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Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

Amex’s business proposition to sellers is “we charge high fees but a lot of rich people have Amex so you (the seller) should suck it up and accept us anyway”

Sure that works if you’re selling perfume or handbags, but if you’re a family restaurant then rich people and regular people eat the same quantity of food, your margins are low, why accept it?

Moreover Amex is pretty rare outside of certain markets. If only foreigners use Amex, and your business is not catered to foreigners, then you probably aren’t going to support it or in some cases even know what the hell it is.

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Whelp, here in Germany many Starbucks and McDonalds, as well as some restaurants(middle to high end) immediately decline(or block Amex payment at counter), though if I am a bit sneaky and use Apple Pay method they can't see it and sometimes actually work.

The issue with other cards here(Germany) is, everything is fake credit, i.e. my Visa/MasterCard is just "Debit" and immediately books paid amount from my bank and some also comes with hefty monthly fees because they issue a shiny/designer "Debit" card. My bank indeed issues a real MasterCard but the monthly fees are unreasonable added on top of my already expensive checking account fees and it has very crappy app where trying to temporarily (un-)block my card needs calling their support and waiting in line while amex app gives me these features immediately on app.

Amex however gives me real credit(though they book the whole amount on start of next month) and also payback points in exchange for minuscle monthly fees but they have free same card with less sexy design which doesn't signal my ego correctly.

What you describe for your particular Amex card isn't a real credit card either. That's a charge card. Germany doesn't do real credit cards much (if at all?)

It does, he could get one from Hanseatic Bank for free, DKB had a proper credit card for years (now with s fee). They are mostly fee-ridden, since germans don’t like them very much (cultural thing?) and they are offered as an extra.

Beside the culture (losing everything twice in the last 100 years),

I think money transfer plays a big role. Germany never had a culture of cheques and switched from money to money transfers early on (before WW1), so most stuff in Germany either I pay by money transfer ("Ueberweisung") or a company takes the money from my account ("Bankeinzug") - like mortages, cars, rent, electricity, travelling etc. In the US credit cards partially replaced cheques (and added credit, duh!), which was never something in Germany. The only use of cheques in Germany were traveller cheques when travelling - and then only to get money at the hotel.

Even for the catalog business people payed by invoice and money transfer (and the catalog companies gave you credit).

What is left, like groceries, is often paid in cash.

It's a total difference of point of view.

In Europe, banks don't like you taking out credit cards. Borrowing money is viewed as a weakness and it's best to never do it.

In America it's considered a virtue to have many credit cards and shuffle them so you can be seen to pay it off. Really weird.

Credit cards have a crucial benefit over debit cards: they add a layer of indirection to my bank account.

Steal (or mischarge) my credit card, run up 10k in charges, no problem. No money ever comes out of my bank account and I dispute the charges/report the card stolen.

Steal my debit card, run up 10k in charges...there's 10k gone out of my account until the bank resolves the situation.

Here they won't let you dispute charges. There's no purchase insurance included either. Or those cashback awards like you get in the US.

> In Europe, banks don't like you taking out credit cards. Borrowing money is viewed as a weakness and it's best to never do it.

Don't know about that, "Europe" is a big place. Credit cards are pretty common in the UK at least, and stuff like balance transfer cards (for shuffling) are too. Maybe not to American extents, but hardly a weakness.

In fact, looks like more people in Iceland, Norway and Switzerland own credit cards than the US: https://www.statista.com/statistics/675371/ownership-of-cred...

Well the UK is a similar state to the US.

I don't believe this about Switzerland though. They are a very typical people that abhors spending money you don't have. But I think they may be counting debit cards there.

> My bank indeed issues a real MasterCard but the monthly fees are unreasonable added on top of my already expensive checking account fees and it has very crappy app where trying to temporarily (un-)block my card needs calling their support and waiting in line while amex app gives me these features immediately on app.

Get yourself an N26 account/card if it bothers you too much. It works as a Mastercard (still the "Debit" kind though), has no account fees and you can do basically everthing from within their app.

I prefer a debit cards. Makes it easier to track my spending, and no risk of overspending.

Plus, probably lower fees…

One thing that never made sense to me is that im sure 99% of all the rich people who have amex also got at least another card. If you dont take amex wont those people just use another card.

Two things:

1) the backup is likely a high end rewards / corporate card whose fees are as high or higher than Amex for most categories of spend; and

2) it’s kind of weak for the last interaction with a business be them saying they won’t take your preferred form of payment because they imagine it boosts their margin by .3%.

Yeah I have never met someone using an amex card that didn't have a backup visa or mastercard.

Sure, they’ll do that once. It might annoy them so they don’t come back. This might bother some business owners and not others.

> but if you’re a family restaurant then rich people and regular people eat the same quantity of food

rich people can afford adding two half strips of bacon for almost half again the price of the burger. they can also afford to leave a third of it on the table (daaaang that off-label semaglutide does magic) and then do it all over again tomorrow.

doesn’t mean they will. but they could. they have the means to do so.

that is what amex is advertising, even if it isn’t quite what they provide.

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