Zach Carter: belief

Transcript context

…Credit card and debit card fees — what is the incidence of those fees in today’s America, 2020? Who actually pays them in the end final analysis? Not where they’re levied upfront, but the actual incidents? You have an article on this. Some people think consumers pay them. Oh, swipe fees. I think, ultimately, consumers probably pay something. The significance of that article — this is from 2011, the swipe fee fight — the significance of that fight is that it didn’t really matter that much at all. Consumers, I do think, ultimately pay some of those fees in the form of higher prices, but retailers do their best to minimize that and capture those fees for themselves. So, who pays? A little bit of consumer, a little bit of the merchant. They share these. It depends on the fee and the merchant. Let’s say we made it completely impossible for credit card companies to stop merchants from offering cash discounts. There are, indeed right now, many cash discounts. Wouldn’t that solve the whole problem, that if it were easier to use cash, those gains would be internalized through a cash discount? And buyers would decide credit, debit card, or cash, and receive different prices, and things will be fine. Correct or not?…

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