Word: creditability
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...that changed when the stock market collapsed, housing prices plummeted, and credit markets seized up. Not surprisingly, many recent converts to luxury shopping quickly reversed course and went downscale. But what caught retailers off guard was that long-time luxury shoppers grew more frugal, too. The widely publicized bailout of Bear Stearns, the takeout of cash-strapped Merrill Lynch, the government rescue of American International Group, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the meltdown in the credit markets - all served to rattle the upscale crowd, as many work in the financial industry. Fashionable free-spenders morphed into penny savers...
Americans are being forced to pay significantly higher swipe fees whenever they use their credit cards than any of their peers in the industrialized world, according to a report by the Merchants Payments Coalition...
...report, released Thursday by a coalition of retailers, supermarkets, drugstores and other businesses, found that Americans currently pay about $2 in "interchange" fees for every $100 they spend using credit cards. The fee is actually paid by retailers, though consumers feel it in a higher retail price. This rate is twice that charged in the U.K. and New Zealand, four times the rate levied in Australia and more than six times the cross-border rate charged in the European Union, the study says. (Read a brief history of credit cards...
...paid the same low credit- and debit-card swipe fees as consumers in Australia pay, then the net benefit for American consumers would have totaled $125 billion over the last four years," the report says...
Banks began charging interchange fees in the 1960s to cover the cost of processing credit-card transactions. "But even as technology has dropped that cost dramatically, banks and credit-card companies have pushed swipe fees higher and higher, turning it into a cash cow," the report notes. "For many businesses, swipe fees are now their single highest non-labor operating cost...