While talking to my brother today about my American Express card, I ran across something in their frequently asked questions that I’ve been trying to find:
What if a merchant does not accept my American Express Card?
To report incidences where merchants do not accept your American Express Card, please click here. American Express Customer Service will then follow up with the merchant to ensure that American Express Cards will be accepted in the future.
While I like the idea of encouraging merchants to accept AmEx, I’m really curious how they “ensure” it. My guess is they send around a couple of hired goons to make sure the merchant agreement gets signed, but I could be wrong.
What I really like, though, is that one of the options is “Merchant insisted on a minimum/maximum purchase amount”. It’s been a while since I’ve run into this, but I find it to be terribly obnoxious when I do (and it’s against every merchant agreement out there). My old method for dealing with those business was to buy enough to satisfy the minimum and then return whatever it was I didn’t want. That way, I only spent as much as I’d originally intended, and their stupid policy ended up costing them extra. Yes, I’m that spiteful.
You are oh so mean. Very sly, but still oh so mean.
I pay cash at small, family-owned businesses, and I encourage everybody I know to do the same. It’s a huge pain in the ass, given that I carry cash infrequently, but I try and make a habit of it. Call it my "soft spot" growing up in a family that owned small businesses, and owning a small business (albeit not one that accepts credit cards) myself.
If you’ve never gotten a chance to review the fee schedules associated with accepting credit cards, as a merchant, you really should try and get your hands on one. The fees I’m seeing in my father’s small business for Visa and Mastercard processing approach 2.5% of the gross sale amount with a flat "swiping fee" (50 cents, if I remember correctly) on top of that percentage. Fees vary depending on the sale amount, whether the sale was "pay at the pump" versus handled by a cashier, and what type of card the Customer uses. The whole thing is designed to be as convoluted and incomprehensible as possible such that you, as the merchant, end up entering into a multi-year contract with no way to predict the effective percentage rate of the fees until after you’ve been in awhile.
The credit card system isn’t "evil" or anything, and I don’t want to do anything loopy like having a government oversight panel set fees, but I do wish that individuals would be more aware of how the system worked. Paying with cash at the local indepedent neighborhood fair trade imported organic vegan fruit smoothie bar and quality hemp-based clothing retailer ought to be as trendy as shopping there in the first place. (*sigh* Did I just type that?)
It amazes me that, given how much higher us credit card interchange fees are than the rest of the world, more credit card associations haven’t popped up to try and undercut the big ones. I know, I know– the "network effect" is in play (why own a fax machine if you’re the only person who has one, etc.). I dunno– I can’t say I’ve ever researched trying to start a credit card association. *smile* I would think that captialism, with the help of technology, would sort this mess out, eventually. (Shouldn’t technology eventually wipe out the need for these parasite middle-men to anyway? *sigh*)
I’ll continue trying to milk the system for everything I can (paying 100% of balances on time, favoring "reward" cards, taking advantage of float, in general, etc), but the soft spot in my heart for family-owned businesses makes me loathe to use a credit card when I know I’m taking a bite out of a deserved and oft too low profit margin.