US retailer Kroger considers extended Visa credit card ban

It'd be great to see other retailers follow the lead set by Kroger and work re-align unacceptably high Visa  & Mastercard fees. Competition between the two main card schemes is almost non existent and only results in even higher card charges to merchants as each competes to offer higher interchange fees to their card issuing banking partners. 

For a long, long time, retailers have complained to the regulators and courts about high card processing fees but have continued to accept cards shamelessly; and, when card networks repealed the NO SURCHARGE rule, many of them brazenly started charging as high as 7.5% surcharge to customers despite incurring less than 3% interchange fees. This is the first time I'm seeing a retailer actually refusing to accept a card. Kudos to KROGER for adopting the right strategy for driving change in a capitalism. Let's see how its gambit plays out...

Of course, following the interchange fee regulation, surcharging has now  been banned for all consumer cards in Europe and only allowed for Commercial cards - and even then charges must not exceed their costs. Despite the IFR, certain member states have banned surcharging altogether, even for commercial cards, so while your comments may be true in the US, it's certainly no longer true for Europe.

Even when surcharging was permitted in Europe, no merchant that I'm aware of surcharged for debit cards only credit cards. Those that did surcharge were in a very market dominant position where the consumer had little option other than to pay. Most High Street merchants never surcharged for fear of losing the customer to a competitor that didn't surcharge. 

That all said, I agree that some merchants (particularly the airline sectors) did charge way in excess of their costs which is down to pure greed and a total disregard for the customer.