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Comment by devoply | Hacker News Reader

> over the $90 billion they pay in swipe fees every year.

> Kroger's revenue was 122.7 billion USD in 2017

That makes little sense and makes me wonder why Kroger does not issue its own credit card. Credit cards are a rent-seeking racket that eat lots of profit. Everyone knows it but no one knows what to do about it.

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To be clear, the $90 billion is what all companies pay combined. It's the total market. It is not what Kroger themselves are paying. I imagine that Kroger is paying between $2 and $3 billion for credit card processing based off of their revenue.

In the full context of the article it's clear the $90 billion number is referring to retailers in general and not Kroger specifically.

I wonder if Apple and others that can generate "soft" credit cards could make this (essentially 1 card per merchant) work pretty easily and seamlessly for consumers. I don't know what underlying infrastructure they have though, are they still heavily dependent on Visa/Mastercard/Amex networks under the hood to do the dirty work or do they have a parallel system?

Your summoning of Apple is funny because one reason many merchants disabled NFC is because Apple tacked on an additional fee for those purchases.

Apple gets a cut of the intercharge fees that the banks charge (much higher in the US than overseas), but it is not an additional fee to the merchant last I researched.

A lot of the NFC issues were either competing tech, payment networks not being ready, people not understanding their system configuration, _or_ intercharge fees being different for that whole category of fees (not specifically Apple Pay).

When you take things out of context they often don't make sense.

The "they" in the first quote was "retailers." It was not qualified at all, so that should be all retailers around the world combined, from Alibaba to Mom's Bait Shop.

They don't provide any source for that figure, so trust it at your own risk.

The figure sounds reasonable to me.

IIRC, a recent figure for US interchange revenue to originating banks was around $40 billion a year. (Interchange fees are a large component of swipe fees.)

Our local version of Kroger does issue its own card, but it is a Visa card. I don't know how settlement would work in their own stores, but if you were to use the card at other merchants, Visa would be getting their network fee, which can be like 3% of the transaction.

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