, where most destinations require going overseas).
Nobody is attacking you, no need to take this so personally. The point was that the reason they still give you the rewards that the EU's lower processing fees can't fund is possibly because they're making enough extra from the customers not doing what you're doing to fund it. That's all.
Amex Plat did not charge foreign fee, but exchange rate is 1% less favorable according xe.com
Chase Sapphire Reserve also no fees, exchange rate is 0.3% different from xe.com
Don't get me wrong, there are tons of options for cheap or downright free foreign exchange transactions (such as Revolut, N26, Fortuneo, BoursoBank just in France). It's Amex in particular that are borderline scamming their French customers on foreign transactions.
Even in the US, this is not true. The Blue Cash Preferred and Everyday Preferred cards have foreign transaction fees, as does the Business Green card.
Practically all non-US-issued Amex cards have foreign transaction fees as well. The US card market seems to be very competitive on that front.
Funnily I've gotten notified a couple of times by Amex, as per ECB regulations, that the course they've used is significantly worse than the official one.
FX is expensive in general regardless of the way you do it.