I’m so flippin’ excited! I get to live out a dream next month… you know, besides the one where I wake up every day and work in a bookstore!
As a small business owner, I get to see how the proverbial sausage is made, and without disabusing you too much, I’ll tell you that there’s a lot more to it than me reading in a cozy chair with a cup of coffee.
Along with all of the decidedly un-whimsical responsibilities like taxes, taxes, and more taxes, we also get to be part of professional associations. We have a rockin’ regional association that focuses on bookstores from Texas all the way to Montana (guess whether we’re the mountains or the plains), and a national association that helps keep us apprised of major developments across the country.
Next month, the American Booksellers Association is working with the Merchants Payments Coalition to send bookstore owners like me to Washington, DC!
I cannot tell you how my little nerdy heart (I majored in political science) jumped at the opportunity to meet with our senators and discuss actual laws that have an actual impact on our lives! In this case, you might not know the impact, so I’m gonna tell you.
The Credit Card Competition Act is proposed legislation that basically addresses the fact that credit card fees are high and kept high because Visa and Mastercard have a lock on credit card processing. Well… technically, on the network routing portion of credit card processing.
Every time you swipe, there are interchange, network, and processing fees associated. That’s why you see stores requiring minimums for credit card purchases, discounts for cash, etc.
But even though there are hundreds of credit card issuers, Visa and Mastercard handle the vast majority of transactions through their networks. And because there’s very little competition besides each other, they can keep the fees high.
The proposed legislation would require the largest banks to offer at least two competing networks for credit card transactions, giving businesses more choice in how those payments are processed. The hope is that more competition will mean lower fees.
Is your brain twisted up yet? Because trust me, I understand. Can you imagine being the senators who have to read all of this?
TLDR: There's not enough competition in the behind-the-scenes credit card processing, and that's part of why fees are high.
Here’s why this matters, and why you should care:
We have paid almost $2,400 in credit card fees already this year, and we’re only at the beginning of our busiest season.
For reference, $2,400 would pay for five years of our website, one year of our professional characters, about seven months of utilities, 300 new books, or a professional marketing campaign that can draw in new readers.
We profit-share with our schools during book fairs, allowing your spending to directly support your school. Credit card fees represent between $50 and $100 per book fair. That’s money that could be going back to your school instead of inflating billion-dollar companies’ bottom lines.
This legislation doesn't get rid of fees entirely, but it could help reduce them.
It’s not wildly exciting to talk about credit card reform. Though it is exciting to fly to Washington and have an actual meeting “on the Hill”… but I digress.
We are going into the holiday season, and you will be inundated with sales, advertisements, and reminders that shopping small supports local.
In a time when we’ve all heard “do more with less” way too many times, here’s real, tangible proof of how your dollars go right back into the community when you shop small.
So yes, please support local. On Small Business Saturday and the other 364 days of the year. Because it keeps us open, it keeps us contributing, and it allows us to do it on a very small local level, and also sometimes on a really cool and exciting national scale as well.
Happy holidays!!
