High Fees Lead to Kroger halting Visa Payments

Most consumers to not realize or care that whenever they use their Visa branded payment cards, the merchant has to absorb fees of 2% to sometimes 10% or more. Grocery stores like Kroger typically have high overhead and low profit margins. Having to shell out even 2% of sales can have a dramatic effect on profitability. As this chart indicates, their margins percentages have declined by 11% over the last 10 years. How can retailers compete? They are looking into lower cost alternative payment methods such as cryptocurrency merchant platforms.

Some platforms include CoinPayments, which offers crypto merchant settlement for .5%, making Visa at least 4 times more expensive. Another POS network coming onling in Asia and spreading is PundiX, which allows purchasing of cryptocurrency at the checkout counter of a coffee store or wherever there hardware is placed.
For more info on PundiX click here: https://pundix.com/
Another platform offering merchant services, a coming debit card linked to crypto, and other services is TokenPay. For more information on TokenPay click here: https://www.tokenpay.com/

Another advantage for merchants is that it seems most platforms charge the microfees to the buyer as opposed to the merchant. There is surely more to come as this space is changing rapidly.

for more on Kroger https://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2018/07/31/kroger-stops-accepting-visa-credit-cards-at-some.html
Kroger Profit Margin Chart https://ycharts.com/companies/KR/gross_profit_margin