What Capital One Doesn't Want You To Know 

That CEO is so full of shit - “if the credit card fees weren’t so high I could pay employees more” no man, I can fucking guarantee you wouldn’t.

Let's be real. That store owner would NOT be reducing his prices if he could magically get rid of swipe fees.

That one guy being all like "whoa can you imagine if the grocery stores fixed food prices" when that's exactly what they're doing 🗿

WHY ARE WE STILL ALLOWING GIANT MERGERS! If you already have more than 10% of the market, or are publicly traded, or are worth over 500m, you should be completely disqualified from all mergers and acquisitions.

"What's in your wallet?" A TRAP!!

every time I hear about lobbying, the real truth to that is our CONGRESS IS FOR SALE

Lowering swipe fees makes sense if retailers lowers price of goods in turn, but Walmart or BP or Atlas have no intention of passing on those savings.

If you’re using credit cards for large transactions with a goal of paying it off over time because you can’t afford it at the time of purchase, you’re using credit cards incorrectly I’m afraid.

6:27 Not to take away from the spirit of the video, but we all know if these swipe fees disappeared tomorrow, not a single one of his 5 locations would lower their prices to reflect this.

The distress for banks was a farce; what we have experienced in the past 2 years is a result of a system that has worked incredibly well. The Fed just had to tighten credit to cool the economy.

The store owner putting out that belief that if swipe fees didn’t exist that would have been more money that they would be able to pay their employees. Who does he think buys that line anymore?

“I’d have $630k more to pay our team members” 1) it most likely would just reduce the cost of consumer goods without those fees. 2) Even if that did boost profit margins, don’t pretend like you’re paying out bonuses.

There should be a class in high school on how to use credit cards. I've had credit cards for 35 years and never paid a penny in interest. Treat them like short term interest free loans.

Hey Business owner, why cannot you provide cash payment discounts as gas stations do? I would gladly pay in cash or cash app.

*The worst aspect about this crisis is that consumers are piling up credit card debt. Credit card debt increased by 20% alone, while interest rates have doubled in a year. Inflation is so severe that customers are essentially going into debt to buy basic essentials. The collapse has certainly begun.*

From $7K to $45K that's the minimum range of profit return every week I thinks it's not a bad one for me, now have enough to pay bills and take care of my family.

Some stores are starting to refuse cards. Their prices are usually lower.

The fact that so many people rely on credit and can't pay for goods and services up front speaks to where our economy's strength really is, just like the stock market: the big wigs. And they're the same people that also encourage us to buy things we don't need with money we don't have. You can't blame people for trying to fruitlessly keep up with consumer trends.

I was a small biz owner. What I never could come to grips with was, why am I paying a fee to conduct the banks business. Not to mention having to lease the terminal to transmit their data...

Paying in cash should be cheaper than swiping a credit card. Otherwise you are making cash payers (typically poorer) subsidize credit card rewards (typically richer). There should be a law that credit card fees are added to the receipt at POS so the customer can see how much more they are paying.

I was paying off a card debt. I made a 6¢ mistake and the interest charged was almost $2! Why? Interest is calculated on the entire amount as of the posting date.

People are calling out the store owner, and they should. But the real issue here is consumer misuse of credit. Never buy something you can’t immediately pay off.

However, for someone with discipline, they raise your limit, you do not use it. Your credit score will rise faster.

Y’all should do a video on the number of layoffs in 2024!!!! It’s wild

reminds me of activation fees from cell phone carriers. It litteral takes seconds for phone line to be activated and deactivated. Nobody is climbing a phone poll to activate your number. Its a been set up already. The info gets sent to phone server which most likey automated to activate or deactivate. No person is paid manually activate the line. its like flipping on a switch is so easy yet they want to charge a fee.

