LAS VEGAS — Amid all the displays of the latest technology in televisions, music systems, gadgets and gizmos at the Consumer Electronics Show here last week, the focus of one of the educational panels turned from circuitry to credit card fees.
Mitch Goldstone, president and chief executive officer, 30 Minutes Photos Etc., Irvine, Calif., who was participating in a CES panel on digital imaging, called on Congress to consider regulating interchange fees. The fees, which average nearly 2% of the total purchase, are assessed by credit card companies and have become increasingly cumbersome to retailers, including supermarket operators.
“What Visa and MasterCard are doing hurts the merchant, the consumer and the country,” Goldstone said he told attendees of the panel, adding that credit card companies “operate through a 1960s fee structure.”
Goldstone is a lead plaintiff in a class-action antitrust lawsuit against Visa and MasterCard.
He said interchange fees in the U.S. are higher than those assessed in other countries — double the rate paid in the United Kingdom and triple that paid in Australia.
“Other countries have recognized that the interchange fee is a hollow, almost punitive, processing fee that doesn't cover any provided service,” he said. “It made sense in the '60s, '70s and maybe even the '80s, when paper transactions and human interactions and approvals were the norm. Today, the same transactions are approved and funds delivered within seconds. Therefore, there is no need or rationale for a fee.”
