A Piece of My Mind – The Plant Based Eater

Many years ago, I had a moment of actual wisdom. I was relatively new to my job as a General Surgeon and I had a nurse who was very capable. I admit that I sometimes did not have a ready answer to some of the questions she asked, mostly because I was new to private practice and just didn’t know. But, my answer was usually the same, “do the right thing”. After a week or two of this, she one day asked “so, how do I know what the right thing to do is?”. Huh. Excellent question and one that caught me off gaurd. But, being a surgeon (often wrong, never in doubt) I switfly replied one of the wisest things I’ve ever said:

When you consider the available alternatives, there is usually one option that stands out as being more work than the others. Pick that option; it’s the right thing to do.

I have found, in the many years since, that this is still a remarkably insightful observation. I nievely assumed that most people want to do the right thing most of the time and, for the first 50 years or so of my life it kind of seemed that way. But the last 4 years have shown me the complete error of my thinking. Clearly, there are large swaths of very influential people who have no desire to do the right thing. No desire to do anything that doesn’t enrich themselves or improve their condition. No ability to do anything requiring the actual work of doing the right thing. The lying, cheating, undermining, and evil doings of President Trump and his administration appear to be unending.

The Vanity Fair piece on Jared Kushner not formulating a Federal COVID-19 plan because he (erroneously) thought it would effect “blue” states. I can’t believe that I actually have to say this, but even if a voter (exercising his Constitutionally provided right to vote) did not vote for Trump (and, of course, over half of us did not), he is still required to use his office to protect us. Obviously, it’s the right thing to do.

We have Bill Barr coordinating Federal troops (illegally, I might add) to crack down on protests. Clearly not the right thing to do.

And our new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy hobbling the US Postal Service with less than 90 days until an election that will rely upon mail in votes more than any preceding election due, in large part, to the non-existent Federal guidance to the COVID pandemic. How could this possibly be the right thing to do?

Now all of us have to do the right thing and get this clown out of office so he can be rightfully prosecuted for his crimes against the United States and his genocide. Only if WE do the right thing will we hope to ever get some closure on this dark chapter.

I’m going to imagine that most of you are not intimately familiar with merchant processing and that’s OK. I wasn’t either before I owned a business and after two years of doing business I finally rolled up my sleeves and dug into this. It’s an eye opening topic.

You go out to eat. You most likely don’t pay with cash because 90% of all restaurant transactions are cashless. You use your card (swipe, dip, or tap) or your phone, watch, or other device to pay. You probably added a tip to the transaction and then you were done. A month or so later you get the bill and pay some or all of it. It’s the way things work.

From the restaurant perspective, things are a bit different. If someone pays cash, we are very happy. For that $50 tab we get to keep all $50. But, as noted, 90% of the transactions are not cash. If someone uses their card (shorthand for all of the ways people pay without cash) I, the restaurant owner, have to pay for letting people have the convenience of not carrying cash. When all is said and done, I have to pay about 3% of the bill. So for that $50 tab you rang up, I actually get $48.50. This doesn’t seem like a big deal at first glance, but we’re talking about restaurants here. A really well run restaurant has a 5% profit margin and we figure that on cash sales. So, if your math is a little rusty, 5% of $50 is $2.50 and the company (merchant processor) that processes the credit card transactions just took $1.50 of my $2.50 profit! Is it any wonder that restaurants go out of business?

So, what’s a business owner to do? There are options, of course.

I can just take cash. Certainly attractive, but not feasible
I can try to negotiate a better merchant processor rate (more on this later), but the bottom line is there isn’t much room for improvement
I can pass the cost on to the customer by adding a surcharge for every transaction

So, why is this such a difficult problem? Isn’t the whole world going the way of China, with digital wallets and no cards at all? The Motley Fool (www.fool.com) certainly seems to think so. They have a whole report called “Leave Your Wallet At Home – 4 Stocks for the Digital Payment Revolution”. Copyright prevents me from sharing this article with you (or the stock recommendations they make), but the Motley Fool analysts seem to have missed a couple of critical details about China’s digital wallet system. First, it’s free for the merchants. Yes, in China, if a merchant accepts payment from your digital wallet, there is no fee associated with that transaction; it’s just like cash. Second, it’s a “digital wallet”, not a credit card. There is no credit in the system. If you don’t have enough money in your wallet, you can’t buy whatever it is you’re wanting. They’re really the digital equivalent of a debit card.

