Which credit card is friendliest to merchants?
Cash is king. PIN-based debit transactions are cheap. In terms of credit cards, a regular (ie. not a gold card) with no rewards has the lowest rates.  Bigger merchants with lots of card volume likely have better deals that make the differences less pronounced. Please don't waste any more time feeling bad for merchants for the charges they incur. I don't know who supported the lobby for this rule, but issuers no longer can demand that merchants accept all transactions (even the unprofitable ones).  I discussed this at length on my blog. Merchants accept credit cards for one reason, and one reason only: it brings them more business.  More people will buy, and on average they'll buy more.  They used to take the occasional hit for someone buying a pack of gum with a credit card, but they don't have to anymore.  The new law restricts issuers from imposing minimum transactions that are less than $10. I use a rewards card wherever possible.  I get a cheaper price.  In most cases I don't care what the merchant has to pay.  They've already factored it into their prices. But if you are concerned, then as fennec points out in his comment, cash is the way to go. Accepting cash isn't free to the merchant's either.  It needs to be counted, reconciled, stored, and taken to the bank each day.  There is a certain amount that needs to be on-hand, not in the bank earning interest. There is more of a worry about employees taking cash from the register.  There is the chance of inadvertently accepting counterfeit currency.   I'm not sure how the cost of cash compares to the cost of accepting credit card, but there is a cost that cannot be ignored. From experience, Mastercard and Visa charge vendors about the same (around 2%-5%) while American Express and Diners Club are astonishingly expensive (6%-10%) and you'll find that few small retailers are very comfortable accepting these. The variation comes from the volume of trade that vendors provide.  A big retailer will negotiate a very low rate while smaller businesses will be hit with higher charges. Back when they started, Discover undercut Visa and Amex fees by about a point. This was also true when I worked for a mail-order computer retailer in the '90s: if a customer asked us which credit cards we took, we were told to list Discover first (and AmEx last) because Discover had the lowest merchant charges. Possibly this is no longer true today, but for quite a while it was a significant selling point of the Discover card to merchants, and a reason why many did sign on. (A reason some stores did not sign on was that Discover was owned by Sears, and many businesses that competed with Sears didn't like the idea of sending any of their profits to the competition.) Today, Discover also owns Diners Club and the fees for those cards are higher. Merchants that accept American Express should have decided that the extra costs are worth the increased business (many business travelers only have an Amex Corporate Card).  To complain about people actually using it after they've explicitly decided to accept it is a sign that they made the wrong decision, or that they are very short-sighted.  No one is forcing them to take a particular card.
"Yes, merchants may charge a fee for using a credit card. For a credit card transaction, interchange fees flow from the merchant to the card issuer. This is why Australians are seeing a boom in ""Debit"" MasterCard/VISA cards - the issuing banks make income when you select ""Credit"".  These costs can be passed from the merchant to the customer as a ""Credit Card Fee"". For an EFTPOS transaction, the interchange flows the other way, from the card issuer to the acquiring bank (The merchant's bank).  As an aside, the setup of these fees is why some large supermarket chains in Australia restrict you from selecting ""Credit"" with a scheme debit card (MasterCard and VISA are 'schemes').  They are 'acquirers' in the payments networks and they make interchange fees when you hit ""Savings"" and pay if you hit ""Credit"" - therefore where you can hit either ""Credit"" or ""Savings"" they prefer (and may force) you to press ""Savings""." Why wouldn't they be? The reader is free after rebate, and sold in Walgreen's/Riteaid, etc. The site shows a fee of 2.75% which is comparable to what merchants are charged for card use. Not sure what other uses you're thinking of, but it's probably a good thing to have for a yard sale.  From an article in Fast Company Magazine: The result was the Square reader, which launched a year ago and which allows just about anyone to set themselves up to take credit card payments. Even you. Planning a garage sale and want to enable people to pay for your gerbil cages and Shawn Cassidy LPs by credit card? No problem. Square's for you. "Abine has a product for iOS and Android (and desktop), now called called Blur, that provides credit card masking (alias credit card numbers), along with other privacy services. It's subscription-based. I've used it successfully for a number of transactions over the past year or so. To the merchant, you supply any name, Abine's address, and the specific masked credit card number and code. You can create any number of masked cards with different credit amounts, and the charges show up on your real card statement as ""Abine, Inc.""