David Lazarus writes for the Los Angeles Times. His column today deals with who should pay retail credit card fees.
Whenever you buy something from a retailer with a credit card, they pay an additional fee for processing, apparently about 1%. However, on a $300 dollar purchase that $3 and after a while it adds up. Congress has before it a new bill which will place supervision over these fees. The retailers want to be able to charge extra to consumers for using credit cards. The banks want things to stay the way they are. But what the banks are really frightened of is revealing how much it actually cost them to process these transactions.
These fees may have made sense in the early days of slow computers and inexperience, but your current computer be it a laptop or desktop could run thousands of transactions by itself. Does it cost a dollar to process a one hundred dollar credit card transaction? I don’t think so.
Lazarus has an elegant solution. Find out what the transactions cost and lower them to a more reasonable level. Banks are entitled to profit from their activities but without consumer and retailer knowledge of what actually takes place here, we have less of a service than a magical transference of your money by a priest of finance. That is not fair.

James Pilant