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Picking Winners and Losers Again

Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 10:34 pm
by Teflor Lyorian
Congress just destroyed $8 billion in American business by imposing $0.21 cap on transaction fees for debit cards.

I bet you can't wait until they get into your business and tell you how much you can charge for your services.

Re: Picking Winners and Losers Again

Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 11:16 pm
by Kindi
if someone went around breaking windows all day, we'd have lots of economic activity replacing them. in fact we could give someone the job of breaking windows, and pay minimum wage, creating not just jobs fixing them, but breaking them as well. GDP would rise from both. if we got more efficient at it, we could build them at the factory then dump them into a nearby river, so we wouldn't have to go installing them all over, so long as they still got paid for making them. we could call it window insurance. eventually window-breaking could be a billion dollar industry!

of course all this ignores that the ppl paying for those windows would have spent the money on something else instead, preferably something that actually creates value

anyway i probably didn't do justice to the Broken Window Fallacy. i honestly don't even know if it applies in this case since there wasn't a link to any source and i'm very lazy

Re: Picking Winners and Losers Again

Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 11:37 pm
by Botef
I don't know about destroying 8 billion in business...that is 8 billion more that a business like mine will be bringing in instead of paying outrageous swipe fees.

Re: Picking Winners and Losers Again

Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2011 2:44 am
by Corth
Nobody was holding a gun to your head forcing you to accept those debit cards as payment.

Re: Picking Winners and Losers Again

Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2011 4:37 am
by Teflor Lyorian
But now there is someone holding a gun to your head telling you how much you can charge for each use.

Re: Picking Winners and Losers Again

Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2011 6:41 am
by kiryan
having actual run a business where we paid swipe fees... I'm very sympathetic to the business owners. I still agree with Corth and Teflor, but you can not run a retail operation without agreeing to outrageous contracts. Contracts that say you can't charge for the swipe fee, you can't tell anyone you have to pay a swipe fee etc etc etc... Its so bad that walmart wanted to start its own bank... to get favorable rates on swipe fees.

Re: Picking Winners and Losers Again

Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2011 12:48 pm
by Sarvis
Corth wrote:Nobody was holding a gun to your head forcing you to accept those debit cards as payment.



kiryan wrote:you can not run a retail operation without agreeing to outrageous contracts.


Maybe not a gun, Corth, but if you can't do business without this...

Re: Picking Winners and Losers Again

Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2011 6:26 pm
by Teflor Lyorian
Sarvis wrote:
Corth wrote:Nobody was holding a gun to your head forcing you to accept those debit cards as payment.



kiryan wrote:you can not run a retail operation without agreeing to outrageous contracts.


Maybe not a gun, Corth, but if you can't do business without this...

ATM.

Re: Picking Winners and Losers Again

Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2011 5:38 pm
by kiryan
ghetto babies don't have cash in the bank to use ATMs. yes they can do cash advances off their credit cards, but those come with outrageous fees which reduces how much money they can spend at your store... Its also horribly bad business, people get really angry at you even if its not your ATM. Think of the $8 fees at the ATM in strip clubs... plus what your bank charges you for using the ATM can be as much as another $3-$5.

We paid $7,000 to buy an ATM from the company that was operating it... and we lowered the fee from $5 to $3. We made about $350 a month in fees which is probably around what you need to cover maintenance and the phone service over the long term making it a revenue neutral endeavor. Maybe I should add in the cost of the repairs the 2x someone tried to steal it...

I used to conduct all my transactions in cash, but I'm going through a cash crunch with putting my son through college that I expect to last a couple more years. When I walk into a store or restaurant that is cash only now, I turn around and leave. I know it happens because I do it. I also observed it with folks who came in with discover cards (they have their own network and their prices and terms are significantly higher than visa/mastercard therefore we didn't take discover). I also observed it when the credit card machine was down and our daily take dropped from $3k a day to 1.8k... tons of people left because they wanted to pay with CC. You can't do business like that.

Now I'm not saying that the answer is CC companies having the government set their swipe fees, but the freedom to charge people a swipe fee regardless of the contracts would've been welcome. We eventually started charging a swipe fee anyway but the service provider would've had the right to unilaterally cancel our service.

Re: Picking Winners and Losers Again

Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2011 11:16 pm
by Ragorn
Sounds like an excellent win for the consumer. Glad to see someone's finally willing to stand up to the big business politics of the republican party. I pick UNITED STATES CITIZENS as the winners, and FORTUNE 500 CEOS as the losers.

Re: Picking Winners and Losers Again

Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2011 11:25 pm
by Teflor Lyorian
Ragorn wrote:Sounds like an excellent win for the consumer. Glad to see someone's finally willing to stand up to the big business politics of the republican party. I pick UNITED STATES CITIZENS as the winners, and FORTUNE 500 CEOS as the losers.

Have you checked your retirement fund lately? Guess what? Most Americans have holdings in that industry.