." In Canada, there are many stores that take debit (Interac) but don't take Visa or MasterCard. For example, a corner store. In the US the reverse is often true: every tiny place seems to take Visa or MasterCard, but not debit. A Visa debit card looks like a Visa card to the merchant. It therefore has the benefit of being usable at places that only take Visa. (Substitute MasterCard as necessary.) This benefit is very small in Canada, less so elsewhere. Meanwhile the money is actually coming out of your bank account just like a debit card, which therefore has the benefit that you're not borrowing money, can't accidentally overspend, and run no risk of incurring interest charges. It is also a way to get what appears to be a credit card when you can't qualify for credit. If you do the majority of your spending in Canada, you don't need a Visa or MasterCard debit card. Your regular debit card (Interac) will work fine for you. If you have a credit card anyway (from another bank or whatever) then again, you don't need a debit card that can pretend to be a credit card. Unlike MasterCard and Visa who only provide clearing service and tie up Banks to actually issue cards or POS terminals for merchants; Discover card operates more like American Express. It's a totally different network; cards and POS to merchants are directly offered by Discover Bank only. There is no other banks that issue this card. "This isn't so much a legal issue, the prohibition on giving discounts was written into the merchant agreements that most of the major credit card companies enforced on businesses that accepted their credit cards. That is, until the recent Financial Reform Bill (2010) passed Congress. It changes everything. (The logic on this is a little convoluted, so read carefully) Credit card companies can no longer prohibit merchants from requiring a minimum purchase amount to use a credit card. Meaning: That if merchants want to, they can now stop taking credit cards for a $4 latte. Credit card companies can no longer prohibit merchants from giving discounts for cash. Here is an article with a lot more detail: Financial Reform Bill Good News for Credit Card Holders Here is a link to the actual bill details and content: HR 4173 - Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act Here is the relevant part: This subsection is supposed to take affect ""at the end of the 12-month period beginning on the date of the enactment of the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2010."" In other words, July 21st, 2011." "&gt; You mentioned the customer experience randomly in some parts, then threw in Wikileaks in others.  Only random if you don't understand what I'm saying. But I'll just give up instead of repeating again.  &gt; Visa and Mastercard have relationships with banks and/or processors, who have relationships with merchants. […] Cardholders aren't Visa and MC's clients  I still don't understand. Why is the indirect relationship merchant-&gt;processor/bank-&gt;VISA so much stronger than cardholder-&gt;bank-&gt;VISA? Presumably VISA also tell banks not to allow *hardholders* to do illegal stuff with their cards?  &gt;&gt; The WikiLeaks blockade was clearly political. What makes you say otherwise? And this is political.  &gt; So your argument is that anything political is the same as anything else political?  No, it's that the wikileaks thing was clearly political, and trying to say ""that's not relevant because it was a legal matter"" doesn't make sense since everything after ""because"" was wrong.  &gt; As long as their reasons for doing so aren't discriminatory based on status in a protected class, they are (and should be) allowed to refuse service.  I'm not saying they're legally in the wrong." A few reasons make sense: They have a defined process for rentals, risk assessment, and customer credit. Especially for a large corporation, making changes to that process is not trivial, adds risk/uncertainty, and will be costly. Such changes for a relatively small customer base might not makes sense. Many rental companies DO allow you to rent with a debit card. Why do some businesses take cash only?  With a debit card, there is no third party guarantee. With a credit card, the cash is coming from a well-established third party who will pay (assuming no disputes) and has a well-established history of paying. Even if the merchant holds your account, it is still your cash under the control of you and your bank until the deposit clears the merchants bank. It is not surprising they view that as more risk and potentially not worth hassling with debit.