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NYC Taxi Drivers and Credit Card Fees
Photo by Thomas Hawk http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/
As a frequent visitor to NYC (at least 6 times / year) and Boston (which recently added a similar program) I really like the ability to pay for cabs with a credit card and I wish Chicago had it too. A recent Huffington Post article Cash or Credit? In a Taxi, It Depends Which Side of the Partition You’re On describes some of the challenges faxed by cab drivers in that situation.
A recent story in the New York Times reported that credit card use in the city’s yellow cabs has risen steeply, suggesting that cabbies are making more money because of it… To the contrary, it appears they in fact have been hit with a pay cut, in the form of credit card processing fees, payment delays, bunk cards, chargebacks, and system failures.
While most businesses, from bodegas to bars, are charged an average of 2% on credit card processing fees, when you swipe your card in a cab, the driver has to pay a hefty 5% for the transaction. This fee is placed on the total metered fare, including the tolls, the tip, and now, even on the fifty-cent MTA surcharge. Why are New York’s cabbies paying so much more than everybody else?
Because of all the middlemen.
That 5% goes back to the garage or medallion broker, where the owners take an average cut of 1.5%. The rest is passed along to the TLC-selected vendor supplying the device. That company takes out another average cut of 1.5% and then, finally, passes the rest on to the bank that is actually processing the credit card. Multiply these numbers by millions of cab rides a year and it becomes clear that a few people are making truckloads of money on drivers’ backs.
That’s actually not that different from most smaller businesses (see previous article average credit card processing rates) – small businesses usually pay a 1%-3% markup over the wholesale (or interchange) rate for their transaction. There are two reasons for it – 1. it costs more for the processors to reach them so the processors need to build those sales costs into the price and 2. they operate at a big informational disadvantage and are taken advantage of by the processors and/or the middlemen.
It stinks that the cabbies are not given choice in which processor they use. If they had a choice they could shop on their own (or use TransFS!!) to cut out the middlemen and get a fair deal.
