Now in the news, the Kroger Company, which runs one of the largest supermarket chains in the United States, is considering to move away from accepting Visa credit cards at all their retail locations. For now, the company has announced the starting next month, on August 14, 2018 all of their 21 locations in Central and Northern California will stop accepting Visa Credit Card payments (Debits will still work). Kroger operates this chain under the Foods Co. brand of retail supermarkets and gas stations in Central and Northern California.

This seems to be the beginning of the Big Retailer vs. Big Credit Card company Battle For Credit Card Fees. According to the Bloomberg article, they estimate the credit card fee market to be about a $90 - $100 Billion Dollars a year market, and that figures to be in the U.S. alone. Walmart also recent severed ties with Synchrony Financial, a credit card company, when negotiations fell through over the credit card fee rate. Amazon is also looking into entering the financial services, some of it pertaining to possibly saving massive amounts of money on credit card fees by processing their own credit.

Retailers are now looking for ways to add to their bottom line while also saving retail consumers money and possibly in return attracting more sales, all leading to higher revenues for the retailer, savings for the consumer but bad times ahead for all credit card companies. The days of merchants paying 3% of their total credit card sales is going the way of the dodo bird.

Although there was no mention of cryptocurrency of Bitcoin in the article or any of the retailers, this nonetheless bodes well for Bitcoin and all cryptocurrency. Large retail corporations are now starting to realize the massive expensive it is to allow consumers to get themselves into debt at the expense of the retailers. Companies like Overstock.com and Newegg.com were early birds in accepting Bitcoin and other cryptos as form of payment, but now it seems that this scrutiny of credit card fees could finally make some headway for cryptocurrency into the retail world.

Read the full story Here- Bloomberg

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