this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
1035 points (99.8% liked)
Curated Tumblr
6381 readers
1224 users here now
For preserving the least toxic and most culturally relevant Tumblr heritage posts.
Here are some OCR tools to assist you in transcribing posts:
-
FOSS Android Recs per u/m_f@discuss.online: 1 , 2
Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I used to do that. There are many flaws with it. It felt really good to kick it.
I answered someone else who replied to this comment with one of the flaws that I see... You say 'many' and I'd be interested in hearing the others.
What kind of flaws?
The biggest flaw is baked into the system... credit cards generally make everything cost a little bit more because vendors bake the processing fees into their sale prices. You may get a small percentage of your expenditures back from your credit card, but not nearly as much as the mark-up you've paid. The effect is a tax on yourself and everyone else. The tax is worse on those who don't use credit cards because they don't even get a partial refund.
The law used to be that you could offer a cash discount, but you couldn't charge extra for using a credit card. That law changed and now many places are adding a surcharge if you use a credit card. You might note, however, that prices didn't go down 3-5% everywhere. So now the retailers are double-dipping... they have the credit card fees baked into their pricing and then they're having those who use credit cards pay the fee explicitly.
I still think there are solid cases for using credit over debit if you are able to pay the bill in full every month to avoid any interest and late fees.
Ah, I thought you were talking about a flaw in an individual using credit cards, but your issue is the systemic problems it causes.
Ignoring the externalities, an individual is better off using a credit card to get back points and have protections offered by the cards. However, you are right that by doing so, we perpetuate the larger problem.
That being said, I think every financial transaction has a "cost" associated with it. Even for bank tranfers/checks or cash there is a cost to process that transaction (cash increases risk of theft, need to move money, etc. bank transfers still require infrastructure to process). It'd be interesting to know if the cost for credit cards is actually that much more than the hidden costs of handling things like cash.