When I buy from a small business that I want to support, I will use cash. When I’m buying anything from a large company, I will always use the fanciest credit cards in my wallet.
In the United States, credit card processing fees are more expensive for fancy rewards credit cards and obviously there’s no fee for cash.
That’s why nobody takes Discover or Amex. Their fees are higher than Visa and Mastercard.
amex is taken in 9 out of 10 places when I use it. it’s usually small places that don’t take it
I literally cannot think of any places that don’t take Discover.
Hmm go figure your mom gives me a hard time about it every time.
It’s the most-commonly rejected card. It has high fees without the clout of Amex. Amex customers are typically pretty wealthy and places will accept them because of their high-roller status. But Discover doesn’t have that going for them, so there’s less reason to accept the card.
Where you’ll find it rejected most often is small shops and government agencies.
For instance, my career has been in government, and no organization I’ve worked for has ever accepted Discover. We aren’t allowed to “profit” from our fees, so we have to include credit card processing in the adopted fee schedule. But since we can’t profit, we have to set the fee at whatever Visa and Mastercard charge. That extra 1 or 2 percent Discover charges can be millions for a large government (large city, statewide agency, etc). So, agencies simply don’t take Discover (and frequently AmEx, though they’ll sometimes negotiate).
Large retailers are able to negotiate better deals with Amex and Discover, but for smaller shops it just isn’t gonna happen. And that 1-2% (of the total charge) extra taken by the card processor is huge when your margins are small.
Heck - even the Visa and Mastercard fees are a huge deal. When I worked in retail management, those fees were secretly the big reason we pushed our store-brand credit cards. It wasn’t the 80 dollar commission for the account the store got - it was that if someone used our card in our store, we didn’t pay the processing fee.
We’d give 2% in points back for using the card in the store, which was a great deal for us since we didn’t have to pay the 3-4% fee to the processor.
Don’t know if it counts as sticking it to the man, but I adblock everything. Seriously, Ive got adblockers on my adblockers. Ive been adblocking for so long I don’t know what to buy anymore.
I’m sitting here in my empty house surrounded by my bags of money I don’t know what to spend on. Send help.
Send money to me. I will dispose of.
I don’t know what to buy anymore.
I have a problem where because I’m so hard to advertise to between adblock and premium subscriptions, that I am usually very out of the loop on what movies and TV shows are coming out
The biggest ones usually make their way into the news or Lemmy somehow, but there’s definitely a lot I’m clueless about until I see them pop up streaming somewhere a couple years later
Just visit Rotten Tomatoes once a week or so
I have this same problem! Friends will mention a film they’re about to see and I’ve literally never heard of it, and they very much act like I should have 😂 I do feel like I’m missing out on important information, but I’m still not turning ad blockers off.
At least, by then, you know how many seasons you’re getting into, eh?
cries in Firefly
Same. I also treat cookies like a virus…no, no, and no again. Though I think my days are limited with that, a lot of websites now saying accept cookies or pay. I’ll give up the interwebs before I accept trackers.
Instead of manually denying cookies, you can deny all cookies and whitelist the sites you trust.
Edit: also note - websites that give you the ‘option’ to opt in or out may not have the same opinion on what cookies are ‘optional’ or ‘mandatory’. Several don’t even do anything and are just there to look compliant.
For articles which won’t let you disable cookies there’s usually an archived version somewhere. Or you use some current alternative to 12ft. Or you ask an LLM to summarize the URL.
12ft ladder has never worked for me, unfortunately. :/
In addition to this every device I use has an always on vpn
I joined a union and organized the election of a workers council at my workplace.
Union dues are 1% of my salary.In the past 5 years, we managed to enforce:
- the right to work from home
- 20% pay for the time spent on call after hours, plus 1 day paid vacation for each week you’re on call (so I now have 42 days + unlimited sick days)
- a company car for on call duty, which you’re allowed to use privately, too
- work phones for every employee (instead of having to install the company MDM on your private phone)
- convertible desks for everyone
- and a substantial pay raise
This post was about little things, no need to show your gigantic balls here.
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
It began with a little thing, simply writing an e-mail to the union, and kind of grew from there.