If you can choose between card and cash, choose cash

Especially when you're buying from small or independent shops.

Every time you pay by card, you're not only feeding the banks with the interchange fees, you're also giving a cut to the Visa/Mastercard/Amex oligopoly that controls 90%+ of global card payments. These middlemen take a huge bite out of merchants' sales.

Until we can use Bitcoin for all our transactions, paying with cash for in-person purchases is a bit closer to Bitcoin’s ideology of decentralisation, privacy and reducing wealth inequalities.

https://www.convenience.org/Media/Daily/2025/March/20/3-Swipe-Fees-Hit-Record-High-in-2024_Research

Credit and debit card swipe fees reached another record high last year, totaling $187.2 billion in 2024, the Merchants Payments Coalition (MPC) said in a recent press release. That's up from $172 billion in 2023 [...]. Fees from the two companies [Visa and Mastercard] alone totaled $111.2 billion of the $187.2 billion total in 2024.