[StBernard] We're from the government and we'er here to help

[Westley Annis]

JY,

Anything that reduces cost is good, but the government cannot arbitrarily
lower prices. That has to happen thru the market place.

There are companies trying to come up with a cheaper way of handling
electronic transactions, which credit cards are. One way is to allow
payments thru your cell phone using text messaging. We're already seeing
some of that, but it's not cheap enough yet.

The "holy grail" of electronic transactions is to be able to handle a
transaction under a $1.00 without the bulk of it being eaten up in
transaction costs. These are micro-payments.

As the CNN article explained, the bulk of the transaction costs right now
are going towards fraud prevention. Until we get to the point where we can
do a thumbprint or retina scan within one second, we will always be fighting
fraud.

Oh, the dirty little secret about pennies is that they when you look at the
total picture, pennies may actually be a money maker for the U.S. Treasury.
While they do cost more to manufacturer, more pennies are withdrawn from
circulation and never redeemed than any other piece of currency. This gives
the Treasury an interest-free loan, which may never have to be repaid.

Westley

-----Original Message-----
I guess I'm just not understanding, but I've never done retail before
either.

I know that for merchants they'll pay the money for the credit card scanner
and things to go  with it plus the trans. fee and
you say 2.5% of the value (didn't know that) so I would think anything that
reduces cost would be good for all.


>With a tank of gas for even small fuel-efficient cars topping $50, this

could hurt the economy even more.

That's the reason I like the debit card...I don't like carrying that much
cash on me.

Oh and definitely agree about no dollar coins, they're too similar to the
quarter.  I'd guess
they'd have to reconfigure vending machines to take them also.  And
definitely yes to 
doing away with at least pennies; it costs more to make them than they're
worth.

JY