[tomjakubowski]

There are a number of brick and mortar retailers I frequent who swing the other way and don't accept cash, only credit or debit. Presumably, they prefer paying the cost of credit card fees to the costs of handling cash. What's driving that difference?

[anticorporate]

Margins, maybe? I work for a grocery retailer. A healthy profit margin in my industry is roughly equivalent to the percentage we pay in credit card fees.

Couple that with inertia. We couldn't go cash-only even if we wanted to without pissing off a lot of our customers and losing sales. We only recently decided the cost of check fraud outweighed the push back we knew we'd get if we discontinued accepting personal checks.

We're a community-owned business with a fiercely loyal customer base. When we tell folks what payment method is cheapest for us, many will actually choose to use that payment method just to help us save money.