Because, between all of these expenses, it is the one the customer controls. The customer chooses what card to use, but the merchant pays the associated cost.
To me, surcharges should not be allowed. The sticker price the customer sees when they decide to buy ought to be the price. This makes comparisons much easier, and enables more competitive pricing.
of course not. That's absurd.
I want a single price, regardless of my choice of method of payment. The cost should be built-in to the price. If the cost of providing one type of payment method is too high, i want the business to take out out to make their price more competitive (balanced with the amount of people unwilling to shop there without said payment method).
Merchants and payment providers compete to provide payment methods at as competitive rates as possible, because they needs to compete with cash handling (which isn't hard at all), and the consumer doesn't think about "cost of payment method" - they merely need to think about the cost of the item displayed.
This doesn’t make any sense. So the price should include potential transaction fees for the most expensive method of payment? Or you want the cheap payment method to overpay and subsidize the expensive payment method?
There’s also usually a flat fee plus a percentage, how do you bake that into the advertised price when the flat fee may be spread across multiple items? Should every item increase in cost by $0.30 or whatever?
This is just stupid. Advertise the cash price. You can go to an atm if you don’t want pay the fees associated with your preferred payment method.