Comment by skrause

In the European Union the fee a bank can charge the merchant for a transaction is now capped to 0.3% (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/credit-and-debit-card-fee...) and that seems to work fine.

Interestingly just around the time when this was introduced in mid-2015 all major German supermarket chains suddenly started to accept Visa/MasterCard; before they only supported the German Girocard system. The fees Visa and MasterCard demanded before were probably way too high.

Compared to that the 2-3% fees in the USA really seem to be very high as well.