You should investigate the research and development behind the replacement for the M3A3 Bradley fighting vehicle in the US Army. Since the 1980's, the US has spent billions on research to replace a tank that already works great and is one of the most advanced and effective on the planet. If it ain't broke, spend over 200 billion trying to fix it right? All this while we spend less on healthcare for vets and pass higher spending budgets for defense than over half of the rest of the world combined. We can't have anything even close to Socialism in this country because we're spending 70% of our tax money on useless spending for the military. Let me state this again in case you missed it, we've spent over 200 BILLION dollars on NOTHING. Because the tank they're trying to replace is still the best option around.

Don’t forget stores have to collect taxes on the credit card payment but has to pay taxes in cash. So they pay fees on money they collect for the government.

I’ve stopped using credit cards about 15 years ago. If I can’t afford it, I don’t buy it. It’s sometimes rough to live within one’s means, but I also don’t like enormous debt.

No one forces anyone to have a credit card, the PROBLEM is, people buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t know!

I've had a cc since I was 15.5 when I started working. I always treat it like cash, pay it off every month, and use the cash back to benefit me. CCs hate people like me. Now all the small businesses I know charge 3% for using a cc, so now I use cash a lot more.

credit card is required to make safe purchase and build credit history. A good credit card gives you good reward and should be used only if you pay it in full every month. Retailers won't pass the saved money if the fees goes down.

My husband and I were fortunate enough to be able to pay off our mortgage early. We were both still working, and took the payment amount that we had been using to pay off our mortgage faster and we put it straight into investments. We were able to retire early because of almost 7 years of putting away what would have been our mortgage payment as well as maxing out our 401K/403B plans. Thankfully we were taught by both of our parents the value of living within our means. Thank you for your advice. I know it will help people. we are interested in investments that could set me up for retirement , I mean I've heard of people that netted hundreds of thousands during these crash, I listened to someone on a podcast who earned over $650K in less than a year, what's the strategy behind such returns?

Why do you see so many ads for Rewards type cards??? Simple. Those are added to the Swipe fees the merchant pays.

Started to notice I spent way less when using cash but also noticed that more businesses don't accept cash or have enough to give proper change. Than out of no where my credit limit went up, makes sense now.

Great report. This is one of the absolute best channels on YT, hands down. ????? How about doing a story about how food shelves and food banks really work? A lot of people, even food shelf workers, mistakenly believe that large corporations kindly donate their products to food shelves (via the big regional food banks like Second Harvest for redistribution to local food shelves) out of the goodness of their hearts. In reality, what happens is that the Farm Bill provides for an "enhanced" fed tax credit equal to cost + 50% of retail value for items "donated" to food banks. This form of tax credit means the corporate food suppliers actually are getting paid (just like the former child tax credits issued checks) amounts that are probably pretty close to what they would get by selling their products to retailers. The bonus for these corporations is that this is a profitable way to unload products that do not sell and that are close to the sell-by date or even significantly beyond the sell-by date. Some corporations even package products specifically to go to food banks which are heavily processed and filled with cheap unhealthy ingredients no one would choose from a grocery store shelf. Because corporations in this country have a mandate to increase shareholder wealth above all else, unless these companies are actually making a profit from "donating" products, they could actually be sued by their own shareholders. That is why they make sure that every "donation" benefits their bottom line and that is why food shelves are full of unhealthy, heavily processed products with inferior ingredients that contribute to chronic health problems like diabetes, obesity and heart disease, and many are also past their sell-by dates. Let's stop pretending these corporate food giants are being nice to the food insecure and expose what that they are making money off of the most vulnerable members of our population. As an example take a look at the fabulous new Second Harvest food bank building in the Mpls suburb, Brooklyn Center (" A guided tour of Second Harvest Heartland's new Brooklyn Park facility" on YT) that has Cargill, General Mills and Target logos all over it, despite the fact that the MN taxpayers spent over $18 million on this. The fact that these corporations control these food banks is obvious and they are controlling them because it is profitiable for them. Second Harvest makes it sound like there is a lot of fresh wholesome food, but that is NOT the case; it's almost ALL unhealthy processed food. It is NOT the case that over 60% of their product assortment is fresh (lean protein and produce), as they claim. The other catch is that these food bank packages are NOT forwarded to local food shelves free of charge; they have to pay huge delivery fees and the lightest weight, cheapest foods to get delivered are processed foods. The public has a right to know what is really going on with this scheme. At the very least, the government should not be giving these enhanced tax credits unless the products meet health and freshness guidelines. I'm sure there is a lot more to this scheme than what I have found out and it needs to be covered by real investigative journalists. Please do a story on this.

