On October 12, 2009
Will Merchants and Consumers get Relief From Soaring Credit Card Fees?
Kathy and Warren Miller run a mom-and-pop grocery store in tiny Elmore, Vt. (pictured at left), and soaring credit card fees are strangling it. In congressional testimony on Thursday, she said they make only two cents whenever a customer pays for a 99 cent bag of potato chips with a credit card. On a 35 cent pack of gum, they lose money. The culprit? So-called interchange, or swipe, fees, which banks and Visa and MasterCard charge to merchants to handle credit and debit card transactions. These rates have tripled in the last decade, with American consumers last year paying the card association giants a total of roughly $48 billion in swipe fees. Visa and MasterCard set the fees on behalf…
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