this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025

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There Are Two Kinds of Credit Cards (www.theatlantic.com)

submitted 18 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

Swipe fees to the Merchant being based on the class of credit card from the same issuer always seemed like a scam to me. Like one person comes in, taps a Broke Boi Visa and the merchant pays 2%, then the next person taps their Sugar Daddy Visa Infinite and the merchant pays 4%... it makes no sense if the merchant cannot selectively accept or reject certain Visa cards, it should be one value.

That said, cash doesn't cost "nothing". Some businesses are cashless to avoid having to deal with cash which is a legitimate savings despite the card fees.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago

This is why merchants use the highest fee and bake that into their margin on profit. Everyone’s prices go higher thanks to the merchant fees.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

With cash you have to use labor to count and sort it. You also have to setup with a cash pickup service to securely transfer your cash to the bank. Otherwise you're risking robbery. Which (needless to say) is the most expensive and traumatizing of all the options

So yeah. I don't blame shops for going cashless

[–] [email protected] 9 points 14 hours ago

I see it as your typical big investor bait and switch. Start off with promise, and then once you have society hooked and it's necessary for businesses normal everyday functions, they remove the value by increasing cc fees. It's already happening.

Maybe one day we'll get credit cards with screens for ads. Watch an ad to swipe your card today 🙂

[–] [email protected] 8 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

There are conspiracy theories about the federal reserve issuing their own digital currency, but having a neutral payment system would be extremely useful. Also, payment processors should pass these credit card fees onto the customer and show it on the receipt to drive up demand for lower fee cards, otherwise we're all just subsidizing high fee cards.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Conspiracy theory? They've posted proposals for it on their website. They want to exclusively use for inter-Bank transactions, although you could read it to imply they want to replace fractional reserve banking with it, possibly even globally

It's deeply concerning, because they don't need this at all for banking as it exists now, and if the global banks use the same system they'd have an insane amount of control over the global economy - they could use this system to more directly control the exchange rate of currencies, which they already use to force austerity and outside investment on resources

The conspiracy really kicks in when you start to question if they're trying to crash the USD and a global recession to do something like this... And for the last few years they've been giving very weird answers to questions like that

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

It's certainly a cause for concern, I'm just labeling it as a conspiracy theory because how the system would work in practice is still in the air and there's been theorizing on what they could do, but what they could do is not necessarily what they will do. You're right though, the potential amount of control they could exercise over the monetary system with this setup is terrifying. For example, I've heard of the idea floating around of having money that sits in an account for a certain amount of time expiring to force increased spending. Inflation is supposed to encourage the same behavior, but this is much more blatant and leaves no room for speculation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

I'd only argue that conspiracy is the wrong word... It's more like speculation

But yeah... I'm sitting in horror right along with you

[–] [email protected] 5 points 14 hours ago

I can't imagine the fucked up shit that would happen if the central bankers ever got their hands on a centralized digital currency. No conspiracy or illuminati shit, just out of general enshitification it would end badly for the workers.