For decades the folks at Visa and MasterCard have been slobbering over the prospect of a cashless society, and they’re getting their wish. Debit transactions surpassed credit in 2003 and continue to grow twice as fast. Today you can use debit cards to pay for anything from a Subway sandwich to a safari–which I did last June in Africa. Cash is easy to lose; it’s a target for criminals; it’s dirty–and yet the feds frown on laundering it. Cashless is safer, faster. But cashless does not mean costless. According to the Federal Reserve, banks collected $16.2 billion from retailers in interchange…
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