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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

Isn't 0.5% very competitive and basically nothing compared to taxes on the transaction?

Here in Poland we have a budding "save cash" movement. And they make some good points about freedom and privacy but are the loudest about the processing fees when mostly it's a way for smaller merchants to avoid paying taxes. Which is fine, I think they should be exempted anyway, but let's not pretend that it's the 0.5% in fees rather than the 30% in taxes.

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The difference is that 0.5% on the whole payment, might in some cases be actually much more than taxes on the profit. Or even worse, if you sell for whatever reason without profit, the tansaction fee is your loss.

Standard VAT in Poland is 23% so taxes usually dwarf fees.

0.5% gross on a 1% margin business (which is most retail) is egregious.

I would like to know where that 1% retail business is located. My family has a bunch of hardware/electricity retail businesses and the margins are way more than that. Like 30%-500%.

Groceries and fuel come to mind.

You mean subsidized wares that is priced for loss to lure masses to cheap shopping, while selling other stuff above the price? Like buying liquors like rum and whiskey in european supermarkets is almost guaranteed to give cca 2x the price of cheapest online sellers in same country. Thats age old tactic, you need to look at overall sums spent or prices across the offer

In Poland fees are capped at 0.3% for credit card, 0.2% for debit per EU. Which is why generally in the EU you don't have the insanity with credit card loyalty programs.

Only the interchange is capped. The merchant has to also cover network and processor fees. And then there are some uncapped transaction supposedly so the fee covers this risk. Comes out to 0.6-0.7% for a smaller merchant with the card present.

One person’s insanity is another person’s interesting puzzle and optimization problem.

You optimize within realm of already paying higher fees, some optimization that is.

Also, some of us have actual lives to live and not obsess over such details, life is way too short and has much more to offer than bean counting accounting.

It’s not hard to optimize so that you get more than the fees’ worth of benefits. The bank is literally hoping that most of its clientele does not optimize so that it has more fees than benefits doled out.

And yes so far I’ve only seen childless people do this optimization. It seems likely that when life gets busier, a person wouldn’t find time to do this optimization.

People want every government service to run at a deficit and maximize the amount of pain inflicted to billionaires. They don't even need them to balance - they're just both good.

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