As a teenager, I would watch fight club and think, man...seems a little crazy and an overreaction. As an adult, I watch fight club and think, man....these guys have got it figured out.

This merger out of all mergers shouldn’t even be on the table. Why is this even up for discussion? Shut it down

From $7K to $45K that's the minimum range of profit return every week I thinks it's not a bad one for me, now I have enough to pay bills and take care of my family

I’m a small business owner. For years customers would tell me they used their rewards cards so they would get free miles. I paid the entire amount of all that. The card companies charged more for reward charges than regular charges. They have brain washed all of us to charge everything. They rake off money from every business. We need to start paying cash again.

And let's be real, they'll continue to get away with it.

They didn't even talk about all the rewards you get from credit cards and how that is more pillaging from the poor. How do you think Amazon/Chase is able to afford giving all of their customers 5% cash back on purchases? They have to be making boatloads of cash on a portion of their poorest customers. The 5% they're giving us is table scraps compared to whatever amount they make.

You load 16 tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store.

I wish y'all had covered the cash back part. A local coffeeshop refuses to accept American Express because their fees are higher than others, meanwhile my rewards for that card where the highest. I decided to not use American Express on local business, and a little part of me feels vengeance when I swipe it at major retailers. Do I accomplish anything? No. Am I petty enough to still be satisfied? Yes.

So at least 90% of the fee is not required to operate the network. Far from "paying for r&d beneficial to consumers", this more likely incentivizes expansion of predatory credit models into additional areas such as auto financing.

The audio levels are all over the place in this video.. annoying to watch. Host either needs to annunciate/speak louder or the cutaway interviews need to be lowered.

Use that plastic! Visa up 23% over the last year. Better to invest wisely than complain. Until the lobbyists are removed from washington there will always be an unfair advantage to a few. Use that to your advantage until it is fixed.

We have to find a way to get rid of these fees. The problem is that the consumer doesn't pay them directly. So there is no price compensation on them.

This is telling me that the MOST IMPACTFUL thing we can do to help our economy is pay cash.

Keep up the awesome work you guys.

There is a price to using cash. Having to keep it in stock, going to the bank, dropping money in the safe and the chance of someone skimming/stealing it. Credit cards do prevent much of this. Credit cards have become so convenient that we would be in trouble without them.

This is why paying cash is far more valuable to a community in the long run. You pay $40 in cash, it remains $40 when it is used to pay wages, and buy other goods. Where when you pay credit, every transaction on that $40 takes a little bit away, and really ends up being jsut $5 to the community as a whole on average. The credit card companies have taken the rest of that money.

Users: don't spend more than you can pay. Vendors: give discounts for debit or cash transactions or abandon credit altogether. What am I missing here? 🤔

Thank you for the update on the rip offs

That's so American. Where I live, there's no extra fee. Or if there is, it's for the seller to pay. I haven't held cash in my pocket for the past ten years because I can just swipe my card for free. Oh, and the only place I had to pay for withdrawing cash at an ATM was in the USA; no other country does that.

As a small business owner, Capital One was one of the only companies to take a chance on giving my business a card. Even my bank wouldn't. Without them, I would have cash flow trouble regularly. How else are small businesses supposed to compete with businesses with more cash flow?

