Hacker News Reader

I don't have enough experience to speak about CC in Germany, but I don't see why a Rewe or ... boh, Aldi, Mcdonalds, etc should prevent that. I am a bit surprised, to be honest.

View on HN

Because there's a significant a transaction fee if you're paying by credit card, with cash or debit card there's no transaction fee.

The bigger mystery is why stores in some other countries are happy to have a payment method chosen by the customer eat into their profit.

Big chains and enterprises, for sure. But there’s still a lot of SMBs not accepting credit cards.

Are these the same SMBs that ... accept only cash? :) Or do they really exclude CCs?

They exclude CCs. They have a card reader but they either have a sign saying, or the vendor will simply say, “keine Kreditkarte”.

If you use contactless payments, this is a non-issue, they can't detect it. Although they wish they could.

So a lot will have in their contract with their processor that they actually can accept Visa/Mastercard, so the sign is there to put you off.

But actually a lot don't, and when you try to pay, even contactless, with a non-Girocard, it won't work.

Visa and Mastercard don't magically let you on their network because you have a card machine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com