I agree with the former, but not the latter. It's fine if stores accept credit cards, as long as they accept cash too. Hell, I wouldn't be against adding the cc fee on top of the price, so cash users don't need to subsidize cc users.
I doubt this is the case; it's easy to see the costs associated with taking a credit card because they are all upfront - e.g. a card may charge 1-5% plus a fixed fee.
However the costs associated with cash happen after the transaction and are extensive:
* Cost of the time spent 'cashing up' - i.e. reconciling the cash in a till with the transactions made,
* Cost of the time spent taking cash to a bank, or the direct cost for a cash collection business,
* Losses due to mistakes in making change,
* Losses due to fake currency,
* Losses due to staff-theft,
* Losses due to robbery,
I can imagine these easily adding up to some small percentage of the costs of accepting cash, comparable to the cost of a CC transaction.
1-5% of every transaction and bigger transactions have a bigger cut taken. With cash a lot of those things you mention are rare events and I'd imagine decent insurance covers or pretty much fixed costs. Credit cards also have problems with customers using stolen CCs, doing fraudulent chargebacks, machines go down etc. It's pretty well known that the high transaction fees needed for CC companies to offer rewards like cashback do impact prices and cash users are effectively subsidizing CC users.
I think it's very dependent on the business. In a couple of minutes research I saw one site which estimated the average CC cost to be 2.08 USD versus 0.30 USD for cash, whilst another site estimated the cost of cash handling to be anything between 4.7-15.3% of the money taken in [https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180130005244/en/New...]
(I think CC costs are also likely lower in Europe - cashback credit cards are less common/rewarding, debit cards are a lot more common)
In the US, maybe. EU Regulation caps interchange fees at 0.2% of the transaction value for consumer debit cards and at 0.3% for consumer credit cards, although most member States have set lower fee caps.
It's always more expensive to handle cash here. Business plans usually estimate the total cash handling cost to be 2.5%, compared to 1% for cars payments.
The world is bigger than the US and the EU. The poster I replied to also mentioned 1-5% transaction fees which kinda suggests they weren't talking about the EU...
