If the alternative was paying cash, cash has an even more demanding level of confidence of sufficient funds required and it applies earlier with no flexibility.

  confidence of sufficient funds when that auto payment hits

FYI, Chase Sapphire Reserve made their rewards drastically worse recently. They were losing money on people like me.

> At one time, credit card companies forced vendors to charge the same, whether cash or credit, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside.

I miss that. I really dislike that it is allowed to charge extra for a credit card. It shows that the company doesn't understand the cost of cash.

Credit cards are cheaper than cash for most merchants. Most people forget about all the costs of cash because they are hidden, but they add up to more than the couple % credit cards cost.

Prices do, in fact, go down. For example, eggs in the USA went down from $6 to $2 in the past few months. https://www.macrotrends.net/3052/us-egg-prices

Long term average? Sure, it goes up, that's inflation. But do you know what causes inflationary pressure? Visa and MasterCard adding unjustified fees because they're a duopoly and control most of the payments market, and your government won't regulate them and cap fees.

The UK and the EU both cap debit card fees at 0.2% and credit card fees at 0.3%. When the UK left the EU, Visa and Mastercard jacked up their fees over 5x for UK-EEA payments. Not because they had to, but because they could, and they love sucking money out of other peoples' businesses. https://www.psr.org.uk/our-work/market-reviews/market-review...

Retailers in competitive industries absolutely do use a reduction in card fees to lower their prices. Maybe not all the way, but they definitely don't give it all to themselves as margin; their competitors don't.

> Prices don't go down, they only ever go up.

Well, there was that time in the 1930s.

Problem with a debit card is that if something goes wrong (product broken, or worse, debit card skimmed) it's my debit card, and thus my money.

Credit card? I file a charge-back which is a forcing mechanism for the vendor. Credit card skimmed? I get a new one, and I don't need to wait for my $ to be re-imbursed.

One isn’t more real than the other. They are both numbers in an online database. In one case your assets are going down, in the other your liabilities are going up. The net result is the same.

it's just as easy to check a debit balance as a CC balance.

and once debt is spent you cannot get it back. you get scammed you can dispute the credit card, and if the CC gets stolen you can fight any charges.

debit means the money is gone and that's it.

You shouldn't get a cash discount - cash costs the merchant MORE than credit card fees. You have to count all the costs of cash that credit cards don't have: counting, and recounting the cash and change. Then the manager counts and recounts everything in the back room at the end of the shift. Then the manager counts everything twice again to write up the deposit forms. Plus you need a cash register with the extra cash drawer that acts like a safe. Plus other security systems just to prevent robbery (this can get elaborate in areas where robbery is common). Those all add up.

I know that Discover has a card with a 5% discount category that changes once a quarter. Everything not in the category gets 1%. It's not hard to get the card (or at least wasn't) and was frequently advertised to college students.

If you combine that with a card that gives 2% on everything than it wouldn't be hard to average over 2% cashback as long as you were mindful about using the discover card for qualifying purchases and the 2% card for everything else.

If you have Amazon Prime, I recommend getting the no-fee Chase Amazon card. 5% on Amazon and Whole Foods; 6% on some Amazon “no rush” deliveries.

No affiliation; just a happy user.

I have a 2% cash back credit card from my bank, with no monthly fee. It started as a 1% cash back card around a decade ago, and slowly crept up to 2%. It's a nation wide credit union that has certain requirements to join though.

My first US credit card was a 4-3-2-1% rewards program and I had literally zero income at the time. I was told by the banker, "oh you can't do that right away, you must first get a secured card to build your credit score, after a year you can try applying for real", but I told them I don't care and to send the application anyway, and I've got it.

Ever since then, I wondered how much of the "not qualifying" is due to misinformation like this.

Once in a while. However the truth is the large people who collect the 1% and pay off their card every month are the people who don't. These people are customers year after year, and often spend more on their cards (they tend to be higher income), and the bank gets their 2-3% from them (2-3% after rewards)

People who don't pay their card off also are on the look out for lower interest rate cards and switch all the time. they in reality are not paying the very high rates on cards, they are paying the lower introductory rates (which is still a lot of money). These people are also more likely to default and stop paying leaving the bank to write everything off. Combine that with the fact that they typically don't spend as much over several years (they hit their credit limit and their income won't allow an increase so they have to stop spending), and they are not as profitable as it seems.

That's how it works in established US communities, too. Contractors often give cash discounts (off the record).

My lawn mower asks me to write "gift" on checks when I can't pay in cash.

Huh?