As consumers, we just accept it, don’t we? ‘£10 Minimum Card Spend’. But why? Well, because the retailer gets charged by the card issuer – about 40p per transaction for a small shop to be more precise. But why? That’s four percent of your tenner! What costs does that cover? Why do they change so much?
The answer, of course, is ‘because they can’. Visa and Mastercard have a 96% market share between them. They don’t even need to conspire together: as long as both of them play it safe and don’t cut their fees, they can go on making obscene profits and the consumers and retailers will just keep on paying.