Moral of the story: DO NOT CARRY A BALANCE ON YOUR CREDIT CARDS and keep your utilization below 15% across all of the credit card you have.

they became the toll bridge of the economy

If you have a "special 4% reward" on YOUR card, then when you buy something at my store, I PAY THAT REWARD in excess of the normal swipe fee! Its charged to me as a "special Commercial Card Fee", and I have NO IDEA I will be charged that by looking at your card! ~ Did you know that?

Nobody believes companies would give workers even a penny if cc fees disappeared. They wouldn't drop prices either

I opened my first Capital One account at 35 (I'm 36 now) and have almost $40,000 saved up in that. I started moving money there for the 4.3% APR on my money I let lay around. Never had a credit card never will.

4:27 This is nonsense. Don't carry a balance and don't get a card with an annual fee. Then there is NO COST to use the credit card. If you are paying any fees or interest on your card, you are using it WRONG. Get rid of it if you don't know what you are doing. Pay cash or use a debit card.

Nothing with a natural monopoly or inelastic demand should be for-profit. That's rapidly including the payment card industry.

One detail that is worth mentioning: The vast majority of the Merchant Swipe Fees (the 2-3%) are actually given to the card issuer (i.e. JP Morgan Chase, Walmart etc.), not the card networks (Visa and Mastercard). They "only" collect their scheme fees, which make up roughly 15% of total Swipe Fees.

Capital One credit limit increases are peanuts, a few hundred dollars here and there. Besides, I have have a 100k credit limit but will only charge what I can afford and not a penny more, that is not the lenders fault, it's called being disciplined and fiscally responsible. So if you can't afford to pay back $1000 dollars in credit, do not borrow $1000 in credit.

The problem with this new bill is that if credit card fees are cut, there is no incentive for companies to actually cut cost in relation to the fees. This happened with debit cards too. Fees were cut, and we lost debit card awards, but prices remained high. I have no doubt that if the bill is passed those of us who are responsible with credit will simply lose our rewards rates and we will all end up paying the same in the end. In the video it’s mentioned how Visa and Mastercard are doing fine in Europe where the fees are fixed. Absolutely, the rewards rates on cards are all near the bottom of the market, and prices in Europe aren’t that much cheaper than here.

It's actually genius because they can just say "Well, don't borrow what you don't have" while they wave easy access to credit in your face. Just putting the blame back on the consumer.

Businesses write off merchant service fees so i strongly doubt that store owner would be paying teammembers more.🤔 And the fees vary based on the card. I know because i reconcile and write off merchant service fees for my company.

As a child I recall my father getting mail that stated he was approved for an 80k credit limit. To my amazement he through it in the trash, to this day I never accept an increase.

Thats why i use cash as much as i can.

oh F off you think this gas station owner is gonna lower the price for you and me if he wasn’t paying credit card fees?

Ive been to small locally owned stores that didnt accept card because the prosessing fees would eat into profit and force them to charge customers more.

Credit cards can be massively rewarding as a US consumer if you know what you're doing. But the obstacles of bad habits and a lack of self-accountability have unfortunately proven too difficult to overcome for an overwhelming proportion of people.

Credit card companies are evil 😈 doers! 😳

when we were kids n young . credit cards were not easy to get! last 10 years it was avail for almost anyone>

Now I see why stores like it so much when people pay cash. Local businesses sometimes give discounts for it.

Every single time charge fees have been limited, costs didn’t go down

"N'aww bruh, it's the minimum wage."

Wild idea. We create a National card system through idk... a Postal Bank that has low prices and public records of salaries etc. Then we require that banks that receive money from the Federal Reserve offer and honor cards through the federal service.😊

I always knew that there was fees merchants paid per swipe, but I never knew how high. 2 and 3% is wild. I always assumed it was a fraction of a percentage. Seems like they would still make tons that way with how much people use cards.

anyone paying interest and fees on their credit cards needs to change their spending habits

I often tip in cash but then I feel like my credit card company will one day release my tipping history to show I’m a bad person. That is my weird paranoid thought when I hand over the money. I also feel like cash tips are more fun and personable than the button on the iPad or whatever.

