Comment by wmchen
5 hours ago
>Wouldn't high fees be competitive? A lot of incentive to compete there. Anticompetitive would be setting the fees too low to compete with.
Canada has a debit card network called Interac. Last I checked, the transaction fee was typically a flat $0.10 CAD (~$0.075 USD). There are shops that do debit or cash only, but it's not the norm (typically restaurants and niches with high chargeback risks). I am curious what keeps credit card acceptance high in Canada, despite a very widespread mature card network. I assume part of it is that consumer debt increases spending volume overall, but that can't be the primary reason I feel.
I think it's a combination of two things. Historically, credit card companies agreements with retailers disallowed them from passing on fees to customers, so effectively anyone paying with cash or debit was subsidizing the fees of credit card customers. Those agreements were made illegal in 2022, but retailers seem to be reluctant to actually start charging credit card users so far.
Then, credit card companies take some of their profits and give them back to customers in the form of reward programs.
So we all end up paying more for nothing, but the incentives make it a difficult collective action problem. I don't know why retailers don't take advantage of their right to pass fees through to customers. That would solve the problem. I guess it would make some stupid people angry. And maybe there is some other pressure the credit card companies are using.