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this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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When I buy from a small business that I want to support, I will use cash. When I'm buying anything from a large company, I will always use the fanciest credit cards in my wallet.
In the United States, credit card processing fees are more expensive for fancy rewards credit cards and obviously there's no fee for cash.
That's why nobody takes Discover or Amex. Their fees are higher than Visa and Mastercard.
amex is taken in 9 out of 10 places when I use it. it's usually small places that don't take it
I literally cannot think of any places that don't take Discover.
Hmm go figure your mom gives me a hard time about it every time.
It's the most-commonly rejected card. It has high fees without the clout of Amex. Amex customers are typically pretty wealthy and places will accept them because of their high-roller status. But Discover doesn't have that going for them, so there's less reason to accept the card.
Where you'll find it rejected most often is small shops and government agencies.
For instance, my career has been in government, and no organization I've worked for has ever accepted Discover. We aren't allowed to "profit" from our fees, so we have to include credit card processing in the adopted fee schedule. But since we can't profit, we have to set the fee at whatever Visa and Mastercard charge. That extra 1 or 2 percent Discover charges can be millions for a large government (large city, statewide agency, etc). So, agencies simply don't take Discover (and frequently AmEx, though they'll sometimes negotiate).
Large retailers are able to negotiate better deals with Amex and Discover, but for smaller shops it just isn't gonna happen. And that 1-2% (of the total charge) extra taken by the card processor is huge when your margins are small.
Heck - even the Visa and Mastercard fees are a huge deal. When I worked in retail management, those fees were secretly the big reason we pushed our store-brand credit cards. It wasn't the 80 dollar commission for the account the store got - it was that if someone used our card in our store, we didn't pay the processing fee.
We'd give 2% in points back for using the card in the store, which was a great deal for us since we didn't have to pay the 3-4% fee to the processor.
It is definitely not true that Discover interchange rates are significantly higher than Visa or Mastercard.
I've put below a list of the actual interchange rates for various personal Visa, Mastercard, and Discover cards types.
Debit:
Base credit tiers:
Rewards cards:
Premium cards:
You can plainly see that Discover tends to be more expensive than Visa but is cheaper than Mastercard. The only reason I could see that someone might refuse Discover is because Discover cards are all rewards credit cards that go into the higher tiers, whereas many Visa and Mastercard cards are debit cards which go into the lowest tier.
What is a regulated debit card?
A card which is subject to central bank regulations regarding the interchange fees which they are allowed to charge. According to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform & Consumer Protection Act 2011, the Federal Reserve has the power to limit debit card interchange fees for debit cards issued by large banks with over $10 billion in assets. A "regulated debit card" issued by a bank subject to the regulation is therefore tariffed at the maximum rate allowed by the regulation, which is 0.05% plus 22 cents.
Thanks, curious about this too.
The small retailer I worked for didn't take Discover. We took Amex though, because it was high-end and wealthy people love their Amex.
Editing to clarify, had to dash off before: wealthy people love their extra-thick Amex Black Card made of titanium or whatever, that we used to have to type in by hand because it would damage the old slide readers. So as long as we were taking those we took regular Amex cards too.
over here, the extra cost that comes from handling cash is large enough that small businesses don't want to take it. counting till every day adds up.
Surprisingly not in the US. If you make 100 sales a day of $20 each, then over a six-day week, you'd pay roughly $360 in credit card transaction fees (assuming 2.5% + 10¢ per transaction which is average). If you instead spent half an hour a day counting cash in the till and then half an hour at the end of the week to go to the bank, that's about $98 in labour cost (assuming a labour cost of $28 per hour, which is roughly $25 per hour in wages and $3 per hour in tax), so the savings are $262 per week, which is not insignificant.
Banks also charge for cash services, many business accounts may just include it in the price, but someone has to physically count, collate and move around the cash, often with security. There are costs for running a computer system, and costs for using cash that businesses have always paid. Some small businesses definitely do not understand that, but cashless can be cheaper and safer depending on your country and quality of banking services.
yeah that 10¢ is 10x our transaction cost.
I used to do that, but here (Australia) passing on surcharges has sadly been normalised, and during covid heaps of businesses went cashless.
The salt in the wound is that there's not really any reason for businesses to push payment gateways for a better deal. They don't give a shit any more as they just pass it into the customer.
Some American states (not mine) have banned surcharging for credit cards in response to consumer backlash. But what's not banned is marking up everything by 3% and then offering a 3% cash discount.