| I've posted here about credit card fees before, and I'd just like to briefly point you to an article in the Nashville Tennessean, where this fight is coming to a mini-head, as their Senate Commerce Committee is holding a hearing on a bill to deal with interchange fees. I don't know if one is coming up in Connecticut, but it would be a good idea!
Anyway, the news article offers some idea about the squeeze it's putting on small businesses.
Milton Milam estimates his Franklin retail store, Schakolad Chocolate Factory, sold $10,000 worth of Easter bunnies and other chocolates this past weekend to customers using credit cards.
Of that money, he expects to pay about $500 in fees for being able to accept plastic. That's 5 percent of Schakolad's weekend credit-card sales, more than double the percentage Milam remembers paying on the same volume of sales four years ago.
The increase in credit-card processing costs, including what are called interchange fees, has merchants such as Milam crying foul. Many want Congress to step in and give them some relief.
As I noted here a few weeks back, Sen. Dodd is one of a few senators to step up and voice their objections to the rotten current state of things. Here are some details from the article:
Processing fees paid by merchants to accept debit and credit cards, meanwhile, have been going up nationwide this decade, according to The Nilson Report, an industry newsletter. Last year, merchants paid $56.5 billion - more than double what they paid five years earlier.
On average, merchants last year paid 1.88 percent of each purchase to process the transactions, up from the 1.52 percent in 2002.
This issue is developing, and maybe not as fast as I'd like, but it's certainly not going away anytime soon. If you yourself have had a merchant credit card account and have a story to tell about dealing with the interchange fee, be sure to let the folks at Unfair Credit Card Fees know about it. |
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