I'm with the RBA on this one. The price on the sticker should be what I pay no matter the format I pay in. It's one of the great things about aus.
Cash still has significant overhead and businesses manage to account for that. Digital should be no different.
Then it should be cheaper for cash payment.
Oh for sure. Cash is expensive to count, store and move. Never understood how an armour guard car with 2 people emptying ticket machines made much sense, even back in the day.
However, the infrastructure to run electronics payments is not trivial. The combination of volume, security and reliability needed adds up in hardware and software. I doubt it will ever be free to transfer money in any form.
Least with debit (not CC) you don't pay fees to credit card companies.
Crypto networks are doing it for microcents, for massive volumes and amounts, see Robinhood on Ethereum in Europe.
The percentage that gets passed onto users is thanks to MasterCard and visa...
I have seen plenty of places here charging a percentage rate for debit card use, as recently as last week. Not saying they should but it happens.
Who ends up benefiting from all the cash skimming I'm not sure, but chances are they are already filthy rich.
Several neo-banks provide. free, instant SEPA transfers. Sure, it's not debit, but it's a form of free money transfer. Also monthly charge.
Yes, one might argue that you are the product then. But I really don't see what they might be getting from these clients. Must be something I'm not aware of. No ads, no upsell (apart from occasional offer to paid plan), ...
I don't like this because it doesn't incentivise low cost cards. If you don't then regulate the fees cards can charge, and how payment providers are allowed to pass on those costs to the retailer, it'll become a race to the bottom on rewards cards, and how much they then turn around to charge the retailer.
We'll all bear the cost then.
And frankly, I don't want to pay for others frequent flyer miles.
I'd go one step further and just outright ban rewards cards. That shit is just perverse incentives all the way down.
“Who the hell does the RBA think will bear the cost of this ridiculous decision? First, merchants, and then customers,” Lambert said.
So why don't you fight for the banks to stop charging merchants those fees, since they have many orders of magnitude more money than you, and you have magnitudes more than the customer? I grabbed breakfast from the cafe in my apartment building the other day, they charged $9 for a plain croissant, plus the card surcharge. We're getting fucking robbed here and all you can do is pretend to care that the bank will force you to charge us more.
I don't think the problem is banks charging fees. In fact, I don't really have an issue with the banks taking 1% of the sale. The issue is that merchants don't realise that counting cash and taking it to the bank etc actually costs more than 1% anyway. Electronic payments are actually cheaper than all that, they already give you a total and handle the bank end.
I can think of a couple of places in Perth who have gone totally cashless. They only accept Eftpos/credit cards.
I'm only for this if card providers can't charge the retailer stupid rates because some people want to use rewards cards, and this would mean all customers, cash or card, would have to cover this cost. Which is a subsidy for the people who can be approved for rewards cards.
I'm actually in favour of the opposite approach. I want it to be mandatory to pay the card fee (but not the payment provider fee). The retailer should be required to pass on the card fee.
This would stop things like Square charging a flat rate for every single type of card, despite EFTPOS being vastly cheaper in most cases.
So, the merchant passes on the cost of their payment provider fee equally to everyone (included in the price), and depending what type of card you use determines how much you pay in transaction fees.
This would incentivise card fees to be low, making EFTPOS much more attractive. And incentivise payment providers to be competitive in their fees (and ban them from charging the same rate for all cards)
I am not in favour of getting rid of card fees unless we bring in a government controlled payment platform that is run at cost, and all these other cards still have to pay fees.
Getting rid of transaction fees entirely just wraps them all into the cost, and means there is no incentive for consumers and retailers to prefer low cost options. It actually creates a perverse incentive for consumers to choose the cards with rewards points, which is terrible for everyone accept the card provider (and to a lesser extent the user of those cards)
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