[em500]

> The most annoying thing to me was how certain neighborhoods flat out do not accept Visa / Mastercard. Basically every other developed nation accepts Visa, I was annoyed and decided to not go back to areas where they literally couldn't take my money.

This is mostly legacy from earlier decades, when VISA/MasterCard would charge around 1 to 3% of the transaction value (and AMEX even higher), whereas debit card fees (processed on the Maestro network, owned by MasterCard) was around a flat €0.10 or so. Since pretty all domestic clients had a bank issued Maestro debit card, where was very little incentive to accept Visa/MasterCard, except for specific merchants (hotels, larger restaurants, car rentals). For most of the country debit cards still work fine, but in tourist-heavy Amsterdam (probably the least Dutch city in the Netherlands) this creates a lot of friction.

Nowadays Visa/MasterCard fees in the EU are capped (I believe at around 0.3% plus some minimum) so the fees are somewhat less outrageous, and acceptance is a lot higher. But on average credit card fees are still significantly higher than debit card fees, there are still many holdouts.

[Doxin]

There's also the thing where basically no one here uses credit cards at all, let alone use them at shops. Accepting them requires a bunch of infrastructure for a quite small group of people.