This is interesting. I have a credit score over 800, and my Capital One card has a super low limit which they won't raise.

I receive a minimum of 3 letters a week from capital one *EVERY* week - for the past 3 years. I rip them up without opening them and throw them in the garbage...but they keep on coming however. I will *NEVER* accept their credit offers...never.

Business owner: If payment network doesn’t charge fees, would you lower prices?? Another way to get around this is give customer discount for cash, would ya? 2-3% that you pay is pale in comparison to 6-9% sales tax and up to 20% that customers pay in tips!

I’m 68 years old and have never used a credit card.

I love when companies try to explain how merging with another giant company will increase competition. It's like they know just how dumb everyone else is. Or they imagine that everyone else is dumb. I have a Discover card, but not Capital One. I never keep a balance on any of my cards so I never pay fees - credit card companies all pay me to use their cards.

We're talking about changing the HHI in cards from under 1200 to a little higher but still under 1200, and payment networks from 2644 to 1940, SQUARELY dropping it from "oligopoly" to "competitive", according to wikipedia.

Obviously, the guy that spend $630,000 on credit card fees means that his business is doing really well. I don’t feel sorry for him at all.

if they didn't make money off the swipe fees then they wouldn't have the same rewards. if you want to dismantle the whole system of rewards then go for it, but most people don't care that their gas station is paying 3 cents on the dollar to facilitate a bunch free stuff for themselves. you know this, which is why you didn't focus on it in the video.

I appreciated this having a how to fix section. Wild to hear europe successfully capped fees at .3%

So, can anyone tell me why we don't have a US treasury run payment network? The fees associated with the network could be based on some set factors like, say... 1) The cost of maintaining and updating the servers running the software. 2) The cost of employing staff to run the system. 3) The cost of maintaining an internet connection to those servers. We already have plenty of regulation surrounding what banks can do, and all banks now basically have to have internet connections. Why would we not want some separate network maintained by the same people that manage the treasury which would just route transactions? If you wanted to address issues of privacy concerns you could just require that the connections be end-to-end encrypted as well. Even if it would not be ideal, having some government system with much lower fees available would almost certainly force these giant and insanely profitable corporations to actually operate according to free market principles of supply and demand rather than arbitrary levels they set in order to maximize shareholder profits...

I’m going to be honest, I’m happy paying Visa an effective 0-1% fee (with cash back which isn’t taxed) to not have to carry around a bunch of cash and to have the protection credit cards offer. I’ve never paid interest since you don’t pay anything if you pay them off each month.

Use cash

imagine if we just used cash or bitcoin, these companies would get angry, we just need someone to coordinate it

Keep up the good work guys - your videos are incredible!

Limit raises sabotage consumer credit. Credit ratings are highly dependent on credit consumption as a percentage of limit - ideally, you should be consuming 30% of your debt limit consistently. By raising the limit, companies are artificially lowering this credit consumption, which in turn lowers their credit score. The only way to maintain that ratio is to spend more money, even if you don't have it. Plus, when you do spend more, they do it again. It should be illegal to raise a credit limit unsolicited. That 2-3% overhead is baked into the costs of goods and services and you pay it whether you use plastic or cash. You literally cannot avoid paying the credit companies for the luxury of participating in commerce. The system is rigged. Against you.

Capital One is by far the worst CC company. their corruption is insane.

This is especially shocking to me. No joke: years ago I was writing for a web-comic where one of the story arcs had the characters hiding from debt collectors, so they built a wall out of mail from Capital One credit-card offers. Uncanny how much truth there was behind the suspicion. I just knew a lot of people in low-income housing were getting them. Had no idea how true it was.

I have one card.I pay the balance every month-no interest,no fee.Please speak about senseless spending and owning one card.Get to the problem: the empty shells shopping.

Is that a new microphone? I like it, it's bassy.