Come on. When you combine Visa and MasterCard, you have clear oligopoly and near-monopoly. And the situation is terrible for businesses, who are getting ripped off on every credit-card transaction with ever-escalating and variable percentages. A lady running a small diving shop told me that Capital One is the worst, jacking them for 4.5% or so. They are now out of business. Some businesses' entire profit margin is being wiped out by monopolistic middlemen.
A business can't be cash-only and survive today; so no, cash is NOT an option.
As for your assertion of fraud-prevention as a benefit, it's a joke. Credit-card issuers have, for some reason, ENABLED fraud in the USA. First they dragged their asses on issuing chip-based credit cards for what, a decade or more after the rest of the world had adopted them. And now that we finally have them, what did the issuers do? Defeat their purpose by neglecting to implement PINs. WTF. "Chip & PIN" is standard operating procedure across the industrialized world except in the USA.
You could drastically curtail fraud overnight by simply implementing the PIN requirement. But we've gone the other way, with a lot of retailers giving up on ANY attempt at validation.
There must be some tax benefit of fraud for the card issuers. Or they're clinging to the extra profits out of fraudulent transactions that are perpetrated but not caught. Regardless, there's no excuse for abetting it, or tolerating this consumer- and business-harming oligopoly.
A business can't be cash-only and survive today; so no, cash is NOT an option.
As for your assertion of fraud-prevention as a benefit, it's a joke. Credit-card issuers have, for some reason, ENABLED fraud in the USA. First they dragged their asses on issuing chip-based credit cards for what, a decade or more after the rest of the world had adopted them. And now that we finally have them, what did the issuers do? Defeat their purpose by neglecting to implement PINs. WTF. "Chip & PIN" is standard operating procedure across the industrialized world except in the USA.
You could drastically curtail fraud overnight by simply implementing the PIN requirement. But we've gone the other way, with a lot of retailers giving up on ANY attempt at validation.
There must be some tax benefit of fraud for the card issuers. Or they're clinging to the extra profits out of fraudulent transactions that are perpetrated but not caught. Regardless, there's no excuse for abetting it, or tolerating this consumer- and business-harming oligopoly.