I have been meaning to post this, seeing as many of you "think" we are going to a cashless society. http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2011/10/consumers_starting_to_shy_away.html Time to bring back them $500 and $1,000 bills and make $200 bills. :devil:
Most of the local coin shops around here charge 3% extra for credit card transactions, and if you have not been dealing with them for very long, they will hold a check until it clears. They do that because they work on some pretty tight margins, and they have been burned in the past.
I'm all in favor of transparency. Let merchants and customers use credit and debit cards, but put the fees in their faces. I don't see any reason for a merchant to eat a 2% fee on a credit-card transaction, except that the credit-card companies have the monopoly and trust/conspiracy muscle to force them. As long as it saves me nothing to use cash, I'll use credit cards for their security and convenience. (One credit card takes up less room in my wallet/pocket than almost any amount of cash, it can easily be replaced without cost to me if it's lost or stolen, and I don't need to drive to and/or pay fees at an ATM to replace money I spend.) If merchants are allowed to pass CC fees along to me, I'll choose to use cash more frequently, but I'll still sometimes use the card for convenience. But I'll also expect the CC providers to compete on rates, once consumers can see which ones are cheaper, and I think that'll drop fees considerably from their current levels. Technology has gotten a lot better and cheaper, without a corresponding drop in CC overhead rates.
Well, there's a new word for me, "a methodologist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston" — One who studies methods.
Did you guys know that Paul Warburb the main creators of the unconstitutional private federal reserve system only wanted to create eight fed banks? But it was already written into the fed bill to have twelve banks. He put up a little fit because he knew the twelve banks were just a ruse and all he needed was the New York Fed Bank to gain the nations money and credit.
