The CC company makes a killing off your purchases. They charge a fee to the merchant for every transaction. Between that fee and a separate fee for processing the fee, they end up charging between 3.5 and 6 percent more on the transaction, while handing out 2-3 percent in rewards if you’re lucky.

The reason there isn’t a cash discount most places is because it’s actually against the terms of service with the CC company/processors for the merchant to charge more for their customers. The CC company essentially requires that everything be more expensive for everyone whether or not they actually use the cards.

The card companies make absolutely stupid money off those fees.

Small rant, but people saying they believe in science is a pet peeve of mine. Belief has no place olin science.

You can’t “believe” in science any more than you can “know” in your religion.

Belief and faith are the realm of the unknowable. Knowledge and fact are the realm of science.

What you get out of it is generally less than the processing fees. That’s how reward cards work. The seller has to pay the processor to process the payment, and you get a portion of that as a reward.

It may feel like free money to you, but that processing fee is built into the price of anything you purchase.

You aren’t sticking it to anybody.

They’re banking on the US eventually turning back around. The US presence in Germany has been historically very beneficial to them, and kicking them out is the kind of move that’s hard to take back.later.

It’s the most-commonly rejected card. It has high fees without the clout of Amex. Amex customers are typically pretty wealthy and places will accept them because of their high-roller status. But Discover doesn’t have that going for them, so there’s less reason to accept the card.

Where you’ll find it rejected most often is small shops and government agencies.

For instance, my career has been in government, and no organization I’ve worked for has ever accepted Discover. We aren’t allowed to “profit” from our fees, so we have to include credit card processing in the adopted fee schedule. But since we can’t profit, we have to set the fee at whatever Visa and Mastercard charge. That extra 1 or 2 percent Discover charges can be millions for a large government (large city, statewide agency, etc). So, agencies simply don’t take Discover (and frequently AmEx, though they’ll sometimes negotiate).

Large retailers are able to negotiate better deals with Amex and Discover, but for smaller shops it just isn’t gonna happen. And that 1-2% (of the total charge) extra taken by the card processor is huge when your margins are small.

Heck - even the Visa and Mastercard fees are a huge deal. When I worked in retail management, those fees were secretly the big reason we pushed our store-brand credit cards. It wasn’t the 80 dollar commission for the account the store got - it was that if someone used our card in our store, we didn’t pay the processing fee.

We’d give 2% in points back for using the card in the store, which was a great deal for us since we didn’t have to pay the 3-4% fee to the processor.

That’s why nobody takes Discover or Amex. Their fees are higher than Visa and Mastercard.

I work in government, and the “work on work phone” rule is sacred. If I do any work on my personal phone, my personal phone becomes subject to Open Records.