Based on this and many other comments I've seen of yours in the forums, you really seem to like the idea of additional government regulation and intervention in the marketplace to try and "fix" things. Government intervention is really what got us into this situation. There was a time when merchant agreements between the credit card processors and merchants prevented merchants from surcharging. That went away many years ago. There are a few states that don't allow surcharging by law, but those are very limited.
I'll avoid becoming political as that isn't what this forum is for. I'm just saying that processing costs are a cost of doing business. Trying to drip pricing stuff is anti-consumer and is pissing almost everyone off. Clearly the market isn't going this way or we wouldn't have constant posts about these fees. And worse, allowing it here is seemingly emboldening places to add more junk fees like the "food prep fee 20%" at one of the restaurant threads. My recycling company has a fuel surcharge fee. WTF? This idea should be stopped - we went till ~2010 without most junk fees and companies didn't go out of business. This is as bad as the old telephone companies and our insane medical system - "We don't know how much it'll cost till we bill you". How is this acceptable between customers and merchants? Worse, they imply right up till you are pretty on the hook to pay that there aren't these fees. (i.e. you already got the meal and ate it)
While there are costs for merchants in processing paper based transactions, those costs likely don't rise to the same costs as processing credit card transactions. Especially when you will have the employee working anyway. Sure you can divert their efforts elsewhere, but that isn't always practical. Processing hundreds of thousands of dollars in checks and cash doesn't necessarily rise to 3%-4% of the value of those checks or the cash.
My main point is - it rises to some percentage. But I'm pretty sure legally they cannot surcharge cash purchases. I'm mostly suggesting the government offer a digital cash alternative - I'll bet they could stop minting pennies and spend that to provide it for free like they provide cash for free (well, at face value, no extra printing or minting or transporting fees). When I get a check from someone, I don't know if it'll clear, I get lots of fees and can lose my account if I get sent bad checks. You won't know at point of sale if the check is good, but you do with a debit / credit card (excluding fraud). Also, as a consumer, checks are very insecure against ACH from what I can tell - there's no free change the numbers if it gets stolen, there's potentially no get your money back protection, etc.
And I'm suggesting that you won't need to have the employee at all if you have less paper checks or cash coming in and more digital. Look, IMO the large companies are just using this as yet another way to sneakily raise prices, the small companies both are taking more of a hit (less likely to have automated ACH processing, etc) and are more likely to just be wrong about the comparable costs to them.
Then there is also the issue that going to 100% digital payments disproportionately impacts the poor and certain demographics in the population. It is estimated that over 4% or almost 5 million households are "unbanked". Meaning they either don't have a bank account by choice or can't get one due to past issues. By forcing them to digital transactions, it can put them into situations where they may be taken advantage of with higher fees to use services that will accept them (such as payday check cashing, prepaid debit cards, etc).
Yes, but why should 96% of the population have higher fees because merchants can't make it part of their cost of doing business? Again, I'm not as against merchants just taking cash or checks. I can choose easily to avoid those businesses or not, and everyone is happy (I guess). I am against the go to check out and oh - here's 4% extra charge. My bigger gripe is one of the things posted above where even paying by ACH has a fee or paying ONLINE has a fee. Online payments should be the cheapest form of payment IMO - you don't need employees to do them. Or is all the griping about labor costs more fake justification to just add fees and book more profits?
The best thing to do is for the government to get out of the way and allow for businesses and customers to complete transactions in whichever way they all agree to.
I'm just asking for all the information up front in the advertisement from the business as to cost so I'm not having ever more of my life like buying an airline ticket. And the way to get that feels like it has to be political.
I won't go into the reasons why they don't do anything you suggest because of climate change, as that would derail the thread even more.
Yes, like my other rants on things, they're happy to spend a lot of money selling new stuff like EVs and Solar which has a lot of new production payoff associated with it instead of reducing use via things we
already have and have shown to work for years to decades. Though my main bitch is "get off my lawn" as to why I have to spend more time now physically going to pay bills via cash or a check like it's 1970 in 2024 than I did from 1999-2015 or so(to avoid junk fees). I really should not need to do math as to whether my time, gas, mileage on my car and how it compares to the extra fees.
