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Well, sure it is. But if Wal-Mart wants to use the card associations' infrastructure, then Wal-Mart has to play by the card associations' rules. The whole point of "CurrentC", as I understand it, is to launch and build out a competing infrastructure which bypasses the card associations entirely, most especially their transaction fee schedules. I can understand why merchants would want to do that; from the association perspective, there is absolutely no reason to do anything other than putting the entire cost of the transaction on the merchant, because asking the customer to pay into the scheme is a disincentive for using plastic at all -- which means that, from the merchant perspective, accepting plastic entails taking a bath on the transaction fees in exchange for not losing all the customers who won't do business at a cash-only till. Which, these days, is most of them, exclusive of special cases like a farmer's market or a flea market, where everybody expects to pay cash -- though, thanks to Square, Stripe, and friends, even that's changing. (This, were you wondering, is the genesis both of the "credit card minimum $10" signs you see at shoestring gas stations, and the rule in the associations' merchant agreements which prohibits merchants from setting such minima. The sign comes about because transaction fees often mean a merchant loses money on very small credit card transactions, and the rule follows because merchants setting such minima costs the associations part of the fee income which they consider their due.) It makes good sense, then, for merchants, especially big merchants like Wal-Mart who pay the associations more than anyone, to band together and try to launch a competitor to the existing scheme. Of course, it would help if they could show signs of being able to mount a serious challenge, and so far such signs are sorely lacking, which might explain some of the bitterness evident in Cook's mien on the subject. Like it or not, though, the card associations are the 800-pound gorilla in the field; counting their predecessor organizations, they've spent over half a century establishing themselves, and to expect them to be anything other than fiercely protective of such investment would be foolish. I'm not sure whether the people making decisions under the "MCX" banner have failed to recognize the scope of what they're trying to do, or whether they've simply failed to execute on a level sufficient to mount a credible challenge -- but, either way, they haven't done anything worth taking seriously, and I doubt they ever will. This leaves them with the same choice they've had for decades now: whether to go on paying a vig to the card associations, or instead to stop taking plastic and lose all the customers such a decision will entail. Sucks, sure, but, as ever, mere pissing and moaning changes nothing. |