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It blows our hivemind that the United States doesn’t use the ISO 216 paper size standard (A4, A5 and the gang).
Like, we consider ourselves worldly people and are aware of America’s little idiosyncrasies like mass incarceration, the widespread availability of assault weapons and not being able to transfer money via your banking app, but come on - look how absolutely great it is to be European:
The American mind cannot comprehend this diagram
[Diagram of paper sizes as listed below]
ISO 216 A series papers formats
AO
A1
A3
A5
A7
A6
Et.
A4
Instead, Americans prostrate themselves to bizarrely-named paper types of seemingly random size: Letter, Legal, Tabloid (Ledger) and all other types of sordid nonsense. We’re not even going to include a picture because this is a family-friendly finance blog.
We involve third parties to help spy on our transactions.
It’s OK, they charge us for the privilege.
Wtf?
Also are banks just dumb or what? Has it crossed their greedy minds that they also can charge to make transfers?
What’s pictured there is when people use Venmo to pay for something instead of just transferring money between friends. The fee is paid by the seller. Banks already do this for traditional sellers in the US which is why you’ll see signs asking for cash instead of cards.
And tax evasion. But I don’t care as long as the tamales are good.
Do Visa, Mastercard, etc, not charge transaction fees in Europe? The only place I’ve been where there’s no transaction fees paid by the vendor is China.
I owned a business in Europe. My bank charged me a pretty low monthly flat fee for card charges, so I would take cards for any amount.
I’m in Australia and it’s a mix. Some places add the surcharge to the bill and can use cc for as low as$1, some don’t and don’t accept payments that’s less than 2 people’s meals ( and also don’t accept split bills).
But it’s very very hard to find a place that’s cash only. It comes to mind empanadas, so I got a laugh at the other reply about tamales.
I mean charging the vendor a processing fee, not the vendor charging the customer for the credit card fee. That’s actually illegal in the US, though businesses can offer a cash discount, they can’t charge fees for using cards if they accept them. When I ran my business our card handler charged 3. something percent on every transaction with card, higher for credit than debit.
I don’t know.