[chrisseaton]

> Credit cards aren't regular in Europe.

Pretty sure it's just Germany being pig-headed about it for some reason. Everywhere else in Europe is perfectly happy to accept a credit card. I do 99.999% of all my spending on a credit card, like most millennial people or younger, and the only people in the developed world who this is a problem for is the Germans.

[freeflight]

> Pretty sure it's just Germany being pig-headed about it for some reason.

That pig-headed reason being that Germany went trough two different repressive regime during the last century.

Regimes that made plenty of use of large scale surveillance and data collections [0] to find a lot of their victims.

That's why cash still reigns supreme in Germany; It's anonymous and third parties can't just remotely disable it by disabling your bank account.

It's also the reason why Germans value their privacy, at least used to.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Liste

[dabc015f]

> Pretty sure

Why not at least google some statistics before you lose yourself in some pig-headed chauvinistic rant about what in the most charitable interpretation amounts to nothing at all.

[FabHK]

To be fair, I find it absolutely absurd that credit card companies siphon off 3% or so of all retail purchases, and then distribute a part of it back to their "most valuable customers" in the form of miles and cash backs and similar time-consuming nonsense. It is redistribution from the poor, those using cash and those not being able to pay off credit cards in full, to the rich.

The EU has imposed caps on these interchange fees [1], which is one reason Europeans are not inundated by junk mail offering credit cards, and may be a reason that credit cards are not ubiquitous. Having said that, I find that I can pay electronically in most places, including Deutsche Bahn ticket machines (or just buy them in the app).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee#European_Union

[switch007]

Come on that’s not fair. Don’t the Dutch hate credit cards too?

[Freak_NL]

Not hate, just not a system used very much here. Most people with a credit card have one for online purchases (I do), but those are a minority. Even that is no longer really needed with big stores like Steam and Amazon (.de and .nl) accepting the local IDEAL standard for banking transfers.

Paying with a credit card in shops? That's just not done excepting American tourists, same as in a number of European countries. It's contactless debit cards mostly. Building a credit rating by using a credit card is not part of the system.