"
His complaints target the so-called interchange fee — a percentage of the sale price paid to credit card companies on every transaction. The percentage is fixed — usually at just under 2 percent — but the dollar amount of the fee rises with the price of the goods or services
"

Now I take credit cards for my business and I don't understand the logic in this statement. Merchant accounts charge two fees. The first fee is a transaction fee. This is a flat fee just for processing the card. The second fee is the discount rate. Usually between 1-4% depending on the deal with your processor and the dollar volume amount of your transactions. You get a better deal if you process $100000 transactions a month vs. someone processing $1000 a month.

My processor charges 24 cents per transaction and somewhere between 1.5% and 1.75% for Visa/MC transactions (Amex/Disc have their own rates) Using those numbers I did some calculations.

The charge amount is the dollar amount of the purchase. The discount is the amount based on the discount fee from Visa/MC. The Trans Fee is the per transaction fee. The total is the total of those two fees. Gallons is number of gallons purchased. I used $5.00 a gallon to make the numbers easier. The cost per Gallon column is the how much that cost the retailer per gallon

Charge Discount Trans Fee Total Gallons Cost per Gallon
$10 $0.18 $0.24 $0.42 2 $0.21
$100 $1.75 $0.24 $1.99 20 $.10

On the 2 gallon purchase the total works out to about 4% of the total sale and the 20 gallon purchase works out to about 2% of the total sale. These percentages are the SAME if gas is $2 a gallon or $5 a gallon.

Since the rates remain the same, regardless of the price of fuel, I dont think the price of gas is hurting the gas stations with credit card fees. What is probably more true is that people are putting less in their tank per trip to gas station. Meaning the stations are not able to allocate that fee over more gallons of gas.

I used numbers for a small retailer. Service stations generally dont remain in business if they do not sell at least 80000 gallons in gas a month. So even A small service station probably gets much better discount rate and smaller transaction fees than a small retailer.

I guess what bothers me about this is that you will soon see people asking congress to intervene on this issue and we will have another case of our government getting involved in something that should be settled by the markets.

I am sure we will have dozens of pictures for you once he settles down.

Marlene had a steak salad and I had a half club with potato soup. We also had fried pickles. Service was quick and the food was fine. It was your typical American Fare. Price in the $8-12 range.

They found the car about a week after Easter. Our insurance company dedcide to total it, so we had to find something else. Marlene was in various rentals cars for almost four weeks. BTW, I cannot saw enough about Priceline for car rentals. It is a great way to get cheap weekly rentals.

Anyway, so we had to wait to really start shopping until Sean came back from Elizabeth City. We were basically looking for something that Marlene liked and could l drive daily to and from work. She really enjoyed the two Hyundai Elantra's she had used as rentals. The 2007/8 models Elantra is a very nice car. Very much like a new Honda Accord in styling and handling. It also comes with more standard features. We also liked the value that the Kia Optima represented. Kia has come a LONG way from their econbox days. The Optima has some very very nice standard features.

We ended up with this Corolla. It did not have half the features of the Kia or Hyundai, but it is a car that we can feel comfortable owning for 10+ years.

We're experiencing some very cold days in Charlotte -- I know I know its not nearly as cold as January in Toronto -- I do not miss those days even when I miss the city itself. At any rate we've had a snow flurry or two and it's below freezing out there, and we actually have had to put on jackets in the afternoon.

This year brings a new frontier for us, looks like we will be in a house in March.
Once the deal has been inked and is for real we'll be sure to post about it in detail. We may need to start a new category or two "Before & After" and umm "Not even close to After yet".

We've already started running conversations about kitchen cabinets, flooring options, kitchen appliances etc etc

I finally started to pack up my Christmas stuff today and am already feeling overwhelmed by the idea of packing everything else....