Eftpos plummets in popularity as newer forms of payment emerge

I hate that we're heading towards a world where Visa, Mastercard, Google and Apple basically control all our money and payment systems. And everyone is enthusiastically embracing it!
- You have to have some system where every vendor from the taxi driver in wellington to the chinese supermarket in auckland to the stand selling noodles in singapore can take your money and give you what you want. You think this can be done with a mom and pop operation? You think it can be done without a centralised system?
  People talk about how crypto can solve all this but the same people can't agree on what crypto to use and have no idea what the transaction rate of global payments are or the fact that transaction costs in most crypto payments are outrageously high.
- Is this not already controlled by the banks?
- It would be incredibly simple for the reserve bank to set up "Kiwicoin" or whatever, and tie it to EFTPOS.
- Yeah, because I don't even need to take the card out of my wallet.
- What alternative is there? The wild west of crypto?

I'm honestly surprised with that graph. Over the last few years there has been a huge uptick in credit surcharges, I've started using EFTPOS a lot more because of it. Perhaps that's represented in the flattening of the decline rather than the increase in EFTPOS use that I expected.
- This always bugs me because businesses charge customers for the fees when they should be taking the responsibility for them internally.
  In a cash business, a person is paid to count tills and ensure money matches up. Then, someone has to do a bank run and deposit that cash. This takes time and labour. This is not directly charged to the customer as a service fee.
  Meanwhile, Stripe or whatever payment processing platform a business uses does all of that for a business, and charges the business a fee. This includes a ton of value added services such as financial overviews and analytics, traditionally something an accountant on payroll would work on.
  Businesses should be eating the cost as it's cheaper than equivalent billable hours for an accountant or allocating labour to count, manage, and deposit cash. I'm all for cashless businesses but it should be the owner's responsibility rather than fees for customers.
  I have a small business plan with Stripe and I'm charged 0.40 cents + 0.4% per card transaction. A bit more for certain types. It's cruel that these businesses are charging more than that to the customer, I assume the larger businesses likely get a better deal than that.
  
  When you go to the supermarket and pay with credit, it's likely only a small percentage fee is being charged. They have huge negotiating power.
  When you go to the local cafe and see a 2% charge, this is almost certainly in the ballpark of what the fee is they are paying. Before paywave, the credit card fees were much lower. In the early days there were stories of places being charged 3% or more for paywave compared to 1%ish for credit card transations by inserting the card. This has led to the culture of surcharges. It's crazy greedy on behalf of the bank, and many places do not have credit at all because of it. Having a surcharge allows the business to offer credit to those willing to pay for it.
  I feel small businesses are well justified in charging a surchage for such a crazy fee compared to the service provided. Even for your Stripe payments, that's a 8.4 % fee on a $5 payment. In particular, hospitality businesses struggle to compete and break even, and this is the sort of place I mostly see the surcharges.
- Yeah, I think also people are happy to pay for convenience, even small ones (like pay wave vs putting your card and pin into the machine).
  Also, I'm guessing it only counts as eftpos if you swipe your card? i.e. if you insert it to read the chip, it's technically not eftpos (I think?)
  
  I don't like the idea of donating to the bank, even if it's only a few cents 😆
  I'm pretty sure inserting the card is still EFTPOS, as this is still how it works even if the place doesn't have credit.

We need contactless EFTPOS, in that case.
A choice between swiping my card, swiping it again, wiping the crud off it, swiping a third time, fat fingering the pin, starting over, and finally succeeding in paying?
Or just plonking my wallet onto the pay wave machine? Yeah, I'll take the most convenient option thanks.
Also, have some of these people ever had a conversation with an elderly person? Imagine trying to explain all that nonsense to someone like my mother.
- Convenience is exactly the issue. Technology tends to make our lives easier. I don't even have to take my wallet out now, just use my phone. It's just so much easier. The transaction fee thing is annoying, but most of the time it's so small I just pay it anyway, instead of going through the above-mentioned steps to pay with EFTPOS. I'd also add "chose the wrong account and it was declined" to those steps. I use EFTPOS so infrequently now I often forget which account I keep all my money in.

Plummets really?
All this article is saying is that people are using credit cards more that's all.