Back to the U.S. market. Taking a page from the tax code or health care billing playbook, if you want to make something as opaque as possible the first step is make it needlessly complicated. Let me introduce you to The Interchange Rate. Visa, for example, publishes a 22 page document that lists their current Interchange Rates. But merchants don’t deal with Visa directly, they have to go through intermediaries. As always, the middle man wants his cut. So merchant processors (the middle men) have two general ways to get that cut. The most common is “Interchange Plus” processing. So they figure out what the interchange rate is for a particular card and charge that fee, plus an additional percentage of the total plus an additional “swipe” fee (i.e. the cost to use the card for one transaction). Because this system is so complicated, trying to read a statement is on a par with trying to complete your taxes by yourself or trying to interpret a health care bill; basically if you don’t work in the system, you’re not going to figure it out. So another option that some companies use is “flat rate” or “flat rate +”. They figure out a rate that more or less encompasses all of the interchange fees and adds a bit of profit and present you with this rate. The most well known version of this is Square, which couples the flat rate with free software to make accepting cards easy, if you’re willing to give up 2.8% of each sale.

Like so many things we seem to love here in the United States, credit cards have all kinds of hidden costs. The Brookings Institute, perhaps the most influential “think tank” in the US has a nice December, 2019 report on How Credit Card Companies Reward the Rich and Punish the Rest of Us. The report notes

the Supreme Court upheld the card companies’ right to prohibit merchants from passing along the costs of high-reward cards to customers who chose to use them.

So if a wealthy patron comes to my place and charges a $100 meal for the family with their cash back/high miles credit card, the issuer (Visa or MasterCard) may charge me up to 5% to take that card, which completely nullifies any profit I may have made from that transaction. And I, as the merchant, cannot do anything about it. Even if I recognized that as an expensive card, I cannot adjust my fees to compensate for the extra it costs me to accept it. Thanks Supreme Court; good to know you’re on the side of the oligarchs.

The report also notes that merchants, those accepting cards for payment, bear the burden of the costs of the system.

The economics of modern credit cards are often misunderstood. The bulk of card-issuers’ profit, particularly from the luxury high-end cards, comes not from interest paid by those who carry a balance on their cards, but rather from the so-called swipe fees paid by merchants, which can range from 3% to 5% of everything you buy. American Express, for example, booked in excess of $24 billion in swipe fees in 2018, more than three times as much as their net interest income.

But surely, then, as the foundation of the vast economic engine that is credit, merchants must have some protection, right? Wrong. If you think that, you don’t know about chargebacks. Chargebacks were created as a consumer protection mechanism where a customer, if they received faulty goods, could ask the bank to reverse the charges. More recently, however, they have been the primary mechanism for merchant processors to recoup funds after identity theft. Finally there is the “friendly fraud” where a customer reverses the charges for no good reason other than they don’t want to pay for something they received.

According to consumer claims at the time of filing, nearly half of all chargebacks are supposedly in response to unauthorized transactions. A recent survey, however, found that over 80% of cardholders filed a chargeback simply because they didn’t have time to request a refund from the merchant.

Moreover, although most merchants fight chargebacks, very few win. The estimation is somewhere around 80% loss rate for chargebacks. As if that wasn’t painful enough, there is usually a fee associated with a chargeback.

A recent example: a customer placed an online order from our website for $20 worth of food. The credit card number was typed in by the customer, meaning I paid well over 3% in fees for that transaction. A month later, I got a notification that the customer had chargedback the transaction, meaning the processor took $20 from my account to cover the transaction (note I didn’t get the 3% back) AND a $15 fee for the chargeback. So, I sold $20 worth of food, then gave the $20 back to the customer plus $15 to the merchant processor (fee) and $0.60 for the original processing fee. And I have no real recourse. Why did the customer chargeback? Didn’t like the food, someone stole their card (and ordered one meal???), who knows?

About 8 months ago I realized that the fees I pay for credit card processing for 2019 are going to be about the same as the profit I make at my restaurant. So, in essence, I’ve given up 50% of my profit to give my customers the convenience of not using cash. I embarked on a journey to find better rates. I talked to everyone. Square, other flat rate processors, some flat rate + processors (lower flat rate + a monthly “subscription fee”), and a number of interchange plus processors. I had my favorites, to be sure, and a bit of a bidding war ensued. The bottom line; I saved about 0.2% on my merchant processing. That translates to about a $4,320 savings on my projected restaurant sales of $2,400,000. Good to save every penny, to be sure, but not worth 8 months of work.

I was given the option, by Elavon, one of the top ten merchant processors in the US, to add a 3.5% surcharge to each bill and keep the billed amount. This is what the State of Minnesota does when I went to get my new driver’s license. There’s a sign by the register that says you can pay by card, but they’ll add 3% to your bill. While I like the idea as it adds transparency to the process, it’s pretty clear that people don’t want to know that the system costs to use, they just want to use it. I, like most merchants, fear backlash from my customers.

Clearly the only way to win here is to just accept cash. If I was smart I’d add an ATM right next to the register and charge 3% for withdrawing funds and peck away at my customers the same way that merchant processors are getting me!

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