You Paid for It. You Just Don’t Know It.

Cedar Valley News
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
You Paid for It. You Just Don’t Know It.
By George Khan

Every time you pay with a credit card—for a sandwich, a tank of gas, a pair of shoes, a bag of groceries—a percentage of your money goes to a bank before the business you are standing in receives a dime. You do not see it on your receipt. Nobody tells you about it. But you pay it. Every single time.

Let me show you how it works. You come into my deli and order a turkey club. The sandwich costs twelve dollars. You add a two-dollar tip, and the state collects seventy-two cents in sales tax. Your total is fourteen dollars and seventy-two cents. You tap your card. The credit card company takes four percent of the entire amount. Not four percent of the sandwich. Four percent of the sandwich, the tax, and the tip. Fifty-nine cents disappears. The bank earns money on the sales tax you paid to the government. The bank earns money on the tip you left for the person who made your lunch.

You paid for all of it. The person behind the counter did not get all of it.

Now multiply your sandwich by every credit card transaction in America. Every coffee. Every prescription. Every oil change. Every grocery run. The credit card industry collected more than 170 billion dollars in swipe fees last year. Billions. Not from businesses. From you. Because every business in the country builds the fee into the price of what it sells. The twelve-dollar sandwich would cost less if the fee did not exist. You are paying it whether you know it or not.

And here is the part most people have never considered. If you pay cash, you pay the same price as the person who tapped a card. The fee is built into the price for everyone. Your cash is subsidizing someone else’s airline miles. The rewards programs the credit card companies advertise—the cashback, the points, the free flights—are funded by higher prices paid by every customer, including the ones who never use a credit card.

Visa and Mastercard control more than eighty percent of the credit card market. They set the fees. The business cannot negotiate. The business cannot choose a cheaper network. The business cannot say no without turning away the customer. And the customer—you—never sees the fee at all.

A bipartisan bill in Congress, the Credit Card Competition Act, would give businesses the right to choose among processing networks. It would not cap the fees. It would not eliminate them. It would introduce competition where none exists. The President has called swipe fees “out of control.” States are not waiting. Illinois passed a law removing swipe fees from the tax and tip portions of transactions, and a federal judge upheld it last month.

But Congress moves slowly, and every day it waits, the fee collects. On your lunch. On your groceries. On the tip you left because you wanted to be generous, and you received good service. On the tax you owe the state. Four percent of everything, every time, every tap.

I stand behind this counter six days a week. I see every transaction. I watch the number on the register and the smaller number I actually receive. But I am not writing this editorial for myself. I am writing it for you. Because you are the one paying. You just did not know it until now.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

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