“Your Purchase Must be Five Dollars”
“Due to the recent debit card fees, all purchases must be equal to or greater than five dollars. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Thank you.”
Those were the words spoken to me today when I made my daily pit stop at the 7/11 on the corner between my home and the office for my Arizona Iced Tea and Fig Newtons. When I advised the cashier I was making a ‘cash back’ decision for $10, she advised that the purchase must be $5 prior to any cash back requests. This really opened my eyes regarding the new debit card processing fees for merchants.
Just last week, Bank of America announced that there would be a monthly flat fee for using a debit card outside of an ATM (which news prompted me to open an account at the local credit union) and has BOA customers in an uproar. Now we have merchants who cannot break even from the fees that are charged to them each time a customer swipes their debit card. That’s crazy! Just ten years ago, my bank in little old Staples, Minnesota wanted me to get a debit card because it was an ‘easier’ form of conducting transactions. I do not think I’ve carried cash since 2007 and now it looks like I’ll start doing so again.
A debit/credit card is a convenience but how much of that convenience is wasted dollars for merchants, banks, and customers alike? Cash and checks may be inconvenient and time consuming but I’d rather use them than knowing my form of payment is costing billions of dollars to merchants every year.
Another morsel for your thoughts…. Could the rise of debit and credit card payments be a factor to the U.S. Postal Service downfall? We may never truly know….
Those were the words spoken to me today when I made my daily pit stop at the 7/11 on the corner between my home and the office for my Arizona Iced Tea and Fig Newtons. When I advised the cashier I was making a ‘cash back’ decision for $10, she advised that the purchase must be $5 prior to any cash back requests. This really opened my eyes regarding the new debit card processing fees for merchants.
Just last week, Bank of America announced that there would be a monthly flat fee for using a debit card outside of an ATM (which news prompted me to open an account at the local credit union) and has BOA customers in an uproar. Now we have merchants who cannot break even from the fees that are charged to them each time a customer swipes their debit card. That’s crazy! Just ten years ago, my bank in little old Staples, Minnesota wanted me to get a debit card because it was an ‘easier’ form of conducting transactions. I do not think I’ve carried cash since 2007 and now it looks like I’ll start doing so again.
A debit/credit card is a convenience but how much of that convenience is wasted dollars for merchants, banks, and customers alike? Cash and checks may be inconvenient and time consuming but I’d rather use them than knowing my form of payment is costing billions of dollars to merchants every year.
Another morsel for your thoughts…. Could the rise of debit and credit card payments be a factor to the U.S. Postal Service downfall? We may never truly know….